Herodotus And Thucydides Similarities

Herodotus and Thucydides are both often referred to as the world’s first true historians. They both were truly the first to document history by writing in it a book-like medium. Both innovators in their field, the two men had extremely different writing styles and ways of formulating their information into their respective books. Herodotus and Thucydides are more different than similar when comparing their works. Herodotus and Thucydides are only similar in a couple ways. To begin, like stated before, they were both the world’s first historians. Before Herodotus and Thucydides, history was mainly passed down orally. Ferdous defies this by actually writing the information out and Thucydides follows soon after. Thucydides did not come much after; both were even in the same century, but, he was still after Herodotus. In addition, they both documented some type of war--

Both, arguably, were very different wars-- but in some way, both the men wrote about a war. These two aspects are the only thing the two men have in common when regarding their work. Considering the fact that they worked at such a similar time period, it could be assumed that there would be more similarities. However, this is not the case. When comparing Herodotus to Thucydides, Herodotus was not as thorough as Thucydides. Herodotus is notorious for not checking his facts. He would talk the word of the first person he talked to. More often than not, this information he got was just gossip and rumors he made out to be facts. “The Father of History” is also ironically referred to “The Father of Lies.” Contrastingly, Thucydides would take multiple sources and synthesize them. This made claims more believable. Herodotus’ numbers, such as when he claims the Greeks had 311 ships in war (Selincourt, page 501). Due