Thucydides Research Paper

Thucydides was an Athenian citizen well known as a general and a historian. Thucydides gain the nickname “The Father of Scientific History” because of the way he gathered evidence for his work as a historian. He believed at first that the Peloponnesian war was going to be a “great war” and be “more worth writing about than any of those which had taken placed in the past”. He believed this because each side was prepared, were at the height of their power, and how the rest of the Greeks or Hellenics were committed to one side or the other. After the war, Thucydides looks back and decides that during the periods of the war it was “not great periods either in warfare or in anything else”. To completely understand Thucydides work as a historian you should understand his methodologies and why he thought it was valuable. …show more content…
Thucydides had strict standards and took more of a scientific approach to his history instead of the normal ways to do it during his time. This approach caused him to earn the name “The Father of Scientific History”. Thucydides did not involve the gods in his history. He felt that “one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition” and said that most people accept the first story they hear instead of going through the trouble to find out the truth. When it came to gathering evidence, Thucydides was very strict about it. He would visit the sites that he wrote about and only include multiple testimony of eyewitnesses and his own experiences as a general during the war, making it a point that he had “made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way”. Furthermore, Thucydides wrote his work on events that were occurring at same time to his life, and he thought that an accurate analysis into past events was

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