Herodotus

Herodotus

A Roman copy (2nd century AD) of a Greekbust of Herodotus from the

first half of the 4th century BC

Born c.  484 BC

Halicarnassus, Caria, Asia Minor

Died c.  425 BC (aged approximately 60)

Thurii, Calabria or Pella, Macedon

Occupation Historian

Herodotus (/ h ɨ ̍ r ɒ d ə t ə s / ; Ancient   Greek : Ἡρόδοτος Hēródotos) was an ancient Greek historian who was

born in Halicarnassus, Caria(modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–

425 BC). He has been called "The Father of History" (firstly conferred by Cicero), and was the first historian

known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent, and arrange them in a

well-constructed and vivid narrative.[1] The Histories—his masterpiece and the only work he is known to

have produced—is a record of his "inquiry" (or ἱστορία historía, a word that passed into Latin and acquired

its modern meaning of "history"), being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and

including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Although some of his stories were

fanciful, he claimed he was reporting only what had been told to him. Little is known of his personal history.

Place in history

Herodotus announced the size and scope of his work at the beginning of his Researches or Histories:

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται,

μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι, τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τὰ τε ἄλλα καὶ

δι' ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.[2]

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, his Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on

record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how

they came into conflict.[3]

His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been

debated. His place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within

which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. However,  Dionysius of

Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their

works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including

popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naive, often charming—all traits that can be found in the

work of Herodotus himself.[4] Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain. According to the ancient

account, these predecessors included Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of

Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus . Only fragments of the

latter's work survive (and the authenticity of these is debatable)[5] yet they allow us glimpses into the kind of

tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories, as in the introduction to Hecataeus's

work, Genealogies:

Fragment from the Histories VIII on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2099, early 2nd century AD

Hecataeus the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem true to me; for the stories told by the

Greeks are various and in my opinion absurd.[6]

This points forward to the 'folksy' yet 'international' outlook typical of Herodotus. Yet, one modern scholar

has described the work of Hecataeus as "a curious false start to history"[7] because, despite its critical spirit,

it failed to liberate history from myth. Herodotus mentions Hecataeus in his Histories, on one occasion

mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his

handling of their national history.[8] It is possible that Herodotus borrowed much material from Hecataeus, as

stated by Porphyry in a quote recorded by Eusebius.[9] In particular, it is possible that he copied descriptions

of the crocodile, hippopotamus and phoenix from Hecataeus's 'Circumnavigation of the Known World'

(Periegesis/Periodos ges), even mis-representing the source as 'Heliopolitans' (Histories 2.73).[10] But unlike

Herodotus, Hecataeus did not record events that had occurred in living memory, nor did he include the oral

traditions of Greek history within the larger framework of oriental history.[11] There is no proof that Herodotus

derived the ambitious scope of his own work, with its grand theme of civilizations in conflict, from any

predecessor, despite much scholarly speculation about this in modern times.[7][12] Herodotus claims to be

better informed than his predecessors, relying on empirical observation to correct their excessive

schematism. For example, he argues for continental asymmetry as opposed to the older theory of a

perfectly circular earth with Europe and Asia/Africa equal in size (Hist. 4.36 and 4.42). Yet, he retains

idealising tendencies, as in his symmetrical notions of the Danube and Nile.[13]

His debt to previous authors of prose 'histories' might be questionable but there is no doubt that he owed

much to the example and inspiration of poets and story-tellers. For example, Athenian tragic poets provided

him with a world-view of a balance between conflicting forces, upset by the hubris of kings, and they

provided his narrative with a model of episodic structure. His familiarity with Athenian tragedy is

demonstrated in a number of passages echoing Aeschylus's Persae, including the epigrammatic

observation that the defeat of the Persian navy at Salamis caused the defeat of the land army (Hist. 8.68

~ Persae 728). The debt may have been repaid by Sophocles because there appear to be echoes of The

Histories in his plays, especially a passage in Antigone that resembles Herodotus's account of the death of

Intaphernes (Histories 3.119 ~ Antigone 904-20)[14]—this however is one of the most contentious issues in

modern scholarship.[15]

Homer was another inspirational source.[16]

