The Histories

herodotus john m. marincola aubrey de sélincourt betty radice

David Grene, one of the best known translators of the Greek classics, splendidly captures the peculiar quality of Herodotus, the father of history.

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard, and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past. In his History , the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama.

In Grene's remarkable translation and commentary, we see the historian as a storyteller, combining through his own narration the skeletal "historical" facts and the imaginative reality toward which his story reaches. Herodotus emerges in all his charm and complexity as a writer and the first historian in the Western tradition, perhaps unique in the way he has seen the interrelation of fact and fantasy.

Genres historynonfictionancient historygreececlassicsancientphilosophyhistoricalmythologyliterature

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,-0430

Series

Loeb Herodotus

Places

cappadocia, lydia, halys river, corynth, sparta, sardis (now: sart), ecbatana, delphi, ascalon (now: ashkelon), cytherea, babylon, athens, marathon, salamis, egypt,

This edition

Format: 784 pages, Paperback
Published: April 29, 2003 by Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780140449082
ASIN: 0140449086
Language: English

Characters More characters

Leonidas

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Xerxes I Of Persia

Xerxes I (c. 518 – August 465 BC), commonly known as Xerxes the Great, was a Persian ruler who served as the fourth King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 486 BC until his assassination in 465 BC. He was the son of Darius the Great and Atos...
Themistocles

Themistocles (/θəˈmɪstəˌkliːz/; Greek: Θεμιστοκλῆς Greek pronunciation: [tʰemistoklɛ̂ːs] Themistoklẽs; "Glory of the Law"; c. 524–459 BC) was an Athenian politician and general. He was one of a new breed of non-aristocratic politicians who rose to promine...
Thales Of Miletus

A pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer from Miletus in Asia Minor (present-day Milet in Turkey). He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, ...
Cyrus The Great

Cyrus II of Persia (commonly known as Cyrus the Great, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Under his rule, the empire embraced all the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually conquered most of Southwest Asi...
Croesus

Croesus was the king of Lydia who, according to Herodotus, reigned for 14 years: from 560 BC until his defeat by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 546 BC.Croesus was renowned for his wealth; Herodotus and Pausanias noted that his gifts were preserved at...

About the author

herodotus

Herodotus (Greek: Ηρόδοτος) (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He has been described as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.
The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information.
Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. However, Herodotus explained that he reported what he could see and was told. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists.