Information about Herodotus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Ἁλικαρνᾱσσεύς Hērodotos Halikarnāsseus) was a Greek historian from Ionia who lived in the 5th century BC (ca. 484 BC–ca. 425 BC) and is regarded as the "Father of History". He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories, a record of his 'inquiries' (or 'ἱστορίαι', a word that passed into Latin and took on its modern connotation of 'history') into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BC — especially since he includes a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented, and many long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. However, his stories were not always completely accurate.

Biography

Much of what is known of Herodotus' life has been gathered from his own work. Additional details have been garnered from the Suda, an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium; it seems likely that the Suda took its information from traditional accounts. Born in Halicarnassus, the Suda claims him to be the son of Lyxes and Dryo, and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis, an epic poet of the time. According to this account, after being exiled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lygdamis Herodotus went to live at Samos. Later returning to Halicarnassus, Herodotus took part in the removal of Lygdamis from the city. The traditional biography also includes some time spent in Athens, and has Herodotus joining a Hellenic colony named Thurii in Southern Italy. His death and burial are placed either at Thurii or at Pella, in Macedonia.

How much of this is correct cannot be known. It was common practice in antiquity for the biographies of poets to be drawn from inferences collated from their works, and something similar may have happened in Herodotus's case. The casting of Herodotus as a tyrannicide may simply be reflecting the pro-freedom attitude he expresses in the Histories, while the stays at Samos and Athens may have been invented to explain the pro-Samian and pro-Athenian bias that has been often thought to pervade his work. His exile from Halicarnassus may also be fictional: later historians, such as Thucydides and Xenophon, certainly did undergo periods of exile, and their fate may have been later retroactively imposed on Herodotus by later writers.

Herodotus as historian

Herodotus gave us a lot of information concerning the nature of the world and the status of the sciences during his lifetime.

For example, he reports that the annual flooding of the Nile was said to be the result of melting snows far to the south, and comments that he cannot understand how there can be snow in Africa, the hottest part of the known world, offering an elaborate explanation based on the way that desert winds affect the passage of the Sun over this part of the world (2:18ff). (He also passes on reports from Phoenician sailors that, while circumnavigating Africa, they 'saw the sun on the right side while sailing westwards'. Thanks to this brief mention, which is almost an afterthought, it has been argued that Africa was indeed circumnavigated by ancient seafarers—for this is precisely where the sun ought to have been.)

Written between 431 BC and 425 BC, The Histories were divided by later editors into nine books, named after the nine Muses (the 'Muse of History', Clio, represented the first book).

As the work progresses, it becomes apparent that Herodotus is fulfilling his opening desire—to 'prevent the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due mead of glory; and to put on record what causes first brought them into conflict.' Indeed, it is only from this perspective that his opening discussion of ancient wife-stealing is comprehensible: he is attempting to discover who first made the 'west' and the 'east' mutual antagonists, and myth is the only source he can delve into for information on the subject.

The first six books deal broadly with the growth of the Persian Empire. The tale begins with an account of the first 'western' monarch to enter into conflict with an 'eastern' people—Croesus of Lydia attacked the Greek city-states of Ionia, and then (misinterpreting a cryptic oracle), also attacked the Persians. (As occurs many times throughout The Histories to those who disregard good advice, Croesus soon lost his kingdom, and nearly his life). Croesus was defeated by Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, and Lydia became a Persian province.

The second book forms a lengthy digression concerning the history of Egypt, which Cyrus' successor, Cambyses, annexed to the Empire. The following four books deal with the further growth of the Empire under Darius, the Ionian Revolt, and the burning of Sardis (an act participated in by Athens and at least one other Greek polis). The sixth book describes the very first Persian incursion into Greece, an attack upon those who aided the Ionians and a quest for retribution following the attack upon Sardis, which ended with the defeat of the Persians in 490 BC at the battle of Marathon, near Athens.

The last three books describe the attempt of the Persian king Xerxes to avenge the Persian defeat at Marathon and to finally absorb Greece into the Empire. The Histories end in the year 479 BC, with the Persian invaders having suffered both a crushing naval defeat at Salamis, and near annihilation of their ground forces at Plataea. The Persian Empire thus receded to the Aegean coastline of Asia Minor, still threatening but much chastened.

