Herodotus and the Invention of History

Before Herodotus, accounts of the past were king-lists, myths, and monuments boasting of victories. He did something different: he travelled, asked people what had happened, wrote down conflicting versions, named his sources, and told the reader when he doubted them. He called the result historia — inquiry. A generation later Thucydides stripped out the gods and the gossip and wrote analysis instead. Between them they invented the idea that the past is something you investigate rather than something you are told.