Key Takeaways
One of the great ironies about Herodotus , the prolificGreekchronicler of the ancient globe known as the " founder of story , " is that his own history is for the most part unknown .
Scholars trust that Herodotus wasborn around 480 B.C.E. in the metropolis of Halicarnassus ( now Bodrum in modern - day Turkey ) , but that ’s passably much where the train of thought unravels . Somehow , he had the mean value to journey all around the ancient globe conduct research and collecting stories for his ambitious magnum opus , " The Histories . "
But how ? Did Herodotus inherit a bunch of money from his family ? Was he a successful merchandiser or traveling reader ? Herodotus does n’t say . expert believe that he must have come from a flush family generate the comprehensiveness of his travel and the fact that his composition trend was so polished , which implies that he was highly educated .
" The Histories , " written sometime in the later fifth century B.C.E. , is a sprawling record of the growth of the Persian Empire over about a century , leading to the defeat of the huge Persian army and navy in Greece in 480 - 79 B.C.E. , in what are call by the Greeks the " Persian Wars . " Herodotus claim long and meander detours describing among other things the astonishing urban center ofBabylon , the course of Egyptian history and even the habits of the nomad Scythians north of the Black Sea .
Herodotus himself might stay a mystery , but his articulation on the page is personal , engaging and playful , that of a natural - born fabricator with a seemingly endless peculiarity to well understand the world around him , past and present .
Scholars have n’t always been genial to Herodotus . Until recently , masses jimmy him less as a " serious " historian than as a skilledraconteurwho valued the entertainment impact of a juicy tale from the past tense rather than ask whether it in reality encounter . But a new generation of historiographer are rescuing Herodotus ’s report as the true " father of account , " a man who locomote to the edges of the known world and interview everyone from Egyptian priests to Babylonian farmers , gather up stories of powerful queens and Median sheepman girls , for make sense of the complex grade of human events , both great and small-scale .
What History Meant to Herodotus
That ’s how Herodotus opens " The Histories , " not by invoking the gods or muses like his precursor Homer , but by state his intention , to record the " great and rattling deed " of humans for future generations . Herodotus did n’t name his text " The Histories . " The deed of conveyance came later and was draw from the Greek word for " inquiry " that Herodotus would have used in that scuttle line : historíē .
" Historíēwas an Ionian Greek word that did n’t signify history , it meant ' investigation , ' " says Carolyn Dewald , a Professor Emerita of classical subject field at Bard College in New York and co - editor program of " The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus . " " To Herodotus , historíēmeant some kind of fact - based exploration . "
The challenge for an investigator of the past tense work in the 5th one C B.C.E. was that almost nothing was write down . Herodotus could n’t walk into the Athens library and check out a scroll or two on Egyptian account . He had to go out and collectlogoi , the " stories " order by people who either witnessed an event at first hand or had received knowledge pass down through strong unwritten traditions . That was the best diachronic data point Herodotus could get his men on .
" What I admire very much about Herodotus is that he persist very near to his sources , " says Dewald . " He insert each new account as ' The Persians say … ' or ' The Lydians say … ' He ’s truly exercisinghistoríēin that he ’s getting as close as he can to the actual record of what encounter , recognizing that it always depends on the level of view of the person separate the story . "
Herodotus sometimes put in his first - individual voice into the story to weigh in on differing accounts of the same event , or to admit that he does n’t hump the full verity .
" I am obliged to record the things I am told , but am certainly not required to believe them , " Herodotus writes in one chapter of " The Histories , " and again in a late chapter : " Anyone who finds such thing credible can make of these Egyptian stories what he wishes . My occupation , throughout this history , is simply to read whatever I am tell by each of my sources . "
What cements Herodotus as the " father of history " for student like Dewald is that " The Histories , " even with its trust on third - person account , attempts to explain the course of instruction of human events through causal issue — this set of decision by people led to a sure action , which brought on another reaction , and so on . Herodotus was n’t satisfied with make out the who , what and when of history , but also thewhy . Why did the Persians hate the Greeks so much in the first place ? Why did mighty Egypt , the top gem of ancientness , fall to the Persians ? Why did one potent drawing card after another fall victim to pride , revenge or rapacity ?