It is possible to see the dialectic theme of Persian power and its various excesses running like a 'red thread' throughout the narrative—cause and effect, hubris and fate, vengeance and violence. Even the strange and fantastic tales that are liberally sprinkled throughout the text find their source in this momentum. At every stage, a Persian monarch crosses a body of water or other liminal space and suffers the consequences: Cyrus attacks the Massagetae on the eastern bank of a river, and ends up decapitated; Cambyses attacks the Ethiopians to the south of Egypt, across the desert, and goes mad; Darius attacks the Scythians to the north and is flung back across the Danube; Xerxes lashes and then bridges the Hellespont, and his forces are crushed by the Greeks. Thus, though he strays (and sometimes strays rather far) off of this main course, he always returns to the task at hand—answering the question, how and why did the Greeks and Persians enter into the greatest conflict then known, and what were the consequences?

Opinions

Herodotus' invention has earned him the twin titles The Father of History and The Father of Lies [1]. As these epithets would seem to imply, there has long been a debate—at least from the time of Cicero's 'On the Laws' (Book 1, paragraph 5)—concerning the veracity of his tales, and, more importantly, concerning the extent to which he knew himself to be creating fabrications. Indeed, every manner of argument has surfaced on this subject, from a devious and consciously-fictionalizing Herodotus to a gullible Herodotus whose sources 'saw him coming a long way off'. Herodotus was, however, by his day's standards, reasonably accurate in his accounts, respectful of evidence, and a master of narrative. It is unfair, in other words, to condemn him for relating tales of giant man-eating ants, if such stories were told to him. Indeed, recent research focusing on Herodotus' report about "gold-digging, giant ants" has gone a long way towards rehabilitating Herodotus' reputation as a scientific historian - see the "Criticisms of Herodotus" section below. Like myths and legends in general, they need not have been true to have been meaningful stories.

Criticisms of Herodotus

There are many cases in which Herodotus was not sure of the truth of a certain event or unimpressed by the dull 'facts' he received, reported the several most famous accounts of a given subject or process and then wrote what he believed was the most probable. Though The Histories were often criticized in olden times for bias, inaccuracy and plagiarism (for example, Claudius Aelianus attacked Herodotus as a liar in Verae Historiae and went as far as to deny him a place among the famous on the Island of the Blessed), this methodology has been seen in a more positive light by many modern historians and philosophers, especially those searching for an example of relatively objective historical writing. Of course, given the sensitivity of the issue, the very founding of the discipline of history, this has not become a consensus view; attacks have been made by several scholars in modern times, a few even arguing that Herodotus exaggerated the extent of his travels and invented his sources.

Discoveries made since the end of the 19th century have greatly helped to restore Herodotus' reputation. The archaeological study of the now submerged ancient Egyptian city of Heraklion and the recovery of the so-called 'Naucratis stela' give extensive credibility to Herodotus' previously unsupported claim that Heraklion was founded under the Egyptian New Kingdom. Because of this recent increase in respect for his accuracy, as well as the quality and content of his observations, Herodotus is now recognized as a pioneer not only in history, but in ethnography and also anthropology.

One of the most interesting discoveries yet made concerning Herodotus' honesty is that of Michel Peissel, a French ethnologist, who claims to have discovered that in an isolated region of the Dansar Plateau, in the Himalayas region between India and Pakistan, there live marmots (a species of burrowing squirrel) who tend to throw up gold dust whenever they dig their burrows. According to Peissel, he interviewed the Minaro tribal people who live in the Dansar Plateau, and they confirmed for him that they have, for generations, been collecting the gold dust that the marmots expose in their diggings. Even more tantalizing, in his book, "The Ants' Gold", Peissel offers the theory that Herodotus became confused because the old Persian word for "marmot" is quite similar to that for "mountain ant". Herodotus, who probably did not know any Persian, may have unwittingly been the victim of a simple misunderstanding of translation. The suggestion that he completely made up the tale may continue to be thrown into doubt as more research is conducted. This theory, of course, fails to take into consideration Herodotus' own followup at 3.105 ff, wherein these "marmots" are said to chase and devour full-grown camels, however this could be an example of a tale told to keep others from seeking this relatively easy to access source of gold dust.