Just as Homer drew extensively on a tradition of oral poetry, sung by wandering minstrels, so Herodotus

appears to have drawn on an Ionian tradition of story-telling, collecting and interpreting the oral histories he

chanced upon in his travels. These oral histories often contained folk-tale motifs and demonstrated a moral,

yet they also contained substantial facts relating to geography, anthropology and history, all compiled by

Herodotus in an entertaining style and format. [17] It is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-

tales he reported that his critics in early modern times branded him 'The Father of Lies'. [18][19] Even his own

contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact one modern scholar[20] has wondered if

Herodotus left his home in Asiatic Greece, migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own

countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been

dedicated to Herodotus at Thuria (one of his three supposed resting places):

Herodotus the son of Sphynx

Lies; in Ionic history without peer;

A Dorian born, who fled from Slander's brand

And made in Thuria his new native land.[21]

Yet it was in Athens where his most formidable contemporary critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is

about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic

dramatist, Aristophanes, created The Acharnians, in which he blames The Peloponnesian War on the

abduction of some prostitutes—a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of

their wars with Greece, beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea and Helen.[22]

[23] Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a 'logos-writer' or story-teller.

[24] Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric, became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an

author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas Herodotus with his frequent

digressions appeared to minimize (or possibly disguise) his auctorial control. [25] Moreover, Thucydides

developed a historical topic more in keeping with the Greek lifestyle—the polis or city-state—whereas the

interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Asiatic Greeks (such as Herodotus himself), for whom life

under foreign rule was a recent memory.[24]

Before the Persian crisis history had been represented among the Greeks only by local or family traditions. The

Wars of Liberation had given to Herodotus the first genuinely historical inspiration felt by a Greek. These wars

showed him that there was a corporate life, higher than that of the city, of which the story might be told; and they

offered to him as a subject the drama of the collision between East and West. With him, the spirit of history was

born into Greece; and his work, called after the nine Muses, was indeed the first utterance of Clio.— Richard

Claverhouse Jebb.[26]

Life

Relief of Herodotus by Jean-Guillaume Moitte (1806), Louvre, Paris

Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life,

[27] supplemented with ancient yet much later sources, such as the Byzantine Suda:

The data are so few—they rest upon such late and slight authority; they are so improbable or so contradictory,

that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow

to the ground. Still, certain points may be approximately fixed...

— George Rawlinson.[28]

Typically modern accounts of his life[29][30] go something like this: Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus

around 484 BC. There is no reason to disbelieve the Suda's information about his family, that it was

influential and that he was 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. The town was within the Persian empire at that time and

maybe the young Herodotus heard local eye-witness accounts of events within the empire and of Persian

preparations for the invasion of Greece, including the movements of the local fleet under the command

of Artemisia. Inscriptions recently discovered at Halicarnassus indicate that her grandson Lygdamis

negotiated with a local assembly to settle disputes over seized property, which is consistent with a tyrant

under pressure, and his name is not mentioned later in the tribute list of the Athenian Delian League ,

indicating that there might well have been a successful uprising against him sometime before 454 BC.

Herodotus reveals affection for the island of Samos (III,39–60) and this is an indication that he might have

lived there in his youth. So it is possible that his family was involved in an uprising against Lygdamis,

leading to a period of exile on Samos and followed by some personal hand in the tyrant's eventual fall.

The statue of Herodotus in Bodrum

As Herodotus himself reveals, Halicarnassus, though a Dorian city, had ended its close relations with its

Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel (I,144), and it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt

(II,178). It was therefore an outward-looking, international-minded port within the Persian Empire and the

historian's family could well have had contacts in countries under Persian rule, facilitating his travels and his

researches. His eye-witness accounts indicate that he travelled in Egypt probably sometime after 454 BC or

possibly earlier in association with Athenians, after an Athenian fleet had assisted the uprising

against Persian rule in 460–454 BC. He probably travelled to Tyre next and then down

the Euphrates to Babylon. For some reason, probably associated with local politics, he subsequently found

himself unpopular in Halicarnassus and, sometime around 447 BC, he migrated to Periclean Athens , a city

for whose people and democratic institutions he declares his open admiration (V,78) and where he came to

know not just leading citizens such as the Alcmaeonids, a clan whose history features frequently in his

writing, but also the local topography (VI,137; VIII,52–5). According toEusebius [31]  and Plutarch,

