A defence of the historiographical approaches of Thucydides' predecessors

Since the era of the ancient Greeks to date, many of the issues that dominate discourses on historiography border on what constitutes account accuracy and what appropriate approaches should be adopted for constructing a historical account. In the 5th century B.C. Athens, Thucydides was a historian who openly criticised his predecessors (especially Herodotus) on the basis of these historians‘ methods of or approaches to historical writing and the inaccuracies of their historical accounts. There is no doubt that certain approaches, such as the eyewitness method of inquiry, are deemed a guarantee of account accuracy. Nonetheless, these approaches cannot straightaway render an account accurate. It is on this basis that the article takes a critical look at the methods of these early Greek logographers (writers of ethnographic and anthropological treatises) and historians, such as Herodotus, to determine the validity or otherwise of Thucydides‘ critique against the predecessors, especially Herodotus. The paper argues that whether standardised and defined historiographical methods, as in the Thucydidean eyewitness approach, or any other methods of historiography, the predecessors of Thucydides were not obliged to follow a particular method or technique of writing. Moreover, since the predecessors‘ methods achieved the purpose of documenting people‘s accounts, culture, and other events for posterity, and irrespective of the criticisms against the early Greek historians‘ methods, their historiographical approaches served as a foundation for subsequent historians, including Thucydides.