Herodotus clearly writes as both historian and teller of tales. The History of Herodotus By Herodotus Written 440 B.C.E Translated by George Rawlinson New York, Penguin, 2013. changes, storing new additions in a versioning system. [78][79] Herodotus did, though, follow up in passage 105 of Book 3 with the claim that the "ants" are said to chase and devour full-grown camels. [42] Cicero (On the Laws I.5) said that his works were full of legends or "fables". ", Eventually, Thucydides and Herodotus became close enough for both to be interred in Thucydides' tomb in Athens. At the same time it is conceived that the freedom and variety of Herodotus is not always best reproduced by such severe consistency of rendering as is perhaps desirab… with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers, and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda: that of Photius[38] and Tzetzes,[39] in which a young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father, and burst into tears during the recital. line to jump to another position: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License, Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.1.0, http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1, http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001, http://data.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1. Click anywhere in the The absence of any mention of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in his work has attracted further attacks on his credibility. He probably traveled to Tyre next and then down the Euphrates to Babylon. [50] For Fehling, the sources of many stories, as reported by Herodotus, do not appear credible in themselves. However, he retains idealizing tendencies, as in his symmetrical notions of the Danube and Nile. A sizable portion of the information he provides has since been confirmed by historians and archaeologists. [66][61] Fehling states that "there is not the slightest bit of history behind the whole story" about the claim of Herodotus that Pharaoh Sesostris campaigned in Europe, and that he left a colony in Colchia. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks. In Homer's case, "who set these two at each other's throats?" [8], But Hecataeus did not record events that had occurred in living memory, unlike Herodotus, nor did he include the oral traditions of Greek history within the larger framework of oriental history. This is a somewhat more serious subreddit compared to many others. "[84], Herodotus at times relates various accounts of the same story. However, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naïve, often charming – all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself.[3]. Despite Herodotus's historical significance, little is known about his personal life. [96], Some authors, including Geoffrey de Ste-Croix and Mabel Lang, have argued that Fate, or the belief that "this is how it had to be," is Herodotus's ultimate understanding of causality. [74] His accounts of India are among the oldest records of Indian civilization by an outsider.[75][76][77]. For some reason, possibly associated with local politics, he subsequently found himself unpopular in Halicarnassus, and sometime around 447 BC, migrated to Periclean Athens – a city whose people and democratic institutions he openly admires (V, 78). As a result, his reports about Greek events are often coloured by Athenian bias against rival states – Thebes and Corinth in particular. Herodotus, The Histories A. D. Godley, Ed. His familiarity with Athenian tragedy is demonstrated in a number of passages echoing Aeschylus's Persae, including the epigrammatic observation that the defeat of the Persian navy at Salamis caused the defeat of the land army (Histories 8.68 ~ Persae 728). [104] For Herodotus, then, it takes both myth and history to produce truthful understanding. He lays this out in the preamble: "This is the publication of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that the actions of people shall not fade with time, so that the great and admirable achievements of both Greeks and barbarians shall not go unrenowned, and, among other things, to set forth the reasons why they waged war on each other."[90]. [36] According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian,[37] Herodotus refused to begin reading his work at the festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade – by which time the assembly had dispersed. It was, therefore, an outward-looking, international-minded port within the Persian Empire, and the historian's family could well have had contacts in other countries under Persian rule, facilitating his travels and his researches. [80] Similarly, in a Corinthian Oration, Dio Chrysostom (or yet another pseudonymous author) accused the historian of prejudice against Corinth, sourcing it in personal bitterness over financial disappointments[81] – an account also given by Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides. I'm quite partial to the Landmark edition. [78] In Book 3, passages 102 to 105, Herodotus reports that a species of fox-sized, furry "ants" lives in one of the far eastern, South Asian provinces of the Persian Empire. For Aubin, Herodotus was "the author of the first important