Insatiably curious, prone to whimsy, a talented writer, a slave to gossip, an innovator, a barbarian apologist, a cosmopolitan, a partisan egoist; Herodotus has been praised for and accused of much since the publication of his Histories.
He was both denigrated and venerated in his own time…and has remained so ever since.
However, it is almost as difficult to understand his legacy as it is to chronicle his life. Because, for the latter, in the words of George Rawlinson: “the data are so few…that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards”.
It was circa 484BC that Herodotus was born into a sophisticated family in the Persian-loyal city-state of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey). However, from hereon in, there is little solid evidence of the precise movements of his extraordinary life.
We know he was exiled at least once. It is possible that, with his family, he fled to the island of Samos due to conflicts with the tyrant Lygdamis. Indeed, some fancifully think Herodotus may later have returned to lead an uprising against his oppressor.

Ruins in Samos
It is likely that Herodotus experienced an unusually multicultural upbringing. Halicarnassus, originally a Greek colony, was also a key trading post with Egypt and would thus have been awash with a diversity of peoples.
Having grown up with a privileged background, a good education and a window to the outside world, it should not be surprising that Herodotus became the traveller and chronicler he did.
Visits to Egypt, Greece, Tyre, Babylon and Italy are reported with enough veracity to suggest that they really occurred – e.g. he considered Egypt an ‘opposite land’ as the Nile flooded in the summer.
Additionally, the fact that his work was known in his lifetime and was thought (by Lucian) to have been performed at the Olympic Games, indicates his contemporaries did not doubt, as some later did, that these journeys really happened.
His fame seems to have been largely to his benefit, though not quite enough to win him a citizenship vote in Athens. However, even to be considered for this was a great honor in itself.
His literary clout was respected by the tragedian Sophocles; there are echoes of The Histories in Antigone. Herodotus also received the ultimate back-handed compliment of being important and well-known enough for comic playwright Aristophanes to lampoon him in The Acharnians.

Illustration of Aristophanes
The final resting place for a famous writer of no fixed abode is almost inevitably open to dispute. The main contenders are Thurii in Southern Italy, Thurium in Macedonia or, of course, Athens. However, the notion that he was buried alongside Thucydides is fantastic in the extreme.
So why does this debate about his reputation constantly flare up? How could he manage to be of differing credibility to men like Plutarch, Strabo, Aristotle and Cicero (not to mention a host of modern scholars)?

The Histories was never fully taken on face value and never will be, but as more and more evidence builds up to vindicate Herodotus (e.g. he described Gelonus, a gigantic Scythian city which was only discovered in 1975) it becomes harder to dismiss him entirely as a fantasist, a defamer, or a fraud.
In fact, there is no logical reason to presume he was anything other than what he claimed to be, a publisher of inquiries.
So, was he the father of history or the father of lies? Well, he could simultaneously be considered both and neither.
Most problems with Herodotus arise when inspecting him from a ‘modern’ point of view. Modern in the sense that we view history as a series of hypotheses and probabilities which must be investigated, debated and, ideally, resolved. Herodotus is far detached from this, content merely to play the role of reporter. Consequently, we cast over him a patronizing and judgmental eye, an eye that isn’t compatible with his method.
Thucydides used a different ‘modern’ eye to belittle his contemporary.
Herodotus was interested in a range of human and natural characteristics as well as customs (together with their backgrounds). In contrast, Thucydides was primarily concerned with tangible facts that were directly relevant to him (i.e. politics and warfare). He considered his work historically definitive in a way Herodotus never did.
Indeed the very problem arises because of our obsession with viewing Herodotus as an historian, something he himself never claimed to be for the simple reason that the word didn’t exist! ‘History’ comes from the Latinized version of the Greek historia – ‘inquiry’.
As John P.A. Gould succinctly put it: “He nowhere claims to have been an eye witness or participant in any of the major events or battles that he describes”.
So, if not an historian, then what?
One could argue he was more of a travel writer, a chronicler of a general encyclopedia, or a journalist. Though actually calling him a novelist is perhaps a stretch too far.