Herodotus " formulate " history as we know it , Dewald says , because he was the first to see these myriad storey from the past as small parts of one much grown tarradiddle — the news report of the known human globe .
" That sounds obvious to us now , but it was n’t at all obvious when Herodotus was writing in the 440s B.C.E. , " says Dewald . " The idea that he would take everybody ’s point of view — including that of hundreds of women — and make certain that the points of perspective of all the human actors are accounted for , was rotatory . "
A Crazy Time to Be Alive
Although we know very short about Herodotus the man , we know a lot about the clock time in which he lived . Herodotus would have been at most a small child when a loose confederation of poor Grecian city - states defeated the mighty Persians in the Persian Wars . By the time he was a unseasoned valet de chambre , he would have been a participant in make fifth - century Greek civilization — an intellectual , philosophic and political revolution that form the course of Western culture .
Herodotus , living in a metre of such an huge ethnical work shift , was try on to make sense of it all . This may have been why he chose the Persian Wars as the foundational narrative of " The Histories . " The Persian Empire had been the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen , stretch out from Libya to India , and its rulers and military were highly competent and well - organized . Why did the Greeks win ?
" The big question for Herodotus ' multiplication was how on Earth did these 30 or so poor , independent , squabbling Hellenic metropolis ( a ) get together and concur to do something in unison , and ( b ) how did they manage to defeat this tremendous and very well - planned Iranian endeavour to defeat them ? " allege Dewald . " Who bed , we might all be speaking a form of Persian today if they had n’t done that . It ’s really a significant import in world chronicle that Herodotus is talking about . "
The Reliability and Legacy of Herodotus
Cicero , the Roman statesman , call Herodotus the " father of history . " Plutarch , a Hellenic philosopher who go more than a century later than Cicero ( first to second hundred C.E. ) , had another title for Herodotus : the " begetter of lies . " ( Plutarch was peeve that Herodotus made it clear that Plutarch ’s own multitude , the Boeotians , had patronise the untimely side in the war , the Persians . )
Herodotus has always been plagued by dependableness issues . His description of Ancient Babylonstands out as a specially flagrant example of an attack to piece together details about a situation that had been defeat doubly by the Persians , with a lot of destruction , by Herodotus ’s time :
Dewald admit that Herodotus ’s descriptions of mud - brick wall move up up to the altitude of a very marvellous office edifice are " idiotic , " even if he was rely on hand - me - down reports about walls no longer brook . Other critic of Herodotus pointed to his imaginary accounts of gargantuan ants in India that poke up atomic number 79 , flying snake in Arabia and long - bob sheep whose tails are endure behind them on wheeled carts . But modern assimilator like Dewald come to Herodotus ' defense .
" What I object to is people who say that Herodotus was n’t concerned in accuracy , " say Dewald . " It ’s clear to me that he spends an incredible amount of meter trying to get things right . I think his critics badly misconceive where he was coming from . Given the immensity of the job he had to gather up and assess all of that data point , almost all scholars now admit it was very telling . "
The realness is that Herodotus , whether you choose to believe him or not , create the start peak from which every innovative historiographer has begun their ownhistoríēor research into the life and time of the Mediterranean populace and its surroundings in the sixth and fifth century B.C.E. " A great deal of what we know about the archaic and early classical period in Greece we owe to Herodotus , " says Dewald .
FAQs
Herodotus gather taradiddle by traveling around the ancient world and interviewing various people who witnessed events firsthand or had knowledge run down through oral traditions .
Herodotus choose the Persian Wars as the foundational narration of ' The Histories ' to make sense of the immense cultural shift happen during his clock time and to explore how a modest group of Greek city - states managed to defeat the powerful Persian Empire .
