Flicking through Herodotus over breakfast, as you do, it occurs to me again that it’s interesting how the first historian implicitly but clearly rejects the notion that history is written by the victors. ‘Winners?’ he effectively says time and again. ‘Maybe, but for how long?’
Mind, this is something I often return to, and was at the heart of the thesis I eventually laid aside, albeit in the hope I could pick it up again someday: Herodotus, as a good student of Homer, knew victory was a profoundly suspect and temporary phenomenon, and not something that was necessarily clear even on the battlefield.
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