The Histories (Penguin Classics)

Great book and a pleasure to read. Not the type of book that puts you to sleep; I actually read this as part of a pick-me-up or stimulant (very entertaining - no need for coffee) before I start off on my other reading

Although Herodotus' Histories is ostensibly the story of the Great Persian War fought early in the 5th century BCE it covers so much territory in the fields of geography, ethnography, history, climate, etc., etc. that it might well be considered to be the world's first encyclopedia. Herodotus' interests were wide ranging and he tells us that he has personally travelled to many foreign countries such as Egypt and Babylonia in order to collect data for his book. As he states himself, the purpose of his journeys was so that "human achievements may not be forgotten in time". So Herodotus was perhaps the first world traveler and he set us on the path of all the tourists who were to come in later ages. Although the main period of interest in the Histories is from the establishment of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great in 559 BCE until the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE where the Persian forces were utterly routed and although he covers this historical period in depth I got the feeling when reading the book that he was a bit bored by the topic and he never missed an opportunity for a diversion. So there are lots of anecdotal stories thrown into the main plot. The earlier of the nine books deal with the history and geography of the main countries during Herodotus' day. There is extensive coverage of Egypt along with Babylonia and Persia. Frequently Herodotus just reports the stories which he has been told during his travels and he seldom expresses any incredulity. He has been faulted for that by later authors but we must remember that in most cases Herodotus had no way to validate the stories he was being told. In some cases the stories are so unbelievable that even Herodotus refuses to believe them and he says so. For example, he doesn't believe in the race of one-eyed men called the Arimaspians who are said to live in the far north. At other times he expresses gullibility such as when he claims to have actually seen the remains of winged snakes who fly across the Red Sea to Egypt. But there were a lot of things he got right such as his claim that the inland desert regions of Libya (i.e., Africa) stretch all the way to the Pillars of Heracles (i.e., Strait of Gibraltar) as we know the Sahara desert does. He knows that the Caspian Sea is a lake bounded on all sides, something that later Greek and Roman geographers forgot about. Those things he doesn't know and couldn't find any information about, Herodotus flatly states outright such as his ignorance concerning the source of the Nile River. So for his era, and given the paucity of good information, he got more things right than he got wrong. Herodotus' coverage of the Persian War is interesting in itself. There are certain facts that have been greatly exaggerated such as his claim that the army of Xerxes that invaded Greece in 480 BCE had 1.7 million soldiers which is ten times the amount of Allied soldiers who landed on D-Day in World War II. There is simply no way that an army of that size could have been fielded in antiquity although scholars are not certain of the army's true size. ~100,000 seems like a more reasonable estimate. At the final battle of Plataea, Herodotus says that the Persians lost 297,000 men while the Spartans lost only 91 and the Athenians only 52. I think we can take those statistics with a big grain of salt. The details of the major battles are surprisingly thin. One would have thought that Herodotus would have had access to more eyewitness testimony than actually shows up in his book. For example, for the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE Herodotus simply has the Athenians rushing the Persians and overwhelming them, capturing 7 of their ships. I'm sure it must have been more complicated than that, but we are left with few of the nitty gritty details. Herodotus also takes, what to modern sensibilities, seems like a peculiar attitude towards oracles and divinations. All parties in the book seem to use oracles and other methods of divination in order to determine the will of the gods. Herodotus instinctively believes in the correctness of oracles, especially the Oracle at Delphi. He makes it seem like all of the Delphic oracular pronouncements turned out to be correct. The Delphic responses may be obscure or even ambiguous but Herodotus seems to have an unshakeable belief that they are always correct. Perhaps their recipients misinterpret their meaning such as in the case of the Lydian king Croesus, but they always can be interpreted correctly to predict actual future events. Thus, when the Athenians are told that safety lies behind a wooden wall it is Themistocles who correctly interprets this Delphic pronouncement to mean they should rely on their navy. Even the Persians are portrayed as intensely superstitious with King Xerxes launching his invasion of Greece only because he has been told to do so by a figure in a dream. Today billions of people pray daily to some deity but imagine a world in which the deity communicates back to you. Such was the world of the Oracle at Delphi and both the Greeks and the barbarians took it very seriously. This was the case despite the fact that Herodotus informs us that on a number of occasions the high priestess at Delphi accepted bribes to respond in some specified fashion to certain questions. It's difficult for us to assess what influence these various oracles had on the outcome of history but it may have been sizable. Herodotus tells us that both sides delayed the final Battle of Plataea for more than a week because the portents of divination were not favorable. Thus, gods, goddesses, and their predictions have their fingerprints on most historical events of the period. This is a far different world than the modern one. Herodotus takes these customs as a matter of course and he has a steady faith that God is on the side of the Greeks. So this is not an impartial history written by a neutral observer but rather the report of a biased writer who was against the Persians even though his home town of Halicarnassus fought on the side of Xerxes. There are many places in the book where Herodotus quotes long speeches by various characters supposedly verbatim. In most cases there is probably not much chance that Herodotus could have known exactly what was said. Perhaps he heard the gist of the conversation and filled in the details using his own imagination. In any case, this practice of inventing speeches and filling their content based on the imagination of the writer was commonly used by contemporary Greek historians and even Thucydides who came decades later (e.g., the Melian dialogue). We revere Herodotus today as the "Father of History" and that title is much deserved but Herodotus was much more than that. He was the first one, so far as we know, who attempted to collect in one place the sum total of the geographic, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical information of the entire world that was known to him. Thus, his Histories are in a sense the "Encyclopedia Hellenica" and despite their many flaws they form the foundation of the Greek pursuit of knowledge which in subsequent centuries would create the Great Library of Alexandria. Herodotus stands at the beginning of that Greek intellectual journey which is still having repercussions in our world 2,500 years later. The Histories are a must read for anyone interested in the foundation of Western culture. I highly recommend them.

