Histories

Front Cover
Wordsworth Editions, 1996 - 734 pages

Translated with Notes by George Rawlinson. With an Introduction by Tom Griffith.

Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining.

Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the Battle of Salamis fought between sausage-sellers? Which is the oldest language in the world? Why did Leonidas and his 300 Spartans spend the morning before the battle of Thermopylae combing their hair? Why did every Babylonian woman have to sit in the Temple of Aphrodite until a man threw a coin into her lap, and how long was she likely to sit there? And what is the best way to kill a crocodile?

This wide-ranging history provides the answers to all these fascinating questions as well as providing many fascinating insights into the Ancient World.

From inside the book

Contents

BOOK ONE CLIO
3
Chapters 13 Causes of quarrel between Persia and Egypt Nitetis story
4
Xerxes urged to attack Greece
6
Address of the Athenian envoys
8
Coës and Histiaeus rewarded
9
of the other troops
28
Chapters 4243 Universal geography Circumnavigation of Libya
44
oracles
46
Chapters 6470 Demaratus deprived of his crown flies to Persia
71
Chapter 7375 Athenian most distinguished Sophanes his conduct and fate
76
Divination
82
Chapters 103104 Proceedings of Xerxes
105
Story of a Thracian king
116
Artembares and Cyrus
122
Course of the fleet
124
Patriotic conduct of the Athenians the Athenians
139

Chapters 7475 Fate of Prexaspes
50
The Hypanis
52
Greeks resolve to sail to the Isthmus
56
The Arians Parthians
67
Chapters 6567 Sacred animals
68
Greeks occupy the defile of Tempe
173
BOOK FOUR MELPOMENE
305
BOOK SEVEN POLYHYMNIA
511
BOOK NINE CALLIOPE
677
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About the author (1996)

Herodotus was the inventor of universal history. Often called the Father of History, his histories are divided into nine books named after the nine muses. A native of Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Bodrum, Turkey), he traveled extensively, writing lively descriptions of the lands he saw and the peoples he encountered. Herodotus set out to relate the story of the conflict of the Greeks of his own time against the "barbarian" Asiatic empire of Achaemenid Persia. His long narrative, titled by modern convention The Histories, begins with the earliest traditions he believed reliable. It ends with a highly colored account of the defeat of the Persian emperor Xerxes and his immense army of slaves by a much smaller number of Greeks fighting to preserve their freedom. Herodotus wrote history, but his methods and assumptions were not those of a modern historian, and his work was unjustly rejected by his successor Thucydides as factually highly unreliable and full of inappropriate romance. By his own admission, Herodotus retold the stories of other peoples without necessarily believing them all. This allowed him total artistic freedom and control to create a picture of the world that corresponded entirely to his own view of it. The result is a picture of Herodotus's world that is also a picture of his mind and, therefore, of many other Greek minds during the period known as "late Archaic." During this period, the Greek mind was dominated by reason, the domain of the first philosophers and the observant and thoughtful medical theorists of the Hippocratic school. Traditional beliefs in the gods of Homer and in their Oracles, especially the Oracle at Delphi, also dominated during this period. The literary genius of Herodotus consisted in the art of the storyteller. The stories he chose to tell, and the order in which he told them, provide his readers with a total view of his world and the way in which the will of the gods and the ambitions of humans interacted to produce what is known as history. For this reason the ancient critic Longinus justly called Herodotus "the most Homeric of all authors." Like Homer, Herodotus strove to understand the world theologically---a goal that makes his work difficult for the reader to understand at first. But, in place of Homer's divine inspiration, Herodotus used his eyes and ears and wrote not poetry but prose. Rejecting what is commonly known as myth, he accepted instead "oral tradition" about remembered events. For example, although he believed that the Trojan War had been fought, he could not investigate it beyond what the poets had said. In his view this "ancient history" of the Greeks and the peoples of Asia was not like contemporary history, because the heroes of old who had created it were beings of a different and superior order who had had a different, direct, and personal relationship with the gods. In recognizing this distinction, Herodotus defined for all time the limits of the historian's discipline.

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