"Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World"

[Felix]

I do not have a good command of the sources, but I would listen to Jona very carefully on this subject. We know the ancient historians had a very different standard than we do on veracity of material - the whole idea of history was being invented by them as they worked; and different writers had differing ideas. All of them had no hesitation in making up long speeches and putting these in the mouths of the subjects of their writings, and we know perfectly well there were no recording devices, nor was there shorthand, nor was there any great likelihood that a pre-battle speech was memorized by the audience. In fact, it has been pointed out that the typical pre-battle speech could only have been heard by a few thousand men at the very best of circumstances, and there is no way that armies of 20,000 or more could have actually been motivated by one. (unless it was written down in many copies and distributed throughout the army beforehand, to be read prior to battle - and we have no evidence at all for any such procedure in the classical age, even if Napoleon did this.) These speeches are a fiction, devised by the author, and must have the author's biases in the text. The idea of a wholly objective scientist is suspect by modern standards, and the idea of a wholly objective historian is fundamentally impossible.

By the by, modern historians do occasionally engage in deliberate fraud, as well as having biases that affect their work. The best case of fraud is David Irving - a well known military historian of WW II, but also one who denied the Holocaust, and was tried and found guilty of fraud relating to this denial in a British court of law.