Must read and wade through.

Wnat makes us what we are? Eternal search for answers

As others have noted below , reading Herodotus is a mixed experience. On the one hand he is a fascinating story teller and hearing about the ancients and the places they inhabited from him is endlessly entertaining. On the other hand he tends to go off on long tangents in order to set up a specific incident and at times the book drags. I personally found the penguin edition and the Selincourt translation fine as an introduction but as I got about halfway through I found the absence of maps and foot notes a bit distracting as place names became more obscure to me. I then paged through a copy of the Landmark Herodotus and realized that the experience of reading this would be better with the added illustration and annotations so I switched. Nevertheless the Penguin is a smaller more portable version that is serviceable enough.

Good one

If you have not read this book, I highly recommend. This is where many great minds in history have traced human ancestry from. He makes a point to highlight significant human achievements, and I think that’s really awesome. Herodotus was banished from his country about 500bc and walked all over tha ancient world and traveled and talked to people, the stories he was told he composed and compiled, this is the histories of Herodotus!

Although this is not the translation usually recommended by those who teach Herodotus, I found it to be an extremely readable translation. The book is in itself absolutely fascinating since it shows how the world around us that we take for granted with our scientific minds looked to those who lived a long time ago. Herodotus has been criticized because much of what he writes is so far-fetched that it is humorous, but the reader can tell that he is making an effort to use his intelligence to sort fact from fiction. Even things that Herodotus considers preposterous have been very helpful to historians. For example, he completely dismisses as a ridiculous story the Phoenician claim to have sailed around the tip of Africa because they saw the sun on the right-hand side of the vessel while they were sailing west, something that cannot happen since everyone knows the sun is always in the southern half of the sky. Based on that story, modern historians feel certain that the Phoenicians did circumnavigate Africa. On the other hand, Herodotus found remnants of seashells in the hills near the delta of the Nile and correctly realized that what was desert in his time must have once been under the sea. There are many wonderful stories like this throughout the book as well as some real insights into the way people view things a long time ago. This is an extremely readable translation and it is very enjoyable. I recommend it highly.

A classic from ancient times.

A book perfect for reading in the shade. Not too dense, easy to understand, reading between the lines is a good thing.

Gran libro, ed bastante denso, recomiendo dosificar cuanto lees, sino puedes satruarte

'After the capture of Babylon, Darius invaded Scythia.' Thus commences book four of the Histories, and if these are the kind of words that set your pulse racing, your eyes going all dreamy, this book is for you. The ancient Greek historian's famous opus has an impressive geographical and chronological spread, and this, together with its precedence over most recovered documents of its type, explains why it is regarded as so important. Herodotus relates over a century of Persian expansion, including the Egyptian and other conquests, from about 600 BC, and of Persian conflict with the Greeks, culminating in his compatriots' victories at Salamis and Platea. As it is explained in the notes and introduction, much of his account has been reaffirmed by modern historical and archaeological research, some of it over earlier condemnations, though much is also being questioned. Indeed, intriguingly, this rings both as history as we understand it and as something else. Herodotus explicitly aims to make an objective and truthful account, unlike other chroniclers of antiquity (for example Egyptian) driven by religious, political or artistic imperatives. He traces facts to sources and steps back when sources conflict. This is familiar. But in other ways, his book is from a culture very distant from ours. Herodotus believes in oracles, in the premonitory value of dreams. It doesn't shock him that a queen might give birth to a lion, or a god strike down an army to protect a sanctuary. Hubris is always punished, and disregard for the warnings of fate, or the desecration of temples. And descriptions are inflated for effect. For example, Herodotus has five million Persian subjects crossing the Hellespont; this probably exceeded the adult male population of the Persian empire, and modern historians have the number at 100,000 to 200,000. Thus, in many ways, the Histories are myth, epic, as much as history, and they probably tell us as much about the ancient Greeks and their beliefs as about what happened in the Persian wars.