Compare And Contrast Herodotus And Sima Qian

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Herodotus and Sima Qian had many different major leaders, all of whom had different beliefs, and different ways of ruling, but some of them also had very similar beliefs, and similar ways of ruling. There are several different ways to come into leadership; one of the ways is to be the son of the current ruler another way is to kill the current king and take all that he has, and there are many examples of the son of a king coming to power when his father dies. The different ways to come in to power can both have different effects on their leadership. Many of the leaders have different ways of ruling and all the ways made their followers do different things and react in different ways. Many kings also spoke to oracles a lot and also believed…show more content…
The first ruler that Herodotus talks about is Candaules. Candaules thought that his wife was the most beautiful woman in all of his land, though he had no way to prove it he greatly wanted to. He told one of his servants Gyges to hide behind a door and wait for her to take her clothes off.(34) Candaules and Gyges thought that they could easily get away with it, but what they did not know was that Herodotus’s wife was aware that he was there the whole time. So later when she informed Gyges that she had known all along and that she wanted some sort of redemption for what they had done. To get that redemption she said, “Either kill Candaules and have me and have the kingdom of the Lydians, or you yourself have to die on the spot, so that in the future you will not see what you should not see, doing everything Candaules tells you to do.”(33) She later made Gyges kill Candaules. In turn Gyges took Candaules’s wife as his own and took the kingdom of Lydains. The only training Gyges had been to watch Candaules and learn from what he…show more content…
Once he came to power after his fathers’ death, he swiftly made his empire one unified state of China. He was the first one to ever do that and he had to go through many wars to get it that way. Once that was done he started his elven year reign as Emperor over the Qin Dynasty. The Qin Dynasty was very intimidating to the other leaders. So much so Crown Prince Dan of the kingdom of Yan sent a person named Jing Ke to assassinate Qin Shihuangdi. Qin Shihuangdi was not supposed to know about the assassin, but he found out. He then had Jing Ke ripped limb from limb as a warning to all others that wanted to oppose him.(95) Shortly afterwards Qin Shihuangdi allied with Xin Sheng and they both attacked and defeated
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