[32] Herodotus was granted a financial reward by the Athenian assembly in recognition of his work and there

may be some truth in this. It is possible that he applied for Athenian citizenship—a rare honour after 451

BC, requiring two separate votes by a well-attended assembly—but was unsuccessful. In 443 BC, or shortly

afterwards, he migrated to Thurium as part of an Athenian-sponsored colony. Aristotle refers to a version

of The Histories written by 'Herodotus of Thurium' and indeed some passages in theHistories have been

interpreted as proof that he wrote about southern Italy from personal experience there (IV,15,99; VI,127).

Intimate knowledge of some events in the first years of the Peloponnesian War (VI,91; VII,133,233; IX,73)

indicate that he might have returned to Athens, in which case it is possible that he died there during an

outbreak of the plague. Possibly he died in Macedonia instead after obtaining the patronage of the court

there or else he died back in Thurium. There is nothing in the Histories that can be dated with any certainty

to later than 430, and it is generally assumed that he died not long afterwards, possibly before his sixtieth

year.

Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally

a Dorian settlement. According to theSuda (an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which possibly

took its information from traditional accounts), Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as a boy living on the

island of Samos, whither he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of

Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia I of Caria. The Suda also informs us that Herodotus later returned

home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. However, thanks to recent discoveries of some

inscriptions on Halicarnassus, dated to about that time, we now know that the Ionic dialect was used there

even in official documents, so there was no need to assume like the Suda that he must have learned the

dialect elsewhere.[33] Moreover, the fact that the Suda is the only source we have for the heroic role played

by Herodotus, as liberator of his birthplace, is itself a good reason to doubt such a romantic account.[34]

It was conventional in Herodotus's day for authors to 'publish' their works by reciting them at popular

festivals. According to Lucian, Herodotus took his finished work straight from Asia Minor to the Olympic

Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous

applause at the end of it.[35] According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian,[36] Herodotus

refused to begin reading his work at the festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade, by

which time however the assembly had dispersed—thus the proverbial expression "Herodotus and his

shade" to describe someone who misses an opportunity through delay. Herodotus's recitation at Olympia

was a favourite theme among ancient writers and there is another interesting variation on the story to be

found in the Suda, Photius [37]  and Tzetzes,[38] in which a young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly

with his father and burst into tears during the recital, whereupon Herodotus observed prophetically to the

boy's father: "Thy son's soul yearns for knowledge."

Eventually, Thucydides and Herodotus became close enough for both to be interred in Thucydides' tomb in

Athens. Such at least was the opinion of Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides.[39] According to the Suda, he

was buried in Macedonian Pella and in the agora in Thurium.[40]

Reliability

Dedication in the Histories, translated into Latin by Lorenzo Valla, Venice 1494

As a historian, Herodotus was sarcastically referred as the father of lies for "quoting eyewitnesses about

things they could have never seen, inventing and manipulating factual material." Ancient historians who

followed Herodotus preferred an element of show to accuracy and fairness, aiming to give pleasure with

“exciting events, great dramas, bizarre exotica.” [41]

Although the factual accuracy of the works of Herodotus is defended by some, [42] others regard his works as

being unreliable as a historical source. Fehling writes of "a problem recognized by everybody", namely that

much of what Herodotus tells us cannot be taken at face value.[43]

The accuracy of the works of Herodotus have been criticized since his own era. Sparks writes that "In

antiquity, Herodotus had acquired the reputation of being unreliable, biased, parsimonious in his praise of

heroes, and mendacious". His ancient critics included Cicero, Aristotle, Josephus and Plutarch. [44][45] Cicero

(On the Laws I.5) said the works of Herodotus were full of legends [46] or “fables”, and Harpocration wrote a

book on "the lies of Herodotus".[47] Duris of Samos called Herodotus a myth-monger.[48] Voltaire described

Herodotus as both "the father of history" and the "father of lies",[49] and Hartog more recently also called him

