Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

This is what happened because they are for them.

It's very important to connect that to astronomical meteorological events.

Right.

So there's a lot of their understanding of the world is wrapped up in understanding history.

But there isn't this sense of a causal narrative.

This is kind of what Herodotus first brings into it.

It's this idea of like things happen for a reason.

Things happen because other things have happened and because personalities have an influence on it and other forces have an influence on it.

And so he's trying to construct not just a list of things that happened or a specific sort of stories that are being collected by, for instance, sort of

priests and sanctuaries and places like that, or noble families that are kind of collecting the history of their household.

But he's trying to bring all those things together to tell a bigger story that isn't necessarily like the acts of one king or anything like that, but something that is in its conception much bigger and much more all encompassing.

And because he's the first one to do that, whose work survives in full, we kind of see him as the person who invents this, right?

Who invents the idea of what history is and what it looks like.

No, no, frustratingly, no.

Because often with these people, I mean, the only thing that survives of them is their work.

And this is also true for people like Thucydides, who comes after Herodotus, obviously, writes history of the Peloponnesian War.

We know pretty much nothing about these people except what they drop into their story by themselves, where they drop in a little sort of autobiographical detail.

They describe something, they'll say, oh, and I saw this myself, or, you know, and I talked to this person.

And so that's how they found out.

Sometimes they do this and that will tell us a lot.