See also

• Pharaoh (historical novel by Bolesław Prus, incorporating scenes involving the ancient Egyptian Labyrinth described in Book II of The Histories of Herodotus)
• Thucydides, ancient Greek historian who is often said to be "the father of history"
• Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus), a short biography of Homer that claims falsely to be the work of Herodotus

Notes

Further reading

• Several English translations of The Histories of Herodotus are readily available in multiple editions. The most readily available are those translated by:
• A. D. Godley, 1920; revised 1926. Reprinted 1931, 1946, 1960, 1966, 1975, 1981, 1990, 1996, 1999, 2004. Available in four volumes from Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-99130-3 Printed with Greek on the left and English on the right.
• Aubrey de Sélincourt, originally 1954; revised by John Marincola in 1972. Several editions from Penguin Books available.
• David Grene, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• George Rawlinson, translation 1858–1860. Public domain; many editions available, although Everyman Library and Wordsworth Classics editions are the most common ones still in print.
• Robin Waterfield, Oxford World Classics, 1998.
• Bakker, Egbert e.a. (eds.), Brill's Companion to Herodotus. Leiden: Brill, 2002
• Evans, J. A. S., Herodotus. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
• —. Herodotus, Explorer of the Past: Three Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• Fehling, Detlev. Herodotus and His "Sources": Citation, Invention, and Narrative Art. Translated by J.G. Howie. Arca Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers, and Monographs, 21. Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1989.
• Flory, Stewart, The Archaic Smile of Herodotus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.
• Fornara, Charles W. Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
• Hartog, F., The Mirror of Herodotus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.
• Immerwahr, H., Form and Thought in Herodotus. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1966.
• Lateiner, D., The Historical Method of Herodotus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.
• Momigliano, A., The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. University of California Press, 1992.
• Pritchett, W. K., The Liar School of Herodotos. Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991.
• Kwintner, Michelle. The Liar School of Herodotus (Review). Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1994.
• Romm, James S. Herodotus. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998 (hardcover, ISBN 0-300-07229-5; paperback, ISBN 0-300-07230-9).
• Thomas, R., Herodotus in Context; ethnography, science and the art of persusion. Oxford University Press 2000.
• Selden, Daniel. "Cambyses' Madness, or the Reason of History," Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 42 (1999), 33-63.
• Simons, Marlise. Himalayas Offer Clue to Legend of Gold-Digging 'Ants'. New York Times: 25 November 1996.
• Peissel, Michel. "The ants' gold: The discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the Himalayas". Collins, 1984. ISBN-13: 978-0002725149.

External links

• Herodotus at About.com
• A reconstructed portrait of Herodotos, based on historical sources, in a contemporary style.
• Herodotus on the Web
• Herodotus for Kids
• Herodotus of Halicarnassus at Livius.org
• 1911 Britannica article "Herodotus"

Online translations

• Herodotus Inquiries—new translation with extensive photographic essays of the places and artifacts mentioned by Herodotus hyper-linked to the text
• Works by Herodotus at Project Gutenberg
• The History of Herodotus, vol. 1, available at Project Gutenberg. (translation by George Campbell Macaulay, 1852–1915)
• The History of Herodotus, vol. 2, available at Project Gutenberg.
• The History of Herodotus at The Internet Classics Archive (translation by George Rawlinson)
• Parallel Greek and English text of the History of Herodotus at the Internet Sacred Text Archive
• Excerpts of Sélincourt's translation
• Herodotus Histories on Perseus

Persondata
NAME	Herodotus of Halicarnassus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Herodotus; Ἡρόδοτος Ἁλικαρνᾱσσεύς; Hērodotos Halikarnāsseus
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Dorian historian
DATE OF BIRTH	484 BCE
PLACE OF BIRTH	Helicarnassus
DATE OF DEATH	circa 425 BCE
PLACE OF DEATH