This book merits five stars because it truly represents the starting point of Western historical writing.

Herodotus asks all the basic questions that historians are supposed to when confronted with a source. Is the account truthful? If you think that it is not truthful do you ignore the information provided or use it and share your reserves with the reader? The best of historians will occasionally reject truthful accounts and accept lies as truthful. The point is that Herodotus is clearly adopting a critical stance towards all his sources even if he errs in places.

The modern reader is most likely to be concerned in those places where Herodotus appears to accept myths and legends as being historically accurate. In the defense of Herodotus, myths and legends have sometimes proven to contain historically accurate material. Until archaeologists discovered Troy and Mycenae in the 19th century, many had thought that these two cities existed only in legend and literature. Similarly the Norse sagas describing a Viking settlement in North America were considered to be legends or works of fiction until a Norse settlement was discovered at L'Anse aux Meduses in Newfoundland in the 1950's.

Moreover, it must be pointed out that in places Herodotus expresses a great deal of skepticism about the religious beliefs and practices of his era. He expresses a great deal of frustration about Oracles. He describes there pronouncements as typically being unintelligible. Moreover he suggests that in time, the Oracles appear to have consciously made inaccurate pronouncements. Herodotus notes that that the myths about the Olympian Gods vary considerably from city to city as do the actual names of the Gods. He points out that the geographic origins of many of the names of the deities are hard to definitively identify. Herodotus does not attack religion and superstition in the manner of the 18th Century enlightenment philosophers but he has a very critical view of the religion of his civilization.

What one gets in the Histories of Herodotus, is a well organized account of the Persian Wars written by a man trying to lay the ground rules for historical investigation as he goes. The result is a great classic of Western literature and history. Read it for its good points and do be distracted in places where it appears to fail modern standards for historical writing. All historians owe a debt to Herodotus who laid a great foundation for history which is after all an art not a science.

It wasn't just Vollmann's fourth reference to Herodotus in a span of 20 pages in Rising Up and Rising Down, it was the reality and shame that I'm in my 40s and the most I know about the war between Persia and the Hellenic city states is what I learned from the movie 300. Thus, The Histories.

First: I can't imagine what it would have been like reading these nine books by Herodotus in any format other than this simply amazingly researched and presented volume. The Landmark has to be the final word on Herodotus: the maps, the footnotes, the appendices, indices, forwards and notes - it is an astounding collection created for the layperson like me to approach a subject that is seemingly dry and yawn-worthy. But The Histories is anything but boring. At times, even page-turning, jaw-dropping awesome. When you say to your partner, "Honey, listen to this -" and then quote Herodotus, you know something amazing has happened.

Herodotus does more than just recount tales of war, he goes to great lengths to describe the culture and the history of dozens of the denizens in his world. An astounding undertaking in any age - made even more incredible given that this was written 600+ BCE. His even-handed histories and details of Persia, a nation looking to conquer and subjugate his own, is an astounding feat of scholarship and academia - even before those words had meaning.

I was so impressed with The Landmark that I purchased their publications on Thucydides and Xenophon. By the time I've finished both of those, I'll be able to play horseshit bingo the next time I watch 300.

What book contains a king ordering his servant to surreptitiously look at his naked wife, a poet riding a dolphin, a king declaring war on the wind, a king having the ocean whipped for being disobedient, flying snakes, ants the size of foxes, *and* an epic battle between Greece and Persia? This one. This one does.