Thucydides' Historical Method

Thucydides indicates that people are indiscriminate about the stories or accounts they are told. They do not put them to the test. This is the case even with accounts that deal with their own country. Thucydides uses the example of the murder of Hipparchus. The Athenians believe that Hipparchus was a tyrant and was the ruler when he was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The fact of the matter is, Thucydides says, that it was Hipparchus older brother Hippias who was in power, not Hipparchus. Hippias was the eldest son of Pisistratus, so he was the ruler of Athens, not Hippias, who was younger, and not Thessalus, the third son of Pisistratus, who was also younger than Hippias. As for Harmodius and Aristogeiton, they originally planned to assassinate Hippias. However, somehow Hippias found out about their plot. Knowing that they would soon be arrested, Harmodius and Aristogeiton steered clear of Hippias, knowing that he knew of their plot. The pair suspected their own accomplices of having disclosed the plot to Hippias. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, their scheme spoiled, were still determined to do something. That something soon presented itself when they came across Hipparchus by chance. They encountered him at the Leocorium, where he was organizing the Panathenaic Procession. Since he was Hippias's brother, they murdered him. These were the real facts of the case, yet, somehow, Athenians have swallowed a legend or myth which obscures and distorts the true facts. The illustration of Hipparchus's murder serves to prove Thucydides' point that "People take in reports about the past from each other all alike, without testing them- even reports about their own country" (Thucydides, 12). The inference is that Thucydides...

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...a cut above the method of the poets and the prose-writers. Thucydides takes pride in the fact that he is not promoting myth, that he has a historian's concern with truth. Yet Thucydides as historian falls short of latter-day historians, for he does not record speeches as they were spoken but instead reconstructs them according to what he thinks people might have said. Thucydides is more accurate when it comes to the action of the war than the speeches. One notes, however, that even with regard to the action of the war he is handicapped by the limitations of his sources. He cannot, like modern-day historians, turn to documents, films, photographs, newspaper accounts, etc..., but must rely exclusively on oral testimony. Even so, he acts much more like a historian when it comes to the action of the war than when it comes to the speeches associated with the war.