According to Aristotle it is the business of history to focus on the particular, the specifics - “what Alkibiades did or had done to him” - and this distinction is often held as definitive. Myth concerns itself with the imagination, pleasure, and caters to its audience while history deals with the facts. This focus on the positivist empirical nature of the historical endeavor was perhaps most powerfully expressed in the nineteenth century by Leopold von Ranke’s formulation of the historian’s task as “simply to show how it really was” (wie es eigentlichgewesen) (cited in Tosh 2002: 7). The natural extension of this historiographical position is to reject myth (among other things) entirely, as Thucydides did, setting up a false set of oppositions that links historical analysis with facts and truth and opposes it to the lies, deception, and unreliability of myth. As Lucian puts it in his essay How to Write History, the historian must sacrifice pleasure to usefulness and truth. As with the athlete for whom good looks should be merely an incidental feature, “So it is with history - if she were to make the mistake of dealing in pleasure as well she would attract a host of lovers, but as long as she keeps only what is hers alone in all its fullness - I mean the publication of the truth - she will give little thought to beauty” (How to Write History, 9; trans. K. Kilburn).
While this complete and total rejection of myth in favor of factual accounts of “how things really were” may work for writers of contemporary history (such as Thucydides), it creates particularly difficult problems for ancient historians, especially those working on periods (e. g. pre-classical Greece) for which myth serves as the only narrative source. It would be impossible, for example, to have much to say about the archaic Greek world if we had to reject all the mythic narratives found in the works of Homer, early Greek poetry, and the work of Herodotus.
World History
