This is an analysis of the writer Herodotus himself and the background and context that led to his account The Histories. I’m going to be adding to it over the coming weeks, so it might be worthwhile to check on it for any updates every now and then 🙂
Herodotus of Halicarnassus was an Ancient Greek writer who wrote The Histories, a long and detailed account that focused primarily on the Greco-Persian Wars. This work embodied a culmination of earlier forms of narrative as well as becoming a forerunner of writing styles after his death.
Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus in modern-day Turkey, which was a Greek city-state within the Persian Empire at the time of his birth in around 485 BC. In the Histories, Herodotus claimed that he “travelled widely,” and scholars have since uncovered the truth of this statement. He was once exiled to the island of Samos, possibly due to his alleged participation in an uprising against a new ruler of Halicarnassus, a man called Lygdamis, after it became a Persian satrapy during the 6th Century BC. We can also safely assume that, at some point in his lifetime, Herodotus travelled to Athens where he lived and worked for an unknown period of time. Scholars have come to presume this due to the precise and detailed nature of his descriptions of Athens in The Histories, which would require a certain degree of familiarity with the city-state. It is also believed that he travelled to Egypt too, as so much of the Histories centres there; Herodotus may have found travelling around that country the most interesting as it was so culturally different from his homeland. It is known that Herodotus died in Thurii, a colony which it is thought he may have founded himself, in around the 420s BC.
The title of Herodotus’ work is a little ambiguous, and so it is worth noting the difference between some interpretations of the word “history”. If one is talking about the history of Britain, they mean the collection of events that occurred in Britain. But if one were to write a book called A History of Britain, the History involved is the account of the events. In Herodotus’ case, his Histories is an account of past events, not the actual events themselves.
Through a term coined by Cicero, Herodotus has come to be known as the Father of History. He not only documented the events of the recent human past (“recent” in relevance to his own time period), but went to great lengths to explain their causes, often going centuries back into the past to link historical events. As aforementioned, his account tended to focus on the Greco-Persian Wars, which were two Persian invasions of Greece in the years 480 and 490 BC. At the time of these invasions, Greece was not one united nation, but a collection of poleis, or city-states. Each polis had only a few thousand people in it, with an occasional maximum of a few hundred thousand. It is remarkable that these poleis united as one force to fight off against the Persians, as they were not strangers to hostility and battles among themselves. The only factors that unified the city-states in times of peace were their cultural similarities; they all believed in the same gods, spoke the same language (but often with different dialects), and were architecturally similar as well. However, their governments were often very different; for example, while Athens was a democracy, Sparta was an oligarchy.
Herodotus was a contemporary of many other great thinkers and writers. It is rumoured that he may have even been friends with the philosopher Socrates. Many of these people were influenced by an event known today as the Ionian Enlightenment, or a period which the region of Ionia underwent in the 6th Century BC, characterised by an advance in scientific thought and explanations on nature and natural phenomena.
Herodotus would have also been greatly influenced by the cultural and intellectual centre of Ancient Greece that was the polis Athens. In the 5th Century BC, Athens embodied the heart of Greek culture, with its significant advances in education and teaching, warfare and government.
When Herodotus was writing his Histories, there was no such word as history. Instead, in the opening sentence, Herodotus describes his account as his “inquiry”, or collection of “research” depending on how you want to translate the Greek. He was the first of many Ancient Greek writers to combine three types of narrative─ethnography, geography and mythography─into his Histories. He covered the culture of the people in foreign lands in the ethnographical side of his work; he documented the topography of certain areas in the geographical features; and he also mentioned many myths as a way to explain the causes of certain historical events.
Indeed, the first sentence of Herodotus’ Histories is a crucial aspect of the book to consider. In it, he sets out his intentions in writing the account: he intends to make sure that noteworthy events will not be forgotten, or “faded,” as he puts it; that the accomplishments of both Greeks and non-Greeks will not lose their glory, or the Homer-famed “kleos”; and lastly, he intends to find out and document the reasons that the Persians and the Greeks went to war with each other.
