Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Roots of Political Thought

Thucydides never names Herodotus but clearly reacts to him, criticizing details and inheriting his role as a large-scale prose predecessor. Herodotus is polymathic and inclusive, while Thucydides pursues akribeia, accuracy, through a single credible account. Lane suggests Thucydides fathers history proper while Herodotus also fathers geography and ethnography, so a single standard can mislead.

The Greek word historia refers to method, inquiry of any kind, rather than a fixed subject matter like the distant past. Lane argues both historians wrote most confidently about contemporary events witnessed firsthand or attested by living witnesses, using autopsy and testimony rather than methods suited to the remote past.

Lane argues the invented speeches reflect sophistic rhetorical practice, including public recitation, but also reflect the real political fact that Greek and Persian polities conducted affairs through deliberation in councils and assemblies. Thucydides says he presents speeches as what speakers should or would have said, drawing on a sophistic notion of the fitting moment.

Herodotus resembles the Presocratics in rationally sifting competing stories, but he also inherits from Homer and Hesiod a concern with preserving glory, kleos, for great deeds. Lane notes he opens his work seeking to keep the deeds of Greeks and barbarians from being forgotten, using Homer's own word, which shows his method is not purely rationalist.

Lane argues Herodotus shows that attachment to freedom and fear of enslavement were shared across Persians, Greeks, and other peoples, not a uniquely Greek value, since losing a war often meant literal slavery. He also stresses the diversity of customs, nomoi, across peoples, connecting to the sophistic nomos-physis debate, though Lane resists calling him a strict relativist and notes some scholars see his ethnography as rhetorically shaped.

Lane presents the Melian Dialogue as a highly constructed set piece, often read as justice versus self-interest between the weaker Melians and stronger Athenians. She complicates this by noting the claim that justice applies only among equals recurs elsewhere in Thucydides, by recalling community organizers reading the Athenian position sympathetically, and by stressing that the Melians rely on hope rather than justice, a reliance that proves self-delusional.

Lane argues Thucydides's sympathies were not entirely with democracy, pointing to his praise of the mixed Constitution of the 5,000 as the best regime he witnessed and his remark that Pericles led the people rather than being led by them. She stresses that what Thucydides and later Socrates criticize is specifically imperial Athenian democracy, not democracy as such.

Lane argues Herodotus and Thucydides were the main prose models available to Plato, and that his critique of imperial Athens, the Republic's staging after the Peloponnesian War, and his accounts of political decline in Republic 8 and 9 and Laws Book 3 amount to Plato rivaling the historians with his own account of political change.

Lane contrasts the common reading that the dialogue shows Athenians cynically trampling justice with an alternative she encountered reading it alongside community organizers, who took the Athenian claim that justice only holds among equals seriously and concluded the Melians should have built strength rather than relied on hope.

Lane addresses whether Herodotus's emphasis on the diversity of nomoi makes him a relativist in the sophistic nomos-physis sense, and gives her own view that he is not exactly a relativist even though he highlights diversity and does not always assess competing customs.