The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

LECTURE I

THE RISE OF GREEK HISTORY IN IONIA
IN these lectures I propose to trace the genesis
and the development of the historical literature
of the Greeks. I will attempt to bring into a
connected view the principles, the governing ideas,
and the methods of the Greek historians, and to
relate them to the general movements of Greek
thought and Greek history. I need hardly
apologize for devoting much of our time to
Herodotus and Thucydides, who, however familiar
to us from childhood, have the secret of engaging
an interest that is never exhausted and never
grows stale. As a Hellenist, I shall be happy if
I succeed in illustrating the fact that, as in poetry
and letters generally, as in art, as in philosophy,
and in mathematics, so too in history, our debt to
the Greeks transcends calculation. They were
not the first to chronicle human events, but they
were the first to apply criticism. And that means,
they originated history.
E5 I B