Herodotus of
Halicarnassus (
Greek ???d?t?? ????a???sse?? Heródotos Halikarnasseús) was a
Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC (
c. 484 BC–
c. 425 BC) and is regarded as the "Father of
History" in Western culture. He was the first historian to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative.
[1] He is almost exclusively known for writing
The Histories, a record of his "inquiries" (or
?st???a?, a
word that passed into Latin and took on its modern meaning of
history) into the origins of the
Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BC—especially since he includes a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented, and many long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during wide-ranging travels around the lands of the
Mediterranean and
Black Sea. Although some of his stories are not completely accurate, he states that he is only reporting what has been told to him.
Much of what is known of Herodotus's life is gathered from his own work. Additional details have been garnered from the Suda, an 11th-century encyclopaedia of the Byzantium, which likely took its information from traditional accounts. It holds that he was born in Halicarnassus (Bodrum in present-day Turkey), the son of Lyxes and Dryo, and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis, an epic poet of the time. According to this account, after being exiled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lygdamis, Herodotus went to live on Samos. Later returning to the land of his birth, Herodotus took part in the ousting of Lygdamis. The traditional biography includes some time spent in Athens, where he is said to have given public readings from his oeuvre and befriended the dramatist Sophocles. It also has Herodotus joining and founding the Hellenic colony Thurii in Southern Italy in 443 BC. His death and burial are placed either at Thurii or at Pella, in Macedon, between 425 and 420 BC.
How much of this is correct we do not know. It was common practice in antiquity for the biographies of poets to be pieced together out of inferences drawn from their works. Something similar may have happened in Herodotus' case. His casting as a tyrannicide may simply reflect the pro-freedom attitude that he expresses in the Histories, whereas the stays at Samos and Athens may have been invented to explain the pro-Samian and pro-Athenian bias that has often been thought to pervade his work. His exile from Halicarnassus may also be fictional later historians, such as Thucydides and Xenophon, underwent periods of exile, and their fate may have been retrospectively imposed on Herodotus by later writers.
Herodotus provides much information concerning the nature of the world and the status of the sciences during his lifetime. He was arguably the first historian, and certainly the first to travel methodically around the known world in a bid to write more accurately, although this still involved second-hand and third-hand accounts relating to his primary subject, the Persian wars.
