One method to specify the purposes of Thucydides is to define which arguments within a text are writers we today view as early Greek historians. Most clearly, Thucydides compared his own enterprise with that of both prose-writers and poets. The lyrical custom with which he is explicitly concerned is, in the first place, Homeric, as that was the reference of the time, although the influence of tragedy is ostensible as well. The works to whom he refers most likely included historians, but also writers of political tracts and authors of speeches for Athenian law courts. Like historians, both poets and legal speech-writers dealt with the past and both had developed elaborate “rhetorical” schemes through which the content of past events (real or)