Writing Naturally

In the Oxford articles, they keep stressing that such and such a document is not strictly historical, but carries an ideological purpose as well. Why would they expect the ancients to observe modern rules of historical writing? Why would they assume that people of yore shared our irrational obsession with objectivity? They were telling the story; that’s all. They were reporting and interpreting in the same narrative, just as you and I do all the time. Even today, the average person has to be broken of this tendency if ever they get into writing history by today’s standards. The ancients didn’t share those regulations. They weren’t trying to divorce what they thought from what they saw. They, unlike we, were writing naturally.