Who was Herodotus?

Halicarnassus had a history of looking outward. Herodotus notes that the city had broken off close ties with its fellow Dorian neighbours after a quarrel, and that it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt. Such connections likely gave his family contacts across the Persian world that made his later travels and research possible. His own writing shows that he visited Egypt, apparently travelling there alongside Athenians, probably sometime after 454 BC, following an Athenian fleet's involvement in a rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt a few years earlier. From there he is believed to have gone to Tyre and then down the Euphrates River to Babylon, gathering firsthand observations as he went.

At some point, for reasons that may have involved local politics in his home city, Herodotus fell out of favour in Halicarnassus. Around 447 BC he moved to Athens during the height of its power under Pericles, a city whose people and democratic government he praised openly in his writing. While in Athens he grew familiar with its layout and streets, and came to know prominent citizens, including members of the Alcmaeonid family, whose history features repeatedly in his work. According to the later writer Plutarch, drawing on the historian Diyllus, the Athenian assembly rewarded Herodotus financially for his work, granting him ten talents.

Around 443 BC, or shortly after, Herodotus joined an Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii, located in modern Calabria in southern Italy. Aristotle later referred to a version of the Histories attributed to "Herodotus of Thurium," and parts of the text have been read as evidence that he wrote certain passages about the region from direct personal experience there. A later source, Ptolemaeus Chennus, preserved through the Byzantine scholar Photius, claims that a Thessalian hymn writer named Plesirrhous was both a companion and heir of Herodotus, which has led some historians to conclude that Herodotus had no children of his own.

Details within the Histories concerning the early years of the Peloponnesian War suggest Herodotus may have returned to Athens later in life, possibly dying there during a plague outbreak. Other accounts place his death in Macedonia, where he may have found a patron at the royal court, or back in Thurii itself. Nothing in his surviving work can be dated with confidence past 430 BC, so he is generally thought to have died not long after, likely before reaching sixty years of age. Later tradition held that his remains rested alongside those of the historian Thucydides in Athens, while the Suda instead places his grave in Macedonian Pella and in the public square of Thurii.

Herodotus opened his Histories by explaining his purpose plainly: to preserve the memory of great and remarkable deeds, both Greek and non-Greek, before time erased them, and in particular to explain the causes of conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks. The work covers the Greco-Persian Wars in detail, including the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, while also following the rise of the Achaemenid dynasty founded by Cyrus. Alongside the military narrative, Herodotus regularly turns aside to describe the customs, geography, and history of the many peoples he discusses, and these digressions form a central part of what makes the work distinctive.

In Herodotus's time, authors typically made their work public by reciting it aloud at festivals rather than through written circulation. The writer Lucian claimed Herodotus carried his finished Histories to the Olympic Games and read the whole work aloud to the crowd in a single sitting, earning great applause. A different ancient account says he refused to begin his reading until clouds provided shade, by which point the audience had already left, giving rise to a proverb about missing an opportunity through delay. The Suda preserves yet another version in which a young Thucydides, present with his father, wept during the recitation, prompting Herodotus to remark that the boy's soul yearned for knowledge.

The Roman orator Cicero later gave Herodotus the title by which he is still known, the Father of History, recognising that his work represented the first surviving attempt by a Greek writer to treat the interaction of civilisations as a subject worthy of extended study. Before the Persian Wars, Greek historical memory had largely consisted of local and family traditions, and Herodotus was among the first to treat the shared struggle against Persia as a story bigger than any single city.

Not everyone was impressed. His own contemporaries sometimes mocked him, and the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes referenced him mockingly in his play The Acharnians, poking fun at the idea that the abduction of women lay behind great wars, a jab at Herodotus's retelling of Persian accounts tracing conflict back to the mythical abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. The historian Thucydides, trained in rhetoric and more narrowly focused on the political life of individual city-states, dismissed Herodotus as a mere teller of tales and avoided his digressive style in his own history of the Peloponnesian War.

Herodotus has long been branded the Father of Lies by critics troubled by his inclusion of legends, folk tales, and fanciful stories alongside verified events. The philosopher Giambattista Vico later wrote that although Herodotus carried the title of father of Greek history, his books were largely filled with myths and bore strong traces of Homeric storytelling. Herodotus answered such doubts simply, saying that he reported what he had seen himself and what he had been told by others, leaving judgment about the truth of each account to his readers.