Superb book, it immersed me in ancient Greece. Herodotus skills are unmatched as a story teller, although the speeches are far better in Thucydides.

Written at the outset of the Peloponnesian War this book comes across as Athenian propaganda some times. However, all the detail provided of the different civilizations the Greeks had contact with is just great. For anyone who enjoys reading on the subject this is a fun, thorough and excellently crafted book.

Props to Herodotus for being more entertaining than most modern writers.

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.

“These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were the grounds of feud.”

Herodotus’s reference to his “researches” (sometimes translated “inquiries”) uses the Greek word historie, from which we get “history.” This is the first recorded use of the word. 

The main subject of The Histories is the twenty years (499-479 B.C.E) of war between Greece and Persia. Herodotus begins by presenting the alleged origins of enmity between Greece and Persia in mythic times. He adds Persian and Phoenician accounts that he has heard to Greek ones. These stories have to do with the abduction of women. According to the Persians, the Phoenicians began the quarrel by carrying off the Greek woman Io and taking her to Egypt. The Greeks retaliated by abducting the woman Europa from the Phoenicians, and later they carried off Medea of Colchis, which motivated Paris to abduct Helen. Herodotus says that the Persians trace their enmity toward the Greeks back to the Trojan War. The Phoenicians, on the other hand, insist that Io left willingly. 

After summarizing these stories, Herodotus says that he will not discuss further which account is correct, and changes the subject to historical causes more recent than the legendary past: “I prefer to rely on my own knowledge, and to point out who it was in actual fact that first injured the Greeks…” Herodotus traces the beginning of the conflict to when Croesus of Lydia conquered the Greek towns of Asia, but Books I - IV focus on other issues. Most of this part of the book is concerned with geographical accounts, stories of notable people, and ethnographies of the peoples ruled by the Persians. Some scientific issues also come up, such as the cause of the flooding of the Nile. Starting with Book V, in which the Persians suppress the rebellion of the local Greek population in Persian territory (the Ionian Revolt) the narrative becomes more tightly focused.  

Herodotus is a moralist; he presents the story of the Persian Wars as a story of how the hubris of the Persian rulers leads to their defeat, and demonstrates how “the god with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent… likewise his bolts fall ever on the highest houses and the tallest trees” (Bk VII).

The website Livius.org has commentaries that I found really helpful when I was reading this. 
http://www.livius.org/articles/person...

The website also has an interesting essay, “The Significance of Marathon” on the historiography of the battle of Marathon, which occurs in Book VI.

“It is often said that the battle of Marathon was one of the few really decisive battles in history. The truth, however, is that we cannot establish this with certainty. Still, the fight had important consequences: it gave rise to the idea that East and West were opposites, an idea that has survived until the present day, in spite of the fact that 'Marathon' has become the standard example to prove that historians can better refrain from such bold statements.”

Some great reviews by other readers on GR:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... (this one’s pretty funny)

some highlights:
Bk I: The story of Croesus & Solon & Cyrus - The wealthy king of Lydia, Croesus, urges Solon, the Athenian lawgiver [magistrate] to admit that he is the happiest of men. (Croesus at this point as captured nearly all the Greek towns along the west coast of Asia.)

Solon warns him that no one can be called happy until he ends his life well. “Call him, however, until he die, not happy but fortunate. Scarcely, indeed, can any man unite all these advantages: as there is no country which contains within it all that it needs, but each, while it possesses some things, lacks others, and the best country is that which contains the most; so no single human being is complete in every respect — something is always lacking. He who unites the greatest number of advantages, and retaining them to the day of his death, then dies peaceably, that man alone, sire, in my judgment, is entitled to bear the name of ‘happy.’ But in every matter it behooves us to mark well the end: for oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin.”
 
Croesus dismisses Solon’s answer, “since he thought that a man must be an arrant fool who made no account of the present good, but bade men always wait and mark the end.”

Croesus suffers for his arrogance when his son Atys is accidentally killed in a boar hunt. Croesus later attacks Cappadocia, part of the empire of Cyrus the Great (and part of modern Turkey). In the conflict that follows, Cyrus captures the city of Sardis. Croesus's other son is killed in the fighting, trying to protect his father, and Croesus is captured. Croesus tells Cyrus the story of Solon's warning to him years before, and how everything had turned out exactly as Solon had said, although it was nothing that especially concerned him, but applied to all mankind alike, and most to those who seemed to themselves happy... Then Cyrus, hearing what Croesus had said, relented, bethinking himself that he too was a man, and that he was a fellow man, and one who had once been as blessed by fortune as himself, that he was burning alive; afraid, moreover, of retribution, and full of the thought that whatever is human is insecure. So he bade them quench the blazing fire as quickly as they could, and take down Croesus and the other Lydians, which they tried to do, but the flames were not to be mastered.”

