Herodotus — The Histories

notes

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 BCE), called "the Father of History" by Cicero, produced in his Histories the earliest surviving substantial work of Greek prose and the founding document of Western historiography. His subject is the Greco-Persian Wars — the conflict between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states that reached its climax at Marathon (490 BCE), Thermopylae (480 BCE), Salamis (480 BCE), and Plataea (479 BCE) — but around this central axis he built an encyclopaedic account of the customs, geographies, and mythologies of Egypt, Persia, Scythia, and half of the known world. Herodotus's method was novel and would define his successors: to travel, to inquire (historia in Greek meant "inquiry"), to preserve what he learned even where he did not believe it ("I am obliged to record what I am told; but I am not obliged to believe it, and this remark applies to my whole narrative"). The narratives excerpted here — Candaules and Gyges (Book I), Solon and Croesus (Book I), Xerxes lashing the Hellespont and weeping over his host (Book VII), and Thermopylae (Book VII) — are among the most-quoted passages in ancient literature. Solon's warning to count no man happy until he is dead became a touchstone of Greek tragedy; the epitaph of the Three Hundred was quoted by Cicero in Latin and remains inscribed on the modern monument at Thermopylae. Translation: George Rawlinson, "The History of Herodotus," 4 vols., London: John Murray, 1858–1860. Public domain.

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