Since the beginning of time people have been keeping accounts of events that occur to themselves or to others. There are many ways to go about describing stories including firsthand, using information from a number of various sources, using criticism to tell the story, and more. Perhaps the most popular methods are firsthand and using information from various sources. Thucydides and Arrian both give accurate accounts of a historic set of events of their respective time but in very different ways. Their approaches differ mainly because of their methods: Thucydides tells his own personal account of what he lived through while Arrian tells his account of Alexander the Great with centuries of hindsight. In “On Justice Power and Human Nature”,…show more content… Arrian also took a paragraph or two after each story to give the readers his opinion of the events described. For example, the death of Cleitus was illustrated extensively. Cleitus’ death occurred because he, Alexander, and some of their comrades were drinking together when a fight broke out. Cleitus believed that drinking so much was a barbaric act, which strayed from their homeland beliefs, and that Alexander should not be praised as highly as his flatterers were praising him. “Accordingly, he remarked that the present company were exaggerating the importance and wonderfulness of Alexander’s exploits and that in any case Alexander had not achieved his conquests all by himself…” Cleitus then went on to say that he had saved Alexander’s life, which struck a nerve in him. He took one of his guards’ spears and killed Cleitus in an instant. After he gives his report of this story of Cleitus’ death, Arrian includes his opinion on the happenings. He explains that he “deplores the insolence Cleitus showed his king” and that he “commends Alexander’s conduct in the aftermath, for he recognized immediately that he had committed a savage…show more content… First, they are different people and they deal with things very differently. This may be due to the fact that Thucydides reacted to his experiences on the spot while Arrian had time to research different viewpoints and ponder his opinion over time. Also, the two authors come from very different periods of time. Thucydides’ story was set in the 400s BC and Arrian’s story of Alexander was set in the 300s BC and told around three centuries later, which is about a 200-year difference in ideas, beliefs, technology, and