Herodotus

Ancient Greek · 484 BCE to 425 BCE

Born around 484 BCE in Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, in present-day Bodrum, Turkey, Herodotus came of age under Persian rule, in a port where Greek, Carian, and Persian worlds met daily. His family was prominent, and a relative, the epic poet Panyassis, was executed by the local tyrant Lygdamis, after which the young Herodotus went into exile on the island of Samos. He became a traveler of extraordinary range, reaching Egypt, Babylon, the cities of the Black Sea coast, and the towns of the Greek mainland, gathering what he saw with his own eyes and what he was told by others. Out of these journeys came The Histories, the earliest surviving work of narrative history in the Western tradition, a long account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire that climaxes at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis. He opened by declaring his purpose, to preserve the memory of great deeds and to ask why the two peoples came to blows, and the word he used for his enterprise, historie, meaning inquiry, gave the discipline its name. He digressed magnificently, into Egyptian embalming, Scythian burial rites, the courtship of Babylon, and the gold-digging ants of India, and his appetite for marvels earned him the title Father of History from Cicero and, from later skeptics, Father of Lies. He is said to have given public readings of his work at Athens and to have settled at the colony of Thurii in southern Italy. He died around 425 BCE, probably at Thurii, in his late fifties, leaving a book that has never left the conversation it began.