Herodotus

Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) was born in Halicarnassus on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor (Caria, then under Persian rule; modern Bodrum, Turkey). His family was prominent and probably partly Carian, partly Greek; the epic poet Panyassis, one of his close kin, was executed by the tyrant Lygdamis during the political strife of Herodotus's youth. The biographical tradition reports that Herodotus went into exile on the island of Samos and only later returned to Halicarnassus to take part in the overthrow of Lygdamis, before leaving again, this time for good. He spent much of his adult life on the move and finally settled, sometime after 444 BCE, at Thurii, the pan-Hellenic colony founded in southern Italy under Athenian sponsorship; he is buried there by one tradition and at Athens or Pella by others.

His Histories (Greek Historíai, "Inquiries") is the first surviving work of long-form prose investigation in the Western tradition, and the reason Cicero — writing more than three centuries later — called him pater historiae, the father of history. The work runs in nine books (the division and the names of the Muses attached to each were assigned by Alexandrian editors, not by Herodotus) and is structured as an inquiry into the causes of the great clash between the Greek city-states and the Achaemenid Persian Empire — the Ionian Revolt, Darius's punitive invasion that ended at Marathon in 490 BCE, and above all Xerxes's massive expedition of 480–479 BCE, with its set-pieces at Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. Around this central narrative Herodotus weaves vast digressions — the ethnographies of Egypt (Book 2, where he traveled extensively), Scythia, Libya, Babylonia, Persia, and India — that together amount to the first systematic attempt in Greek prose to describe the inhabited world.

Herodotus's method combined three resources. He relied on autopsy — what he saw with his own eyes — wherever possible, traveling at least to Egypt, Phoenicia (Tyre), Babylon, the northern Black Sea coast, Cyrene, and the Greek mainland. Where autopsy failed he used historíē in the strict sense: questioning local priests, guides, and elders and recording their accounts, often with the famous caveat that "my obligation is to record what is said, but I am not at all obliged to believe it." Earlier prose chroniclers — above all Hecataeus of Miletus, whom Herodotus names and corrects — gave him a model of geographical and genealogical writing, and Homer gave him his epic register; but the explanatory ambition (to ask why) and the sustained investigative voice were his innovations. He gave public recitations of portions of the work, reportedly at Olympia and Athens, and was associated in the biographical tradition with Sophocles in Periclean Athens.

Herodotus's reception has been a long argument. Already a generation later Thucydides criticized him — without naming him — as a teller of agreeable stories rather than a strict historian, and Plutarch's polemic On the Malice of Herodotus accused him of bias against the Boeotians and Corinthians. Through the Middle Ages he was less read in the Latin West than in Byzantium, and in the early modern period the explorers who tested his Egyptian and Scythian reports often found them wildly accurate where they had been thought fabulous. Modern scholarship treats him as the founder of ethnographic and comparative inquiry; the recovery of cuneiform and Egyptian sources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries vindicated much that nineteenth-century positivism had dismissed. He remains the indispensable narrative source for the Greco-Persian Wars and for the imagined geography of the fifth-century-BCE Mediterranean world.