Herodotus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greek writer of the fifth century BCE whose Histories, an account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire and of the peoples and lands involved, is the earliest surviving work of history in the Western tradition. The Roman orator Cicero called him the "father of history", and the word history itself comes from the Greek historia, "inquiry", which he used to describe his work. Critics since antiquity have also called him a teller of tall tales, and both reputations have some truth in them.

Almost everything known about Herodotus's life comes from hints in his own work and from late, unreliable sources such as the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda. He was born around 484 BCE in Halicarnassus, today's Bodrum on the south-west coast of Turkey. The city was Greek but then under the rule of the Achaemenid Empire, so he was born a Persian subject, and his family had Carian as well as Greek connections; a relative, Panyassis, was an epic poet. According to the Suda, the family was forced into exile on the island of Samos by Lygdamis, the local tyrant, and Herodotus later helped to overthrow him, but this story cannot be confirmed.

Herodotus travelled widely, though how far is disputed. His work suggests personal knowledge of Egypt, which he probably visited sometime after the mid-fifth century, and of Phoenicia, the Black Sea coast and possibly Babylon. He spent time in Athens in the 440s, where he admired the democracy and seems to have known leading families, and later stories claimed he gave public readings there and was rewarded by the city. Around 443 BCE he joined the new colony of Thurii in southern Italy, founded under Athenian sponsorship, and Aristotle refers to him as "Herodotus of Thurii". Nothing in the Histories can be firmly dated later than about 430 BCE, and he probably died not long after, perhaps around 425 BCE, either in Thurii, in Athens, or possibly in Macedonia.

The Histories, later divided by ancient editors into nine books, each named after one of the Muses, opens with Herodotus's statement that he wrote so that the great deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks would not be forgotten, and to explain why they went to war with one another. After dismissing the mythical abductions of women such as Io and Helen as causes, he begins with Croesus, the king of Lydia, who was the first, he says, to wrong the Greeks.

The work then follows the rise of Persia: the conquests of Cyrus the Great, the conquest of Egypt by his son Cambyses, and the reign of Darius the Great, including his failed campaign against the Scythians north of the Black Sea. Each new conquest becomes an occasion to describe the land and its people, so the early books are as much geography and ethnography as war history. The long second book on Egypt, with its accounts of the Nile, mummification, religion and the pyramids, is one of the main Greek sources on ancient Egypt.

The later books narrate the Ionian revolt against Persia around 499 BCE and the Greco-Persian Wars that followed: the Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 BCE, the vast invasion of Greece under Xerxes I in 480 BCE, the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, and the Greek victories at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale in 480 and 479 BCE. The work ends, somewhat abruptly, with the Athenians capturing Sestos on the Hellespont in 479 BCE.

Herodotus did something new. Earlier Greek writers, such as Hecataeus of Miletus, had produced prose accounts of geography and genealogy, but none had attempted a large explanation of a historical conflict built from inquiry. Herodotus relied mainly on what he saw and what he was told by local informants, priests and officials, and he often reports several versions of an event, sometimes saying which he believes and sometimes leaving the choice to the reader. He states that his duty is to record what was said, not necessarily to believe it.

This method made him valuable and vulnerable. Some of his stories are plainly fabulous, such as the gold-digging ants of India, and he can be wrong on numbers, as in his figure of well over two million fighting men in Xerxes' army, which modern historians reduce to perhaps a tenth or less. Within a generation the Athenian historian Thucydides, who wrote about the Peloponnesian War, implicitly criticised writers who aimed to please their audience rather than establish the truth, and the comic playwright Aristophanes parodied his account of the war's origins. In Roman times Plutarch wrote an essay on his "malice". Yet archaeology and other sources have confirmed much of what he reported, including details of Scythian burial customs and of Persian administration, and many of his errors came from his informants rather than from invention.

Beyond the facts, the Histories reflects a coherent view of the world. Herodotus was fascinated by the variety of human customs and argued that every people thinks its own customs best, illustrating the point with a story of Darius asking Greeks and Indians how they treated their dead. He treated non-Greeks with unusual fairness for his time, so much so that Plutarch accused him of being a friend of barbarians. He also saw a moral pattern in events: human fortune is unstable, and rulers who overreach, as Croesus and Xerxes did, are brought down, often with the gods' involvement. For him the Greek victory showed the strength of free citizens governed by law against the subjects of an absolute king.

Herodotus's Histories is the earliest substantial work of Greek prose to survive complete, and it is the main source for much of the history of the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE in Greece, Persia and the Near East. His blend of narrative, travel, ethnography and moral reflection influenced historians from antiquity onward, and he is often regarded as a founder of anthropology as well as history. His comment that Homer lived about four hundred years before his own time is one of the earliest ancient attempts to date Homer. Modern scholars, after long treating Thucydides as the more serious historian, have come to value Herodotus for his curiosity, his breadth and his willingness to see the past through many eyes, and he remains essential reading for the history of ancient Greece.