Why did Ancient Historians write history?
So often, modern historians are asked to justify why they choose to study history and to demonstrate its usefulness. It is not always easy; people often choose not to listen. Exploring why a historian who lived two thousand years ago — or perhaps more — chose to write history is no easier. Yet there is something intransient in the desire to study history that makes it a valuable exercise for the modern historian. Furthermore, understanding why and how ancient historians wrote what they did improves the modern historian’s interpretation of their texts. Throughout their works (well, actually, more often than not in the opening paragraph), historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus set out their reasons for writing history. These reasons can be organised into four categories: monumentality, glory, moralising, and truth and understanding. These categories do interlink quite heavily and sometimes the differences between them are subtle, but divisions do have to be drawn somewhere.
