Essay | Thucydides: Life Driven by Man Rather Than by Gods

Thucydides, the Athenian, was the first historian in ancient times to have recorded the facts of an event as history, his history being on the Peloponnesian war. History before Thucydides was written by poets, writers of romance and exaggeration. However, Thucydides did not buy into this kind of history due to the lack of accuracy. According to Thucydides "[His conclusions were] better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes . . . [he claimed] instead to have used only the plainest evidence and to have reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate . . . "1 Facts are what make history, not the art of poetry. Thucydides looked at the cause of an event, such as the destruction of Troy, differently than Homer had. Homer had the idea that gods had caused the Greeks to go to war with the Trojans and that...
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