The Father of History?

In his book 'Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day', Philip Matyszak describes the two earliest historians in the following terms:

When war comes, Thucydides will unsuccessfully command troops in this area [Thrace] against the great Spartan general Brasidas. Thereafter he will turn his skills to chronicling the ebb and flow of the fortunes of Athens in its contest with Sparta and her allies. To do this, he will essentially have to invent the craft of writing history.

It is worth noting at this point that Herodotus, who we encounter below, is commonly cited as the Father of History, so Matyszak's claim that Thucydides invented the craft is quite iconoclastic.

His famous predecessor in the field is Herodotus, a writer of the previous generation, whose History is a rag-bag of anecdotes, myths and travellers' tales. As a historian Herodotus meanders happily through his collection, getting side-tracked into endless digressions, yet always emerging triumphantly with the thread of his narrative.

This is not an opinion shared by R.G. Collingwood, who explains in his classic publication 'The Idea of History' that

The greatness of Herodotus stands out in the sharpest relief when, as the father of history, he is set against a background consisting of the general tendencies of Greek thought. The most dominant of these was anti-historical ... because it involved the position that only what is unchanging can be known. Therefore history is a forlorn hope, an attempt to know what, being transitory, is unknowable. But ... by skilful questioning, Herodotus was able to ... attain knowledge in a field where Greeks had thought it impossible.

Not quite the tavern storyteller of Matyszak's narrative. By contrast, Collingwood considers Thucydides in markedly less favourable terms:

[A]fter him [Herodotus] the search for unchangeable and eternal objects of knowledge gradually stifled the historical consciousness, and forced men to abandon the Herodotean hope of achieving a scientific knowledge of past human actions. The difference between the scientific outlook of Herodotus and that of Thucydides is hardly less remarkable than the difference between their literary styles. The style of Herodotus is easy, spontaneous, convincing. That of Thucydides is harsh, artificial, repellent.

Admittedly the latter observation is purely the opinion of the author. But he continues:

In reading Thucydides I ask myself, What is the matter with the man, that he writes like that? I answer: he has a bad conscience. He is trying to justify himself for writing history at all by turning it into something that is not history. ... Thucydides is not the successor of Herodotus in historical thought

(a point, at least, upon which the two authors would seem to be in agreement)

but the man in whom the historical thought of Herodotus was overlaid and smothered beneath anti-historical motives.

So, on the one hand we have the opinion that Herodotus was a writer of amusing stories, learned from the people he encountered on his travels but not subjected to any kind of critical analysis, and on the other we have the more recognisable standpoint that Herodotus was a thinker of specific genius, who stood alone amid ancient Greek thought in his attempts to compile an accurate narrative. Equally, we have a description of Thucydides as a scientific thinker and innovative developer of an entirely new field, rubbing shoulders with the opinion of him as a mimic, trying to imitate the brilliance of his predecessor but falling short under the weight of contemporary thought. But who is closest to the truth?

One important factor is defining what we are to understand by scientific history. The development of this brand of history has been attributed again to both Herodotus and Thucydides. It is my opinion that both parties are correct. To clarify: Herodotus was the first to employ a critical approach to his use of sources, cross-referencing and questioning each informant extensively in order to make his narrative as coherent as possible. Thucydides, however, was the one to dispose of the inclusion of mythological factors as explanations for human phenomena.