Herodotus
Herodotus made it perfectly clear that he was not reporting truth or fact, but making a record of what others had told him: “I owe it to tell what is being told, but I by no means owe it to believe it”. [7.153-2]
If he were an historian, then he could only be said to have been a war, or anti-war historian. This is made clear from the preface to his work in which he states his wish to record how Greeks and non-Greeks came to strife. Thus, everything else (topography, local customs etc) becomes entertaining garnish.
And it is precisely the garnish, the tall-tales, the meandering yarns, the detailed landscapes, the curious dress and peculiar fauna, that have brought him in for such weight of attack.
However, as one man traveling in an unknown world, desperate to learn and share all it had to teach him, he is no more worthy of censure then the authors of obsolete entries in the Lonely Planet.
Modern assumptions and misinterpretation wound Herodotus. It is not up to him to justify himself to us, but up to us to read him as he wrote, without certainty, without authority, but with keen interest, enthusiasm, a willingness to think and a thirst to learn.
And, naturally, a pinch of salty skepticism.
Interested in reading the Histories by Herodotus? You can access it here for Free:
https://classicalwisdom.com/greek_books/herodotus-histories-book-i/
“Herodotus: Father of History or Father of Lies?” was written by Ben Potter
One comment
Herodotus was one of the first works I read in ancient Greek – and maybe I can offer a different perspective from what was a profoundly moving experience. To be fair, my view of him comes from Dennsion’s wonderful “Greek Prose Style”, which emphasizes that we read Greek works in translation or in tedious seminars, where the focus is on identifying and synthesizing grammatical puzzles. What a typical Greek reading class never conveys, however, is the underlying music of the texts, the idea that these texts were read aloud, to gather an audience. It always frustrated me how both Greek and Latin seminars put no emphasis on the pronunciation of ancient Greek – the altering tones, the dance of long and short syllables, the flow of vowels punctuated by the crispness of the consonants. The Greeks were word-musicians – how they sounded was as important as what they said. We forget that Greek tragedies were not plays, but musicals (although maybe the last thing you want to hear after learning you married your mom is a song). But when texts are read aloud by teachers, you often get the Boris Johnson Eton mumble when he flamboyantly quotes Classical texts – “maynin ayay-day the-aa peleyade-ow Achilley-os”. As if they were just reading an equation on a backboard.
The first thing we did when we studied Arabic was to study, carefully, as if our lives depended on it, how every consonant and every vowel was spoken. This was the language of heaven, after all. We spent a month on it, before even learning the rudiments of vocabulary and grammar. The Arabs *really* care about how things sound when they say it! As do the French, as do the Italians, as do the Indian Brahmins (they have to pronounce the Vedas with razor-sharp precision if they are to have a magical effect). But the Greeks and the Romans – who made public speaking into an art form, whose texts were as much chanted as spoken – we pretend that it really didn’t matter what they sounded like. And this, I think, is one of the reasons we tend to see them as a “museum culture” – we should learn about them and from them, but not how to feel like them, not to enter their soul. Despite modern linguistic’s insistence that all languages are equal, I just disagree. Languages change every day, because people can’t help playing with them, and this playing is part of a search for better ways to communicate, but an aesthetic search as well. I am of the Tolkien school, that languages, as the product of collective human decisions, are works of art.
The Greeks lived in the Shadow of Homer, and Homer’s influence can be greatly felt in the pages of Herodotus. There is the fate-gods-humans structure you find in Homer, where fate is unchangeable, the gods are fickle and manipulable, and humans (as long as you weren’t a woman, a slave, a person with physical disabilities, or a barbarian) must strive towards their finest despite their miserable futures. In his description of Xerxes’ armies, there’s a direct reference to the catalogue of ships, and there is a bit of a dramatic angle to how he describes his Near Eastern characters – far more lively, rich, and tragically complex than his rather wooden mainland Greeks. He grew up with them, and he understood them far more intimately than the mainlanders.
But Homer has a more subtle influence – In the same way the King James Bible lapses into iambic pentameter, Herodotus has this way of writing flowing pseudo-dactyls – rythmically balancing sequences of long vowels with short vowels in the build-up, only to culminate the phrase with a cluster of short vowels and consonants when we wants to rise to a dramatic conclusion. Greek prose, we must remember, had to compete with poetry in the earlier periods.
His tangents are annoying, although archeology seems to be confirming at least some of his observations on local cultures. His math is bad – he loves numbers with lots of zeros. A half-Easterner himself, he absorbed the Near Eastern habit of using round numbers rhetorically (as Americans do as well). Thucydides would have made sure that Xerxes a force of not one million, but 973,432.
But read him aloud. Learn to pronounce the long and short vowels properly, learn that the pitch accent isn’t just a stress, but a chance to add a note to the symphony. Feel how he uses Homer, phrases – when his dactyllic flow is interrupted with an iambic car-crash, it can stop your heart. It is opera. It’s Shakespeare and Mozart put together. The rhythms alone are a hymn to the marvelous and sometimes horrific, but always awe-inspiring complexity and wonderfulness of a world that cannot be fully understood, and the naivitee and slipups in objectivity are, at worst, endearing.
Then read Thucydides. Not the facts, not the grammar, not the tangled conspiratorial politics. There is music, the music that almost breaks out during Pericles’ speeches but is broken with a few misplaced particles. Thucydides is the story of an intelligent but arrogant civlization that talked itself into cruelty, barbarism, and its own destruction. Thucydides deliberately mangles the language because – underneath his cold exterior – he has the red-hot bitterness of a spurned lover, and he obsessively blends two thoughts together in the same phrase. Athens, his dream, betrayed him, so he betrays the language. Indeed, he explicitly notes how the conspiracies in individual cities degrade the language Herodotus was a son of Homer, Thucydides was a brother of Euripides.
But at the end, at the end of the disaster, Nicias ends with a short, biting, Herodotean zinger – “Andres far polis”.
I should not take slight at an ancient insult like “the father of lies”. But I do. Because I fell in love with Herodotus. He is the father not of lies, but of questions, of curiosity, of befuddled world-love, and of putting that love into prose music. He saw Greece not as a series of consoiracies, but as a small part of a much larger world. Whereas Pericles’, almost offhandedly, referred to Athens as the teacher of Greece, Herodotus insisted on a far more reliable teacher – the world. Not all lessons were correct – some of them were horribly obscene – but he gave Greece the choice.
And let’s remember that Shakespeare didn’t always get his facts straight either – just ask the Ricardians.
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