Herodotus (c. 484 BCE - c. 425 BCE) was a Greek historian and geographer from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, the author of the Histories, an account of the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. His decision to inquire systematically into the causes of events, and to record the customs and traditions of the peoples involved, earned him the title given to him by Cicero, the father of history. [1] The work is the earliest surviving large-scale prose narrative in Greek and a principal source for the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. [2]
Life
Little about Herodotus can be established with certainty, and most of what is known derives from his own text and from later ancient notices. He was born around 484 BCE in Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the coast of Caria in south-western Asia Minor, then under Persian control, and appears to have come from a prominent family. [1]
He was reportedly exiled or left the city during political struggles against its ruling tyrant and spent time on Samos. He travelled widely, apparently visiting Egypt, the Levant, Babylonia, the Black Sea region and much of mainland Greece, and spent time in Athens, where he seems to have recited parts of his work. Ancient tradition records that he joined the Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii in southern Italy, where he is said to have died around 425 BCE. [2]
The Histories
The Histories, divided by later editors into nine books named after the Muses, traces the growth of the Persian Empire under Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes and the conflict that followed with the Greek states, culminating in the campaigns of 490 and 480 to 479 BCE and the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. [1]
Herodotus opens by stating that he sets down his inquiry, historie in Greek, so that human achievements should not be forgotten and so that the reason for the conflict between Greeks and barbarians should be preserved. The word he uses for inquiry gave its name to the discipline of history. [3]
The narrative is interrupted by long digressions on the geography, religion, customs and traditions of Egypt, Scythia, Libya, Persia and other regions. These passages are among the earliest surviving ethnographic writing and remain important evidence for peoples who left no written record of their own. [2]
Method and reliability
Herodotus distinguishes between what he has seen, what he has been told and what he believes, and frequently gives competing versions of the same event without deciding between them. He relies heavily on oral testimony gathered on his travels, and his account incorporates oracles, dreams and divine causation alongside political and military explanation. [3]
Ancient critics, among them Thucydides by implication and Plutarch explicitly, accused him of credulity and of bias, and he acquired a reputation in some quarters as the father of lies. Modern scholarship, supported in several cases by archaeological and Egyptological evidence, has treated his reports with more respect, while recognising that his figures for army sizes and some of his geographical claims are unreliable. [4]
Legacy
The Histories established several enduring conventions of historical writing: the statement of a subject and purpose at the outset, the citation of sources and alternative accounts, and the combination of narrative with descriptive and cultural material. [1]
The work has been continuously read since antiquity and was among the first classical texts printed in the Renaissance. It remains a standard subject of study in ancient history, anthropology and literature, and the term historiography traces back to the inquiry Herodotus named. [2]
