Herodotus: Life and Work

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Herodotus the first Historian

On his Work, the Histories

The Selection of readings were taken from the translated work of Herodotus, a narrative that sought to explain, share, tell and record what he experienced and saw in many of his travels as a scholar in much of the Ancient World, the world of Antiquity. Known as the first Historian, much have been made on the veracity of the methods applied by Herodotus and his 9-book 'Histories', a collection of select historical data from the known world of his time. While Thucydides is seen by many as an objective & chronologically-inclined ancient Historian in his work on the Peloponnesian War, Herodotus' focus was to create an understanding of the known world during the Hellenistic period through his travels, access to various libraries from Macedonia to Egypt and a systematic manner of information gathering whereby prior to inclusion he applied methods of verification to the veracity of his sources, particularly data from the most far flung of places or data from distant past. He arranged all these in a vivid narrative, allowing the reader of his 'Histories' a colourful reincarnation of the past through his writings. Herodotus was inclined in creating 'maps', ancient representations of the known world to situate the event in question geographically. Much of the ancient world that we know today we owe to the writings of Herodotus and much of the criticism of his work stems from the very nature of it: vivid, almost firsthand accounts of ancient society that are not chronologically placed. The vivid description merits an almost ethnographical messiness to the texts, that the layering of stories allows social scientists to create patterns on the manner of Herodotus' writings providing an insight to his take on the nature of human events. One can argue that his work when read seems like some travel annals of sorts - in the selected readings he takes us to Babylon & Mesopotamia, Egypt, Scythia, Phoenicia, parts of present day Turkey, Greek territories and territories in North Africa.

Like Thucydides, he provides particular speeches & documentaries when his sources allow it for political events. Unlike Thucydides though, while Herodotus' data collection was systematic, his histories allow for Hellenistic Myth influencing some of his recollections of events. A credit can be given though to the manner by which this myths surface --- they ...