Were the Greeks “unhistorical”? It depends, of course, on how that term is understood, but the writings of nineteenth-century historians—and not only, or even especially, ancient historians—suggest that they would have found the question absurd. In their eyes, the Greeks were not only “historically minded,” but the inventors of the modern idea of history as a critical account of and reflection upon past events. There was some dispute about the precise dating of this invention. Friedrich Creuzer, in his 1803 account of The Historical Art of the Greeks, traced the origins of Greek historical thought back into the archaic period, to the epic poetry of Homer and his successors. Most writers, however, followed Friedrich W. J. Schelling in identifying Herodotus and Thucydides as the originators of the historiographical tradition. Both ancient authors emphasized the critical aspect of their enquiries, their attempts at distinguishing “myth” from real events; Thucydides, indeed, offered not only a model for historiography, but a manifesto, a prototype for historians' claims to authority in the face of competing accounts of the past. His ringing declaration that methodology guarantees truth, even or perhaps especially when presented in a less rhetorically polished and pleasing form, has been quoted by historians ever since; it did not take much imagination for Leopold von Ranke and his followers to claim Thucydides as their forebear, the first “scientific historian.” Jacob Burckhardt argued instead that historians like Thucydides were more enlightened than the Rankeans, but shared their assumption that true civilization begins with the consciousness of history.