"The father of all liars".[50]

The reliability of Herodotus is particularly criticized when writing about Egypt. Alan B. Lloyd states that as a

historical document, the writings of Herodotus are seriously defective, and that he was working from

"inadequate sources".[51] Nielsen writes that: "Though we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of Herodotus

having been in Egypt, it must be said that his narrative bears little witness to it." [52] Fehling states that

Herodotus never traveled up the Nile River, and that almost everything he says about Egypt and Ethiopia is

doubtful.[53][54] About the claim of Herodotus that the Pharaoh Sesostris campaigned in Europe, and that he

left a colony in Colchia, Fehling states that "there is not the slightest bit of history behind the whole story". [55]

[56] Fehling concludes that the works of Herodotus are intended as fiction. [57] Depew and Obbink concur that

much of the content of the works of Herodotus are literary devices.[58]

In contrast, many scholars (Aubin, Heeren, Davidson, Diop, Poe, Welsby, Celenko, Volney, Montet, Bernal,

Jackson, DuBois, Strabo), ancient and modern, routinely cite Herodotus in their works on the Nile Valley.

Some of these scholars (Welsby, Heeren, Aubin, Diop, etc.) explicitly mention the reliability of Herodotus'

work on the Nile Valley and demonstrate corroboration of Herodotus' writings by modern scholars. Welsby

said that "archaeology graphically confirms some of Herodotus' observations." [59] A.H.L. Heeren (1838)

quoted Herodotus throughout his work and provided corroboration by scholars of his day regarding several

passages (source of the Nile, location of Meroe, etc.). [60] To further his work on the Egyptians and

Assyrians, Aubin uses Herodotus' accounts in various passages and defends Herodotus' position against

modern scholars. Aubin said Herodotus was "the author of the first important narrative history of the world"

and that Herodotus "visited Egypt."[61] Diop provides several examples (the inundations of the Nile) that he

claims support his view that Herodotus was "quite scrupulous, objective, scientific for his time." Diop claims

that Herodotus "always distinguishes carefully between what he has seen and what he has been told." Diop

also claims that Strabo corroborated Herodotus' ideas about the Black Egyptians, Ethiopians, and

Colchians.[62][63]

Herodotus claimed to have visited Babylon. The absence of any mention of the Hanging Gardens of

Babylon in his work has attracted further attacks on his credibility. In response Dalley has proposed that the

Hanging Gardens may have been in Ninevah rather than in Babylon.[64][65]

Reconstruction of the Oikoumene (inhabited world), ancient map based on Herodotus, c. 450 BC

Gold dust and nuggets

Herodotus provides much information about the nature of the world and the status of science during his

lifetime, often engaging in private speculation. For example, he reports that the annual flooding of

the Nilewas said to be the result of melting snows far to the south, and he 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 dismissive reports from Phoenician sailors that, while circumnavigating Africa,

they "saw the sun on the right side while sailing westwards". Owing to this brief mention, which is included

almost as 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. His accounts of India are among the oldest records

of Indian civilization by an outsider.[66]

Discoveries made since the end of the 19th century have both added to and detracted from his credibility.

His description of Gelonus, located in Scythia, as a city thousands of times larger than Troy was widely

disbelieved until it was rediscovered in 1975. The archaeological study of the now-submerged ancient

Egyptian city of Heracleion and the recovery of the so-called "Naucratis stela" give credibility to Herodotus's

previously unsupported claim that Heracleion was founded during the Egyptian New Kingdom.

Croesus Receiving Tribute from a Lydian Peasant, byClaude Vignon

After journeys to India and Pakistan, French ethnologist Michel Peissel claimed to have discovered an

animal species that may illuminate one of the most bizarre passages in Herodotus's Histories. [67] In Book 3,

passages 102 to 105, Herodotus reports that a species of fox-sized, furry "ants" lives in one of the far

eastern, Indian provinces of the Persian Empire. This region, he reports, is a sandy desert, and the sand

there contains a wealth of finegold dust. These giant ants, according to Herodotus, would often unearth the

gold dust when digging their mounds and tunnels, and the people living in this province would then collect

the precious dust. Peissel reports that in an isolated region of northern Pakistan, on the Deosai

