What we now think of as history – the scholarly study of the past – emerged only slowly from the myths and legends people long told each other about their ancestors and origins. The first writings about the past often amounted to little more than king lists, tracing the descent of a current ruler, often back to a god, and lending divine sanction to the status quo.
Early epics such as Homer’s Iliad may have contained faint echoes of distant historical events (see here ), but their purpose was to enthral and move their listeners, not to explain events, or to offer a balanced view of the past. Such grand heroic poems reflected and celebrated the values of the societies they came from. Histories began as foundation myths, the myths of peoples, dynasties and religions. Religion played a key role. Even to this day, historians cannot help but reflect the values and priorities of their own societies to some degree or another, although there is usually an attempt to strive for balance and objectivity.
The first to attempt to do this was Herodotus, a Greek who lived c . 485–425 BCE . In writing his account of the Greek–Persian Wars fought in the early part of his own century, he travelled round Greece, seeking out those who had actually taken part in the conflict. He states clearly that he cannot always vouch for the truth of a ‘fact’ – he is only reporting what has been related to him. He defined history as what can be truly discovered, rather than just stories about the past. Herodotus organized his source material systematically and critically, then formed it into a coherent and even-handed narrative.
‘I write in the hope of hereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.’
Herodotus (c . 485–c . 425 BCE ), The Histories
Herodotus’ younger contemporary Thucydides (c . 460–c . 400 BCE ) wrote about the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta with similar even-handedness and with a stress on evidence, but many later classical historians quite plainly had agendas. The Roman historian Livy was a propagandist for the virtues of the (partly imagined) ‘golden age’ of the Roman republic just as the empire was superseding it. A century later his compatriot Tacitus emphasized the failings and vices of the emperors who had usurped the republic.
These authors embodied the concept of history as a source of examples to guide action in the here and now, a view that was explicit in the work of Plutarch (c . 46–c . 120 CE ), a Greek biographer who took up Roman citizenship. In his Parallel Lives , he compared a series of famous Greeks and Romans, pointing out the ways in which they shared common moral failings and virtues. The character of leaders, Plutarch believed, was what shaped the destiny of the mass of humanity.
This ‘great man’ version of history, common for many centuries, not only in Europe but also in China and the Muslim world, has fuelled debate among historians. For instance, opposing Thomas Carlyle (whose own historic approach focused on ‘heroes’ of history) in the 19th century, Herbert Spencer argued that great leaders were merely the products of the societies they came from. Those who agree believe that history should focus on the broader causes of historical events, and attempt to detect deep underlying political, economic, social and cultural patterns and trends.