Herodotus

• 1. Introduction

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  Herodotus called himself, in the opening line of his Histories, a man of Halicarnassus, a Greek port that today lies beneath Bodrum in Turkey. In the 5th century BC that city sat under Persian control, which made the historian himself a subject of the Persian king. He set out to record the long hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks, and to keep human deeds from being erased by time. The ancient Roman orator Cicero would later hand him a title that has stuck for two thousand years: The Father of History. Yet other readers reached for a far harsher name. Who was this traveler who wandered from Egypt to Babylon collecting stories, and why did some of his own contemporaries laugh at his work? How did one book about kings and battles come to be regarded as the first true history ever written in Greek prose?

• 2. The Father Of Lies

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  "The Father of Lies" is the rival nickname Herodotus earned, hung on him because of the strange tales and folk-stories packed into his pages. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides, who wrote his own History of the Peloponnesian War, accused Herodotus of inventing stories simply to entertain his audience. Herodotus answered the charge directly. He said he reported what he could see and what he was told, no more. In 425 BC, about the time many scholars think Herodotus died, the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes staged The Acharnians. The play blames the entire Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes, a joke aimed straight at Herodotus. He had retold the Persians' version of their wars with Greece, opening with the carrying-off of the mythical women Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. The Italian thinker Giambattista Vico kept the suspicion alive much later. In the opening pages of his New Science he wrote that although Herodotus is called the father of Greek history, his books are for the most part filled with myths, with a style carrying many Homeric elements. Even so, modern historians and archaeologists have since confirmed a sizeable portion of what he wrote.

• 3. A House Of Cards

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  "Building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow to the ground." That is how one scholar described the task of writing a life of Herodotus from the surviving evidence. The data are few, the sources late and slight, the details often improbable or contradictory. Much of what is claimed about him comes from the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine work that may have drawn on older traditional accounts. The Suda names his father as Lyxes, his mother as Dryo, his brother as Theodorus, and ties him to Panyassis, an epic poet of the age. Because Lyxes and Panyassis are Carian names, scholars think Herodotus was at least partly a Hellenised Carian. The Suda tells a romantic story that he fled with his family to the island of Samos to escape Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia, and that he later came home to lead the revolt that overthrew the despot. Inscriptions found at Halicarnassus from about his own time complicate that tale. They show that Ionic Greek already appeared in official documents there, so there is no need to believe he learned the dialect in exile, and the heroic-liberator version now looks doubtful.

• 4. The Traveler

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  Egypt was one of the lands Herodotus saw for himself, and his eyewitness accounts place him there in the company of Athenians. The likely date is sometime after 454 BC, possibly earlier, following an Athenian fleet's support for the uprising against Persian rule between 460 and 454 BC. His home city helped make such journeys possible. Halicarnassus had broken with its Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel, yet it had also helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt. That outward-looking port within the Persian Empire gave his family the kind of foreign contacts that could ease travel and research. From Egypt he probably went on to Tyre, then down the Euphrates to Babylon. Around 447 BC, finding himself unpopular at home for reasons perhaps tied to local politics, he moved to Athens under Pericles. He openly admired its people and its democratic institutions. There he learned the local topography and came to know leading citizens, among them the Alcmaeonids, a clan whose history appears again and again in his writing. Plutarch, drawing on a writer named Diyllus, records that the Athenian assembly rewarded him for his work with the sum of 10 talents.

• 5. Herodotus And His Shade

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  "Herodotus and his shade" became a proverb for someone who loses an opportunity through delay. The phrase grew out of a story about how he shared his work. In his day authors made their research known through public recitation at popular festivals, reading detachable performance pieces aloud to win over a crowd. John Marincola, writing in the Penguin edition of the Histories, identifies passages in the early books that read as almost independent set pieces, ready to be lifted out for an oral show. The festival stories about Herodotus multiply and contradict each other. According to Lucian, he carried his finished work from Anatolia straight to the Olympic Games and read the whole of the Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, earning rapturous applause. A different ancient grammarian tells the opposite: that he waited for some clouds to give him shade before he would begin, and by then the crowd had drifted away. A third version, preserved in the Suda through Photius and Tzetzes, places a young Thucydides in the audience with his father. The boy burst into tears during the reading, and Herodotus told the father, "Your son's soul yearns for knowledge."

• 6. The First Utterance Of Clio

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  Clio, the Muse, lends her spirit to the line that Herodotus gave Greece "the first utterance" of history. His Histories is the earliest Greek prose to survive intact, and he named the whole work after the nine Muses. The Augustan literary critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed seven predecessors who wrote simple, unadorned accounts of cities and peoples, Greek and foreign, full of popular legends that were sometimes melodramatic, sometimes naïve, often charming. Those same traits run through Herodotus himself. The named forerunners include Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia, and the best attested of all, Hecataeus of Miletus, of whom only disputed fragments remain. What set Herodotus apart was his subject. Before the Persian crisis, history among the Greeks meant only local or family traditions. The Wars of Liberation showed him a corporate life higher than the single city, and gave him the drama of a collision between East and West. Thucydides took a different path. Trained in rhetoric, he kept tight authorial control and focused on the polis, while Herodotus, with his constant digressions, seemed to loosen his grip on the story.

• 7. Three Graves

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  Three supposed resting places are claimed for Herodotus, and the ancient sources cannot agree on which holds him. One tradition says he and Thucydides grew close enough to be buried together in Thucydides's tomb in Athens, an opinion recorded by Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides. The Suda instead reports two graves, one in Macedonian Pella and one in the agora at Thurii. The uncertainty mirrors the uncertainty about how his story ended. In 443 BC or soon after, he joined an Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii in modern Calabria. Aristotle even refers to a version of the Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium." A late source summarised in the Library of Photius, drawn from Ptolemaeus Chennus, names Plesirrhous the Thessalian, a hymnographer, as his eromenos and his heir, which has led some to conclude he died childless. His close knowledge of the early Peloponnesian War hints that he returned to Athens, where he may have died in an outbreak of the plague. Others place his death in Macedonia under a royal patron, or back in Thurii. Nothing in the Histories can be securely dated after 430 BC, and he is thought to have died not long after, possibly before his sixtieth year.