TY  - BOOK
AU  - Hau, Lisa Irene
AB  - Why did human beings first begin to write history? Lisa Irene Hau argues that a driving force among Greek historians was the desire to use the past to teach lessons about the present and for the future. She uncovers the moral messages of the ancient Greek writers of history and the techniques they used to bring them across. Hau also shows how moral didacticism was an integral part of the writing of history from its inception in the 5th century BC, how it developed over the next 500 years in parallel with the development of historiography as a genre and how the moral messages on display remained surprisingly stable across this period.       For the ancient Greek historiographers, moral didacticism was a way of making sense of the past and making it relevant to the present; but this does not mean that they falsified events: truth and morality were compatible and synergistic ends.
DO  - 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411073.001.0001
ID  - OAPEN ID: 642715
ID  - OAPEN ID: OCN: 964447338
KW  - Classics
KW  - Classical
KW  - Early and Medieval
KW  - Ancient History
KW  - Literary Studies
KW  - Didacticism
KW  - Diodorus Siculus
KW  - Herodotus
KW  - Polybius
KW  - Thucydides
KW  - Xenophon
L1  - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/36ed824e-dbcf-425c-a567-4991f3f7c40f/642715.pdf
LA  - English
LK  - http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30787
PB  - Edinburgh University Press
PY  - 2016
SN  - 9781474411073
SN  - 9781474411097
TI  - Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculusnull
ER  - 
