ABSTRACT
Ancient Greeks had a profound appreciation of material culture as evidence and the intellectual trends concerning the past had a predilection toward monuments and objects. The paragraphs that follow introduce the interest that historiographical research encouraged towards material evidence. Although Thucydides does not express the antiquarian historical tradition of the descriptive and analytical approach, he did observe the visible traces in the soil and put them in relation to tradition, in order to analyse them materially (Schnapp, 1996: 51). He used monuments and inscriptions (Hornblower, 1987) in order to argue about the distant past, when his ordinary methods of cross-questioning and autopsy were inappropriate or impossible. Twice in his narrative Thucydides used objects and monuments to reach archaeological conclusions. The best known of these paragraphs is the one concerning the purification of Délos, the first of the two paragraphs that follow.
