SOURCE: "Herodotus' Perspective," in Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 59-74.

In the following essay, Fornara contrasts Herodotus with Thucydides, suggesting that while Thucydides wrote for posterity, Herodotus's History addresses chiefly his own generation. Defending Herodotus against scholars who have found the History inconsistent and unscientific, Fornara calls him "essentially an artist" who mixes historical narrative with drama.

Thucydides believed and claimed that he had written … a possession for all time. The boast may have struck his contemporaries as arrogant and rhetorical. To the modern world it is a truism. Our consciousness of the perfect justification of these words, however, deprives them of impact and robs them of all but superficial meaning. Yet their value is inestimable. They tell us, if we needed to be told, what stance he had adopted, what perspective he had taken, in writing his history. These words explain the principle of...