The modern portrait of the development of Greek historiography is quite different from that of the ancient one. Admittedly, the latter must be pieced together from various writers, but the outlines are clear. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his On Thucydides envisioned a process that began with writers of local histories and chronicles, in which authors wrote down in a plain style with little adornment material preserved in temples, archives, and so forth. The next step was to take that raw material and apply to it literary skill and polish: that role in Dionysius is reserved for Herodotus, who incorporated these local histories and wove them together into a comprehensive and, one might say, universal account. Thucydides, though influenced by Herodotus, moved off in another direction, treating not the deeds of Greeks and barbarians, but a single war through which he himself had lived. All later historians could be seen as variations or offshoots of the two founders and best practitioners of the genre.