Plateau in Gilgit–Baltistan province, there is a species of marmot, (the Himalayan marmot), (a type of

burrowing squirrel) that may have been what Herodotus called giant ants. Much like the province that

Herodotus describes, the ground of the Deosai Plateau is rich in gold dust. According to Peissel, he

interviewed the Minaro tribal people who live in the Deosai Plateau, and they have confirmed that they

have, for generations, been collecting the gold dust that the marmots bring to the surface when they are

digging their underground burrows. Later authors like Pliny the Elder mentioned this story in the gold

mining section of his Naturalis Historia .

The Himalayan marmot

Peissel offers the theory that Herodotus may have confused the old Persian word for "marmot" with the

word for "mountain ant". Research suggests that Herodotus probably did not know any Persian (or any

other language except his native Greek) and was forced to rely on a many local translators when travelling

in the vast multilingual Persian Empire. Herodotus did not claim to have personally seen the creatures he

described.[67][68] However Herodotus did follow up in passage 105 of Book 3, with the claim that the "ants"

are said to chase and devour full-grown camels. The details of the "ants" seem somewhat similar to the

description of the camel spider (Solifugae), which are said to chase camels, have lots of hair bristles, and

could quite easily be mistaken for ants.[citation needed] Images of camel spiders could give the impression that

this could be mistaken for a giant ant, but certainly not the size of a fox.[citation needed]

Some "calumnious fictions" were written about Herodotus in a work titled On the Malice of Herodotus,

by Plutarch, a Chaeronean by birth, (or it might have been a Pseudo-Plutarch, in this case "a great collector

of slanders"), including the allegation that the historian was prejudiced against Thebes because the

authorities there had denied him permission to set up a school. [69] Similarly, in a Corinthian Oration,Dio

Chrysostom (or yet another pseudonymous author) accused the historian of prejudice against Corinth,

sourcing it in personal bitterness over financial disappointments[70]—an account also given by Marcellinus in

his Life of Thucydides.[71] In fact Herodotus was in the habit of seeking out information from empowered

sources within communities, such as aristocrats and priests, and this also occurred at an international level,

with Periclean Athens  becoming his principal source of information about events in Greece. As a result, his

reports about Greek events are often coloured by Athenian bias against rival states—Thebes and Corinth in

particular.[72]

Although The Histories were often criticized in antiquity for bias, inaccuracy and plagiarism—Lucian of

Samosata 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—modern historians and philosophers take a more positive view of

Herodotus's methodology, especially those searching for a paradigm of objective historical writing. A few

modern scholars have argued that Herodotus exaggerated the extent of his travels and invented his

sources[73] yet his reputation continues largely intact: "The Father of History is also the father of comparative

anthropology",[18] "the father of ethnography",[74] and he is "more modern than any other ancient historian in

his approach to the ideal of total history".[75]

Herodotus and myth

It was not until the time of Herodotus that gods began to have less influence upon history that was written,

yet it was still implied because of the largely accepted view of the Greeks and the expectations that they

may have had of how The Histories would be written. History was becoming more of a “knowledge” rather

than an amusement.[76] Because of Herodotus wanting people to accept what he had to write, he

implemented stories that may have not directly correlated to gods, but rather implemented the idea that

miracles or supernatural events took place. As was the story of Arion and the dolphin. While on a boat the

men found out that Arion, who was a musician, was worth lots of money and decided to have him killed.

The crew gave him two options, that either he jump ship or they kill him on the spot. Arion flung himself into

the water and a dolphin carried him to shore.[77]

Herodotus was more concerned with putting pleasure before knowledge, unless he did not believe that the

gods had a dramatic influence on history and was rather just trying to please his audience. Like the story of

the king having his servant look upon his naked wife, and when spotting him hiding, asked him to kill her

husband.[78] This, like many stories of Herodotus, are told in great detail, and for the simplicity of dramatic

effect. This refers back to the way bards used to tell their poems or stories to their audience. Herodotus was

accused by many because of such detailed accounts, and even called a liar by some. In in his writing we

can already see that there was no direct association with gods.