The ancient world's treatment of historical causation — how ancient historians explained why events happened — reveals assumptions about human agency, divine will, chance, and structural forces that differ interestingly from both modern scientific historiography and from naive fatalism.

Herodotus, the 'father of history,' combined multiple explanatory frameworks in a single work: divine punishment for hybris (overweening pride), causation through human decisions, the role of oracles whose pronouncements were always fulfilled but often misunderstood, and the observation of structural factors like geography and ethnography that shaped the behavior of peoples. The multiplicity of frameworks is not inconsistency but a pluralism of causation that may be more realistic than mono-causal explanations.

Thucydides explicitly separated immediate causes (prophasis) from underlying causes (aitia), and identified human nature (anthropeia physis) as the constant that made past events a guide to future ones. His account of the Peloponnesian War is one of the first attempts at systematic causal analysis in historical writing, explicitly modeling itself on medicine's search for underlying causes rather than symptoms.

Roman historical writing oscillated between providential and moralistic frameworks. Livy's Ab Urbe Condita traces Roman success to Roman virtue and Roman failure to Roman moral decline; Tacitus' more cynical histories locate causation in the personal psychology of emperors and in the structural corruption of autocracy. Neither framework is simply wrong — both capture real aspects of how political communities function — but both are more limited than either author recognized.