Herodotus

Open Herodotus and he introduces himself before he says anything else: «Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε», “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus”. He promises that great and marvellous deeds, Greek and non-Greek alike, will not fade with time, and that he will tell you what made the two sides go to war.¹ His word for “inquiry”, ἱστορίη, is the ancestor of our word history.²

Cicero's verdict has stuck. In his dialogue On the Laws he calls Herodotus “the father of history”, and in the same sentence admits that Herodotus and the historian Theopompus are both full of countless stories.³

Debated among scholars We cannot say exactly when he lived. The ancient count, which Aulus Gellius takes from a writer called Pamphila, makes him fifty-three when the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, so born about 484.⁴ Modern books move it by a few years; Livius.org gives c. 480 to c. 429.⁵ What the Histories themselves show is that he was still writing after 430 BC: he mentions Spartan envoys put to death at Athens,⁶ an event Thucydides places at the end of the war's second summer.⁷

He went to see things for himself. He reached Egypt's city of Elephantine, “to look myself”,⁸ and sailed to Tyre to ask about the temple of Heracles.⁹ And he tells you exactly where his own eyes stop. Up to one point in Egypt, “all I have said is the record of my own autopsy and judgment and inquiry”; after it, “I will record Egyptian chronicles, according to what I have heard”.¹⁰ His rule for the rest of the book: “although it is my business to set down that which is told me, to believe it is none at all of my business”.¹¹

Not everyone was charmed. Plutarch wrote a whole pamphlet, On the Malice of Herodotus, arguing that the simple, friendly style hides a spiteful streak, aimed above all at Boeotians and Corinthians.¹²

Ancient tradition / legend Later writers told stories about how he shared his work. Plutarch passes on, from a historian called Diyllus, that Athens voted Herodotus ten talents on a motion by Anytus.¹³ Lucian, writing long after, has him reciting the Histories to the crowd at the Olympic Games, so delighting them that the nine books were named after the Muses.¹⁴

He wrote in Ionic, and you can hear it in the first line. LSJ, the standard dictionary, notes each of these as Ionic forms of the words Attic Greek uses: ἱστορίη for ἱστορία, θωμαστά (“marvellous”) for θαυμαστά, κότε for πότε (“when?”, at 9.122.2) and ἀπίκετο for ἀφίκετο (“arrived”, at 6.43.3).^1511617

Three things readers still argue about

A speech the Greeks would not believe. In Book 3, after a coup in Persia, seven nobles debate how the empire should be ruled, and Otanes argues for handing power to the people. Herodotus knows that the speeches “to some Greeks seem incredible”, and insists “there is no doubt that they were spoken”.¹⁸ In Book 6 he says it again, for “those Greeks who will not believe” it.¹⁷

A meeting that cannot have happened. In Book 1 the Athenian lawgiver Solon visits the rich Lydian king Croesus, and tells him “it is necessary to see how the end of every affair turns out”.²¹ Dating makes the meeting very hard to accept. Plutarch already knew it: some, he says, “prove by chronology that it is fictitious”, but he would not give up so good a story.¹⁹²⁰

An ending that stops short. The Histories close with Cyrus telling the Persians that “soft lands breed soft men”.¹⁶ Jona Lendering thinks the work is probably unfinished: at 7.213 Herodotus says he will tell “later in my history” why Ephialtes was killed, and, Lendering notes, he never does.²²²³