Who did it better /his/?

Kagan

:^)

>childishly insisting on ranking everything ordinally by subjective terms of value
>pinning any two related things against each other to determine 'betterness'

Lrn2histroy

Herodotus:
>"I traveled and inquired about the known world like no one else before me [who has survived through the ages] and try my best to list all the accounts and perspectives of these events to let you, the reader, to decide them, while also occasionally giving you my opinion of what likely happened and why."

Butthurt pro-Persians, Greekaboo Romans, anti-Western skeptics, and modern historians:
>"Herodotus--father of history? No! More like the father of LIES!"

Thuycdides:
>"I'm going to write about one particular regional conflict that I served in Office in for only the first few years of it, so therefor I practically witnessed all of it. Fuck what my sources are or trying to list alternative accounts, that's nonayabusiness, plebs; let me do that for you and trust me. Btw, the main event I wrote my histories on ain't even a single war, but two, but I'll push it as one huge connected one to make it sound more important. Also, all those speeches I wrote are all made up by what I assume those niggas really said. "

Butthurt pro-Persians, Greekaboo Romans, anti-Western skeptics, and modern historians:
>"Truly Thuycdides is the father of history, and champion of non-fiction -- unlike Herodotus!"

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>>1450847

Result of Herodotus's writings: one of the best sources we have about a lot of obscure lands and States back-then that have no other major surviving sources that survive that mention them; and the history behind them and their culture and social practices that scholars and researchers have based their entire career directed to reviewing his works to see if some of the reported events he wrote about are really true in the exact way he describes.

Result of Thuycdides' writings: best archive for battle-field statistics of particular battles and skirmishes during the Peloponnesian War; Primeval Realpolitiks; nice and elegant influential speeches.

Overall: if Thuycdides' history were happened to be lost during time, we still would've known a lot about the major battles and events of the war he wrote about from inferences made by poets, dramatist, and other writers (such as Plato) at the time that have survived. If Herodotus' histories were lost, we would likely miss out on a lot of details about testimonies he wrote down after hearing about of different foreign lands and their histories and cultures.

Herodotus was a better historian by method and value of the works he tried to document.

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Herodotus did his best with what he had, and he tried to get an accurate account through secondary accounts. He traveled the world and inquired about things which otherwise would have been lost to the sands of times.

Is his work probably less accurate than Thucydides, probably, but it's of a much different scope.

Thucydides' history is much more like a Xenophonic memoir than it is a modern tackling something he wasn't there to see.

I would content that Herodotus is the father of History as we know it, and Thucydides is the father of first person accounts.