Herodotus of Halicarnassus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (/hɨˈrɒdətəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Hēródotos, pronounced [hɛː.ró.do.tos]) was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–425 BC). Widely referred to as "The Father of History" in Western culture. He 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. He is exclusively known for writing The Histories, a record of his "inquiries" (or ἱστορίαι, a word that passed into Latin and took on its modern meaning 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. Although some of his stories were not completely accurate, he claimed that he was reporting only what had been told to him.

The Histories

The Histories, otherwise known as The Researches or The Inquiries, were divided by Alexandrian editors into nine books, named after the nine Muses - the "Muse of History", Clio, representing the first book, followed by Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania and Calliope for books 2-9 respectively. At its simplest and broadest level of meaning, The Histories is structured as a dynastic history of four Persian kings:

• Cyrus between 557-530 BC: Book 1;
• Cambyses between 530-522 BC: Book 2 and part of Book 3;
• Darius between 521-486 BC: the rest of Book 3 then Books 4,5,6;
• Xerxes between 486-479 BC: Books 7, 8, 9.

Within this basic structure, the author traces the way the Persians developed a custom of conquest and he shows how their habits of thinking about the world finally brought about their downfall in Greece. However, this central theme is often merely a background to a broad range of inquiries and, as Herodotus himself observes, "Digressions are part of my plan" (Book 4, 30). The digressions can be understood to cover two themes: an account of the history of the entire, known world as governed by the principle of reciprocity (or what today might be more commonly called an an eye for an eye and one good turn deserves another); and an account of the many astonishing reports and sights gained by the author during his extensive travels. In an age when philosophers increasingly sought to understand the world according to basic principles, Herodotus's method of enquiry presents a world where everything is potentially important. Sometimes he seems not to discriminate carefully between fact and fiction and, as shown in the next section, this has bedevilled his reputation.

His place in history

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

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.

The extent of his own achievement has been debated ever since. 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, temple and civic records, sometimes melodramatic and naive, often charming - all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself. Hecataeus of Miletus is the best known of his predecessors. Only fragments of his work survive (and the authenticity of these is debatable) yet they allow us glimpses into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories, as for example in the introduction to Hecataeus's work, Genealogies:

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.

This clearly points forward to the 'folksy' yet 'international' outlook typical of Herodotus and yet one modern scholar, reading between the lines, has described the work of Hecataeus as "a curious false start to history" because, in spite of its critical spirit, it still failed to liberate history from myth. Herodotus actually mentions Hecataeus in his Histories, on one occasion mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his predecessor over his handling of Athenian history. It is possible that Herodotus borrowed a lot of material from Hecataeus, as stated by Porphyry in a quote recorded by Eusebius yet there is no proof that he derived the ambitious scope of his own work, with its grand theme of civilizations in conflict, from any predecessor, known or unknown, despite a lot of scholarly speculation about this in modern times.

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 - Homer in particular provided Herodotus with inspiration for writing history on an epic scale.

"In the scheme and plan of his work, in the arrangement and order of its parts, in the tone and character of the thoughts, in ten thousand little expressions and words, the Homeric student appears." - George Rawlinson

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, and these are compiled by Herodotus in an entertaining style and format. 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'. Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact one modern scholar 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 Lyxes here

Lies; in Ionic history without peer;

A Dorian born, who fled from Slander's brand

And made in Thuria his new native land.

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, produced The Acharnians, in which he blames The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes - a mocking reference to Herodotus, who traced the origin of The Persian Wars to the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea and Helen. Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a 'logos-writer' or story-teller. 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 disguize) his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed an historical topic more in keeping with the Greek lifestyle - the polis or city-state - whereas the interplay of civilizations had been a topic more relevant to Asiatic Greeks(such as Herodotus himself), for whom life under foreign rule had been a recent memory.

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 yet his reputation continues largely intact: "The Father of History is also the father of comparative anthropology", "the father of ethnography" and he is "more modern than any other ancient historian in his approach to the ideal of total history."

Life of Herodotus...

As told by other 'liars'

As mentioned earlier, Herodotus has sometimes been labeled 'The Father of Lies' due to his tendency to report fanciful information. Much of the information that others subsequently reported about him is just as fanciful, some of it is vindictive and some of it is blatantly absurd, yet it is interesting and therefore worth reporting: Herodotus himself reported dubious information if it was interesting, sometimes adding his own opinion about its reliability.

Plutarch, a Theban by birth, once composed a "great collection of slanders" against Herodotus, titled On the Malignity of Herodotus, including the allegation that the historian was prejudiced against Thebes because the authorities there had denied him permission to set up a school. Dio Chrysostom similarly attributed prejudice against Corinth to the historian's bitterness over financial disappointments, an account supported by Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides. 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. Thus the accounts given by Plutarch and Chrysostom may be regarded as 'pay-back'.

Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda (an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which likely 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 ssume like the Suda that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. 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.

