[ceejayoz]

You should care about that, if truth is your goal. The original sources have biases, disagree, make things up outright, etc.

This is the reason we have historians. To help analyze those sources. The end result often winds up as a book… or an article series. Like this one.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Sorry, but are you saying that the blog posts above are an objective analysis of historical sources, without "biases, [disagreement], making things up" etc?

No, seriously, when you read that blog post, did you think "ah, that is an objective analysis of history, without any personal opinions or any attempt to promote an agenda"?

Because that's not at all what I thought!

[eesmith]

Objectivity is impossible, and no one here is making the point that the author of this series had no personal opinions on the topic.

It's a given that the author of this series has a bias, just like everyone does. Part of the academic tradition is to cite references (as this author does) and present the reasoning behind the arguments (as this author does).

That said, if Herodotus does have biases in his Histories, how would you identify them? Do you think it's fundamentally impossible, because you too have biases?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

What Herodotus (and Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch, etc) is writing about happened more than 2000 years ago. I don't have any "bias" that relates to what he wrote. I just can't get worked up about how the ancient Spartans murdered their slaves, as I can't get worked up about how every other Greek city did not grant any rights to "free" women, or how the priests of the Aztecs sacrificed POWs and then sold their flesh to the market to be consumed by the ordinary citizens of Tenochtitlan, or about the cannibalism at the siege of Maara [1].

Generally I find it ridiculous to moralise about ancient peoples. The blog posts above are just one big moralising moralisation about ancient Sparta. People who share their link are probably people who really get all their knowledge of history from films like 300, people who sincerely, honest-to-G0d, hand-on-heart, thought the Spartans were noble warriors with huge gnashers and sculpted six-packs, who are utterly shocked to learn about the helots, and about the Agoge, and how the 300 Spartans of Leonidas were not alone in Thermopylae, hence why a blog rant appeals to them as some kind of font of revelatory knowledge.

And hence my advice to such people to read actual history and not continue to take their knowledge of history from shallow, unscientific sources like blog rants. Intellectual laziness is what makes people keep sharing this rubbish, not any kind of desire to know any sort of unbiased, objective truth.

__________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Ma%27arra#Cannibalism

[eesmith]

People got worked up over the question "are birds dinosaurs?". That event happened millions of years ago - 2,000 years ago is a blink.

So, you have a bias against moralizing ancient peoples - got it. (Though, when do you think it's okay to moralize about history?)

I assume also we shouldn't take knowledge of history from HN commenters.