Ancient Greece

Alexander conquered from Greece to India by the age of thirty, and almost every anecdote historians repeat about him was written by biographers three or four centuries after he was dead.

-331

Most of what carries Aristotle's name reached us through students and editors, not Aristotle's own hand for publication, and that fact shapes how confidently anyone can say what he actually thought.

The funeral oration that shaped centuries of democratic thought may not be his own words at all; even Thucydides admitted reconstructing it from memory.

Even the meaning of his own name is disputed, and scholars still cannot agree whether the Socrates in his dialogues speaks with his teacher's voice or Plato's own.

He wrote nothing himself, so the man scholars still argue over is entirely a construction of students, satirists and a philosopher born after his death.

-490

-480

After Alexander's empire broke into rival kingdoms, three centuries of Greek-speaking dynasties in Egypt, Asia and Macedon produced much of the science and philosophy later credited to a cleaner idea of classical Greece.

Thucydides wrote the fullest surviving account of this war while much of it was still happening, and openly admits reconstructing the speeches in it rather than transcribing them.

A war fought over roughly fifty years survives mostly through one Greek writer working decades later, and the numbers he gives for Persian armies remain the most argued-over figures in ancient history.