I get the sense that this has been history’s dilemma since the beginning. Thucydides wrote an “inquiry” into the events of the Peloponnesian War, one of the wo

I get the sense that this has been history’s dilemma since the beginning. Thucydides wrote an “inquiry” into the events of the Peloponnesian War, one of the world’s first histories. It is an excellent book and a masterpiece of literature. However you can’t help but wonder as you read it: how could simply writing what happened have been something so novel? Throughout the book he makes clear his methods and objectives, almost as if to directly contrast them with some kind of default of the day. You get the sense that people of his day didn’t write history so much because if one were to go through the trouble of writing something it should be trying to advocate a specific conclusion for its readers. Something like a moral lesson or to elevate a specific polis. Anyways, in the end Thucydides did end up advocating a specific conclusion but it’s one that could only be done through history. It’s subtle, detailed, balanced, and self-critical. I don’t know how to explain it other than history does something different to your brain, and in the end that is very worthwhile as literature. However, after this new literary genre had been established, it’s not like the whole world suddenly changed. It certainly made a dent among those who read it, but I think everybody else sort of continues to operate under some set of default principles about what the point of a book should be, similar to what I described in Thucydides’ time. Even now, most people who cite Thucydides, for example in the news but also often in academia, don’t seem to have read the work in its entirety, at least based on the conclusions that they’re advancing. So it seems that things aren’t really so different from his time. It’s a shame though because it really is something entirely new, and Thucydides proved, to me at least, that a careful account of the facts can be just as dramatic and entertaining as the best fiction.