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.. According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian, 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 any man who misses his 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 and Tzetzes, 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. According to the Suda, he was buried in Macedonian Pella and in the agora in Thurium.. According to Ptolemaeus Hephaestion, otherwise known as Ptolemaeus Chennus, as cited in the Bibliotheca of Photius, Herodotus's only surviving heir was his eromenos, a Thessalian hymnographer named Plesirrhous ("Καὶ ὡς Πλησίρροος ὁ Θεσσαλὸς ὁ ὑμνογράφος, ἐρώμενος γεγονὼς Ἡροδότου καὶ κληρονόμος τῶν αὐτοῦ") - who is also reported by the same source to have killed himself while Herodotus was still writing his Histories..

As told by other historians

Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life, very carefully supplemented with other 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.

Typically modern accounts of his life 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.

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 to Eusebius and Plutarch, 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 the Histories 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. Either way, there is nothing in the Histories that can be dated with any certainty later than 430 and it is generally assumed that he died not long afterwards, possibly before his sixtieth year.

Intriguing information and recent discoveries

“

Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

”

Herodotus provides a lot of intriguing information concerning the nature of the world and the status of the sciences during his lifetime, often engaging in private speculation.

He reports, for example, that the annual flooding of the Nile was 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.

Discoveries made since the end of the 19th century have added to 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 extensive credibility to Herodotus's previously unsupported claim that Heracleion was founded under the Egyptian New Kingdom.

One of the most recent developments in Herodotus scholarship was made by the French ethnologist Michel Peissel. On his journeys to India and Pakistan, Peissel claims to have discovered an animal species that may finally illuminate one of the most "bizarre" passages in Herodotus's Histories. 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 fine gold 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. Now, Peissel says that in an isolated region of Pakistan, in the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir that is known as the Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA), on the Deosai Plateau there exists a species of marmot, (the Himalayan Marmot), (a type of burrowing squirrel) that may solve the mystery of Herodotus' 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. The story seems to have been widespread in the ancient world, later authors like Pliny the Elder mentioning it in his gold mining section of the Naturalis Historia.

Even more tantalizing, in his book, "The Ants' Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the Himalayas", Peissel offers the theory that Herodotus may have become confused because the old Persian word for "marmot" was quite similar to that for "mountain ant". Because research suggests that Herodotus probably did not know any Persian (or any other language except his native Greek), he was forced to rely on a multitude of local translators when travelling in the vast multilingual Persian Empire. Therefore, he may have been the unwitting victim of a simple misunderstanding in translation. (It is also important to realize that Herodotus never claims to have himself seen these "ants/marmot" creatures—he may have been dutifully reporting what other travellers were telling him, no matter how bizarre or unlikely he personally may have found it to be. In an age when most of the world was still mysterious and unknown and before the modern science of biology, the existence of a "giant ant" may not have seemed so far-fetched.) The suggestion that he completely made up the tale may continue to be thrown into doubt as more research is conducted.

However, it must be noted that this theory of the marmots fails to take into consideration Herodotus's own follow-up in passage 105 of Book 3, wherein the "ants/marmots" are said to chase and devour full-grown camels; nevertheless, this could also be explained as an example of a tall tale or legend told by the local tribes to frighten foreigners from seeking this relatively easy access to gold dust. On the other hand, the details of the "ants" seem somewhat similar to the description of the camel spider (Solifugae), which strictly speaking is not a spider and is even sometimes called a "wind scorpion". Camel spiders are said to chase camels (they can run up to 10mph), they have lots of hair bristles, and they could quite easily be mistaken for ants given their rather bizarre appearance. And as has been noted by some, on account of the fear factor of encountering one, there have been "many myths and exaggerations about their size". 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.

See also

• Category:Historians
• Ancient Greece‎

Translations

• Several English translations of The Histories of Herodotus are readily available in multiple editions. The most readily available are those translated by:
  • C.E. 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.
  • 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.
  • Aubrey de Sélincourt, originally 1954; revised by John Marincola in 1996. Several editions from Penguin Books available.
  • Strassler, Robert B., (ed.), and Purvis, Andrea L. (trans.), The Landmark Herodotus, Pantheon, 2007. ISBN 978-0-37542109-9 with adequate ancillary information.
  • Robin Waterfield, with an Introduction and Notes by Carolyn Dewald, Oxford World Classics, 1997.

Bibliography

• Bakker, Egbert e.a. (eds.), Brill's Companion to Herodotus. Leiden: Brill, 2002
• Dewald, Carolyn, and John Marincola, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006.
• Evans, J. A. S., Herodotus. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
• —. Herodotus, Explorer of the Past: Three Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• Flory, Stewart, The Archaic Smile of Herodotus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.
• Fornara, Charles W. Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
• Harrington, John W., To See a World. C. V. Mosby Company, 1973. Harrington explored Herodotus's deduction that deltas, including Egypt's, were deposited over a great period of time.
• Hartog, F., "The Invention of History: From Homer to Herodotus". Wesleyan University, 2000. In History and Theory 39, 2000.
• 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.
• Kapuscinski, Ryszard, "Travels with Herodotus". New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf, 2007.
• Lateiner, D., The Historical Method of Herodotus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.
• Marozzi, Justin, The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus. London: John Murray, 2008.
• 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 persuasion. 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 978-0002725149.

External links

• Herodotus at About.com
• A reconstructed portrait of Herodotus, 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"
• Mendelsohn, Daniel (2008-04-28). Arms and the Man. The New Yorker. Retrieved on 2008-04-27.

• 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