narrative history of the world. "[58] German historian Detlev Fehling questions whether Herodotus ever traveled up the Nile River, and considers doubtful almost everything that he says about Egypt and Ethiopia. Kenton L. Sparks writes, "In antiquity, Herodotus had acquired the reputation of being unreliable, biased, parsimonious in his praise of heroes, and mendacious". [71], British egyptologist Derek A. Welsby said that "archaeology graphically confirms Herodotus's observations. Good translation and it has handy maps. Boedeker concurs that much of the content of the works of Herodotus are literary devices. Gould argues to the contrary that this is likely because Herodotus attempts to provide the rational reasons, as understood by his contemporaries, rather than providing more abstract reasons. The historian Duris of Samos called Herodotus a "myth-monger". This points forward to the "folksy" yet "international" outlook typical of Herodotus. Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text. Amazon.com. [82] In fact, Herodotus was in the habit of seeking out information from empowered sources within communities, such as aristocrats and priests, and this also occurred at an international level, with Periclean Athens becoming his principal source of information about events in Greece. This work is licensed under a 1920. Feel free to submit interesting articles, tell us about this cool book you just read, or start a discussion about who everyone's favorite figure of minor French nobility is! Possibly he died in Macedonia instead, after obtaining the patronage of the court there; or else he died back in Thurium. These are not perceived as mutually exclusive, but rather mutually interconnected. Although Herodotus considered his "inquiries" a serious pursuit of knowledge, he was not above relating entertaining tales derived from the collective body of myth, but he did so judiciously with regard for his historical method, by corroborating the stories through enquiry and testing their probability. Herodotus mentions Hecataeus in his Histories, on one occasion mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his handling of their national history. The intellectual matrix of the 5th century, Marincola suggests, comprised many oral performances in which philosophers would dramatically recite such detachable pieces of their work. However, one modern scholar has described the work of Hecataeus as "a curious false start to history,"[5] since despite his critical spirit, he failed to liberate history from myth. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. [51], Like many ancient historians, Herodotus preferred an element of show[c] to purely analytic history, aiming to give pleasure with "exciting events, great dramas, bizarre exotica. For example, he reports that the annual flooding of the Nile was said to be the result of melting snows far to the south, and he comments that he cannot understand how there can be snow in Africa, the hottest part of the known world, offering an elaborate explanation based on the way that desert winds affect the passage of the Sun over this part of the world (2:18ff). ("Agamemnon", "Hom. The Suda also informs us that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. Your current position in the text is marked in blue. The aim of the translator has been above all things faithfulness—faithfulness to the manner of expression and to the structure of sentences, as well as to the meaning of the Author. In fact, one modern scholar[18] has wondered if Herodotus left his home in Greek Anatolia, migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at one of his three supposed resting places, Thuria: Herodotus the son of Sphynx The accuracy of the works of Herodotus has been controversial since his own era. In his introduction to Hecataeus' work, Genealogies: Hecataeus the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem true to me; for the stories told by the Greeks are various and in my opinion absurd. Make sure to familiarize yourself with our rules and guidelines before participating. This is true of Greek thinking in general, at least from Homer onward. [31] Further, the Suda is the only source which we have for the role played by Herodotus as the heroic liberator of his birthplace. This tragic discovery can be seen in Homer's Iliad as well. Herodotus announced the purpose and scope of his work at the beginning of his Histories: Aristotle refers to a version of The Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium," and some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about southern Italy from personal experience there (IV, 15,99; VI, 127). [44][45] The Alexandrian grammarian Harpocration wrote a whole book on "the lies of Herodotus". "[16][17] Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. Detlev Fehling writes of "a problem recognized by everybody", namely that Herodotus frequently cannot be taken at face value. Thus to understand what Herodotus is doing in the Histories, we must not impose strict demarcations between the man as mythologist and the man as historian, or between the work as myth and the work as history. Od. This page was last edited on 19 October 2020, at 21:43.

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