Historical texts have more direct resources availible to them, and indeed all modern texts will be referencing them.
Writing about the battle of Zama, a Roman could talk with the soldiers there, with the returning army, take accounts from them and with a certain flourish and spin, present the account as trufax.
200 years afterwards, a Carthaginian could draw upon a few surviving documents and come up with the basic fact that they were defeated, yet it was a hard struggle and that the main reason for the defeat was treachery.
2300 years later, to write a fresh account on Zama, a historian will draw on all the old histories ,be severly lacking in many of the original material and simply cobble together their best effort along their original bias.
In a nutshell, and rather neatly, nobody really knows the trufax on anything. |