Thucydides and History Today

Extract

Many brilliant assumptions made for the first time by the Greeks have been for centuries part of European thought, and it requires a great deal of historical imagination to realize that much of what we tend to think obvious or inevitable has happened because of the Greeks and not by nature. So with the concept of ‘History’. The word conjures up certain thoughts and feelings which, I suggest, owe their origin to Thucydides when at the end of the fifth century B.c. he evolved a new literary form, a mixture of art and science.