Greek Historians: Homer, Thucydides, and Polybius
From the culture of ancient Greeks come many influences and theatrical inventions that make up part of the basis in our current day lives. From science, to theater, to politics, to history; Greece remains an important facet in both our countries development and success. The Greek culture in fact, can almost be singled handedly thanked for attempting to think, and analyze facts and myths about our world on a higher plane thought. Even how we write, think, and look at history for example can be traced back to a few important persons in the Greek populace. From the original Greek historian Herodotus to Homer, Thucydides, and Polybius; the development of our history is written in a fashion in which they created, through a narrative that should be read and understood. Each of these famous Greek historians - Homer, Thucydides, and Polybius - developed their own ways of telling the history, and it was from these elements that we our current system developed.
Homer is said to have come before both Thucydides and Polybius in about 700 B.C.E.. (Homer) The kind of history he wrote was more akin to the traditional forms of knowledge transference in those times. The Iliad and the Odyssey - Homers two greatest works - were manifested in the sense of how an orator would have told these stories long ago. At the heart of Homers stories lied a sense of epic drama, heavy tone and grandeur that would supercede the oratorical traditions in the centuries to come. Homers Iliad and Odyssey became the "prototype for all subsequent western Poetry." (Homer) And that's what Homer was, the original poet. Suggestions have been made that the Iliad and Odyssey work compiled works and stories of orators gone past. It wasn't so much then documentations of Achilles and Agamemnon in the Trojan war, or the epic journeys in the return of Odysseus that sparked an epiphany of writing in the time. It was more the format, structure, and elements of both historical and entertaining connotations which made Homer important to the development of historical study.
As the first European poet, Homer created a longer lasting tradition of writing poems that would have otherwise been spoken, thus preserving message fidelity. Homer wrote in a certainly narrative and partially fictional style, while including various elements of drama, action and myth within each. His writing was more for the entertainment of its readers than that of historical and documented fact. While Homer was important to the development of documented history, his more entertainment/narrative focused works contributed only one style and form related more directly with that of the written novel and development of theater.
Contrasting with Homer's narrative based works, Thucydides, born 460 B.C.E - took a considerably different, and more traditional - as we know it today - to the documentation of history. (Thucydides) Thucydides wrote during the period of the Peloponnesian wars (431 - 411 B.C.E), where all of Greece was divided between two sides, the Athenians and the Spartans. (Soybel) It is said that Thucydides felt it was important to document this war because it was and would be greater and more important than all wars previous, mostly credited to the great preparations and complete split of the Greece as a whole. (Soybel) Thucydides writing was drastically different from that of Homer however; his writing was just about devoid of any kind of dramatization or misconstruing/exaggeration of facts. Other than these facts however, Thucydides written work, the History of the Peloponnesian War "covered the period from 431 to 411 and was a departure from the histories of the past, both in method and presentation." (Thucydides) He wrote these tests to read instead of being recited and was "scrupulous in his presentation of facts." (Thucydides)
Thucydides was certainly an important historian, but his writing contained only military history, chronicled events and actions be seasons. (Perseus) His work completely lacks and "avoids any reference to social conditions or state policy, unless they have to deal with the progress of war, and interprets the succession of events in view of the general nature and behavior of man than as the result of a fate outside man's influence." (Thucydides) It was these key elements that made Thucydides' work fall short of what we think of today as a traditional documentation of history, thus creating an important difference between him and his the historians to come.
Polybius, born sometime around 203 B.C.E, developed another unique style of writing about history. (Soybel) He became a historian of the school of Thucydides, but his writing - a work of 40 books on why Rome became great in such a short period of time - for the most part had what Thucydides writing lack, full societal impact. Unlike both Homer and Thucydides however, he did not really write about war, but his expertise covered "the Mediterranean world from before 220 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E.. (Polybius) "Polybius spared no efforts in his research for detail, accuracy, and unbiased truth, but as a great admirer of Rome, he could not, however, avoid a measure of partiality." (Polybius) Along with Polybius' account of the facts, he inserted discussions about the importance of historical writing about principles of the Roman state because he believed it was "a guide to political conduct." (Polybius)
Polybius was a Greek, born in Macedonia, until deported to Rome in the countries defeat. His writing was greatly influenced by the pride and respect he felt for Rome once he had gained allies and friends there. He wrote is works to go back and present the people of Greece with documentation explaining how and why the Roman Empire had come to be from "virtual insignificance" to an important nation, and why they should be supported along with other miscellaneous reports about why they were great.
The differences between these three historians are important, but easy to see. Each is a progression towards what we look at today as a sort of 'traditional' form of historical documentation. Homer wrote about the Trojan war in a form that entertained, where Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian wars strictly from a factual basis, and Polybius wrote about the rise of Rome, while covering both factual evidence, but opinionated discourse, and political process as well. Each of these writers wrote for a purpose, one to entertain, another to report the actions within a great war, and another to explain the reason for a great developing nation. Each reflects the level of importance history played on the different societies throughout their time. Through their writing, we can see what the focus of society was on at these different point in history, all major events that had drastic and long lasting effects on the populations of time. These three historians served as pillars in the development of historical tradition and notation, they document the elements, events and actions of some of the most important times in early history, influencing everything we have today. For that, they must be thanked.