Herodotus

Herodotus, ‘the father of history,’ was born between 490 and 480 B.C. at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor. When the colonies were freed from the Persian yoke, he left his native town, and travelled in Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, Greece, Macedonia, the coasts of the Black Sea, Persia, Tyre, Egypt and Cyrene. In 443 B.C. the colony of Thurii was founded by Athens on the Tarentine Gulf and Herodotus joined it. From Thurii he visited Sicily and lower Italy. He died about 425 B.C. On his travels, his zeal in collecting information and making enquiries, historical, geographical, ethnological, mythological and archaeological, was extraordinary. His history was designed to record not only the wars but the causes of the wars between Greece and the barbarians. Beginning with the conquest of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor by the Lydian king Croesus, he gives a history of Lydia, and then passes to Persia, Babylon and Egypt. In books V to IX we have the history of the two Persian wars. The work of Herodotus is to the bald, brief, disconnected notes of his predecessors what the work of Homer was to the poems of his predecessors. Few writers have so many devoted friends as Herodotus counts amongst his readers – he is simple, frank, talkative, amiable and worthy of respect. For though doubts may have been expressed as to his honesty, he never says what he does not believe. He did not believe all that he was told, though he believed, sometimes, things that were not true.