to what actually transpired, at all. Over-indulgence in meta-narratives also distorts reality by minimizing the influence of the myriad environmental, cultural, individual and societal factors acting upon people and events of the time. In order to fully appreciate the cumulative effect of particular factors, the historian has two choices, each with its own pitfalls. The first option is to limit his research to events for which eyewitnesses or participants can still be accessed. For an account of the Peloponnisian War between 423 and 403BC then, one would have to interview Thucydides to obtain his account as a general, as well as the testimony of Spartans, infantryman, widows and orphans, who were also directly involved but differentially affected by that war. This is a daunting task, requiring extraordinary amounts of time to interview and document so many different people’s experiences, and still more to analyze and interrelate/offset the various accounts. Furthermore, one could question whether the immersion in an event experienced by the participant historian might not be overwhelmingly incompatible with attempts for historical objectivity. As late as the days before the Second World War, a professional historian who studied events up to his own time was considered rash and intolerably unhistorical. At that time, scholars felt that at least a full generation was required before current affairs became respectable subject matter for the historian. In fact, a professional historian who wrote on contemporary events was disdainfully deemed to have lapsed into journalism (Smith, 1964).It would seem then, that the role of the historian is to make valuable, intelligible and meaningful what people who actually lived it may not even been aware of. On the other hand, “If the actors gave lucid and urgent testimony as to why they lived, struggled and died, is it not a form of intellectual arrogance for historians to come along years l...
