Histories

Often called the first work of history in the Western tradition, Herodotus's Histories combine an account of the Persian Wars with an enormous digressive survey of the customs, geography, and legends of Egypt, Persia, Scythia, and beyond. Herodotus left his native Halicarnassus as a young man, gave public readings of his developing work at Athens in the 440s BC, and later joined the Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii in southern Italy around 444/443 BC; mainstream scholarship places the Histories' composition across these Athenian and Thurian years, not at his birthplace. Herodotus explicitly sets out to preserve great deeds from oblivion and to explain the cause of the conflict between Greeks and Persians, mixing eyewitness inquiry with reported legend and openly flagging his own doubts about his sources.

The work, later divided by Alexandrian editors into nine books each named for one of the Muses, moves outward from a single question, why did Greeks and Persians go to war, into an ever-widening account of the Persian empire's expansion under Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius, pausing at length over the customs and antiquities of each people it absorbs: a long digression on Egypt, its geography, religion, and the building of the pyramids, another on the nomadic Scythians and their unconquerable steppe, others on Lydia, Babylon, and Libya. Only in the later books does the narrative narrow to the wars themselves, Darius's failed invasion and defeat at Marathon in 490 BC, then Xerxes's massive second invasion a decade later, turned back at Thermopylae, Salamis, and finally Plataea, battles Herodotus treats less as Greek military genius alone than as a study in how a vast, centrally commanded empire can be undone by smaller, more improvisational city-states fighting for their own soil.

Herodotus's method, which he calls historia, inquiry or research, rests on travel, interviews with priests, guides, and local informants, and his own autopsy, seeing things himself, though he freely reports secondhand and often fantastical stories alongside verified observation, marking the boundary with phrases amounting to 'this is what I was told, and I do not necessarily believe it.' His curiosity about non-Greek peoples, treated with an even-handedness unusual for the period rather than as objects of contempt, drew both praise and suspicion in antiquity, Cicero called him the father of history, while other ancient critics, doubting his tall tales, called him the father of lies. Whatever the balance of legend and evidence in any given passage, the Histories established narrative history as a distinct genre, gave Thucydides an explicit model to react against and refine, and remains, alongside its wealth of dubious anecdote, an irreplaceable source for the peoples and events of the fifth-century-BC Mediterranean and Near East.