Histories

Context:

Tom Holland discusses at length how Herodotus' account of the Persian Wars contains the very first counterfactual in historical writing. Herodotus imagines what would have happened if the Athenians had gone over to the Persians or sailed away to Sicily, concluding the Spartans and all other Greeks would have been conquered. Tom uses this to argue that counterfactual reasoning is embedded in the very origins of historical writing.