Croesus prays to Apollo and a rainstorm extinguishes the flames. Cyrus, “convinced by this that Croesus was a good man and a favourite of heaven” asked him after he was taken off the pile, "'Who it was that had persuaded him to lead an army into his country, and so become his foe rather than continue his friend?' 'What I did, oh! king, was to thy advantage and to my own loss. If there be blame, it rests with the god of the Greeks, who encouraged me to begin the war. No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons. But the gods willed it so.”

Bk II: Herodotus’s story about Indian burial customs:

“… if one were to offer men to choose out of all the customs in the world as seemed to them the best, they would examine the whole number, and end by preferring their own; so convinced are they that their own usages surpass those of all others. Unless, therefore, a man was mad, it is not likely that he would make sport of such matters. That people have this feeling about their own laws may be seen by many proofs; among others, the following. Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked -- 'What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?' To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said -- 'What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?' The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language.”

Bk III: Sosicles of Corinth’s response to the Spartans, who at this point in the narrative plan to reinstate a tyrant in Athens. Sparta’s allies are skeptical of the plan, but only Sosicles the Corinthian argues against it:

“Surely the heaven will soon be below, and the earth above, and men will henceforth live in the sea, and fish take their place upon the dry land, since you, Lacedaemonians [another name for the Spartans] propose to put down free governments in the cities of Greece, and set up tyrannies in their room. There is nothing in the whole world so unjust, so bloody, as a tyranny. If, however, it seems to you a desirable thing to have the cities under despotic rule, begin by putting a tyrant over yourselves, and then establish despots in other states… If you knew what tyranny was as well as ourselves, you would be better advised than you now are in regard to it.”

Sosicles then tells of how Corinth was once ruled by an oligarchy, before it became democratic.

Bk VII: The battle of Thermopylae 
“And now there arose a fierce struggle between the Persians and the Lacedaemonians over the body of Leonidas, in which the Greeks four times drove back the enemy, and at last by their great bravery succeeded in bearing off the body. This combat was scarcely ended when the Persians with Ephialtes approached; and the Greeks, informed that they drew nigh, made a change in the manner of their fighting. Drawing back into the narrowest part of the pass, and retreating even behind the cross wall, they posted themselves upon a hillock, where they stood all drawn up together in one close body, except only the Thebans. The hillock whereof I speak is at the entrance of the straits, where the stone lion stands which was set up in honour of Leonidas. Here they defended themselves to the last, such as still had swords using them, and the others resisting with their hands and teeth; till the barbarians, who in part had pulled down the wall and attacked them in front, in part had gone round and now encircled them upon every side, overwhelmed and buried the remnant which was left beneath showers of missile weapons.

Thus nobly did the whole body of Lacedaemonians and Thespians behave; but nevertheless one man is said to have distinguished himself above all the rest, to wit, Dieneces the Spartan. A speech which he made before the Greeks engaged the Medes, remains on record. One of the Trachinians told him, ‘Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude.’ Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered ‘Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade.’ ”

Bk VIII: Xerxes reflects on the passage of time: 
“And now, as he looked and saw the whole Hellespont covered with the vessels of his fleet, and all the shore and every plain about Abydos as full as possible of men, Xerxes congratulated himself on his good fortune; but after a little while he wept. 

Then Artabanus, the king’s uncle (the same who at the first spake so freely against the king, and advised him not to lead his army against Greece) when he heard that Xerxes was in tears, went to him, and said: ‘How different, sire, is what thou art now doing, from what thou didst a little while ago! Then thou didst congratulate thyself; and now, behold! thou weepest.’

‘There came upon me,’ replied he, ‘a sudden pity, when I thought of the shortness of man’s life, and considered that of all this host, numerous as it is, not one will be alive when a hundred years are gone by.’

‘And yet there are sadder things in life than that,’ returned the other. ‘Short as our time is, there is no man, whether it be here among this multitude or elsewhere, who is so happy, as not to have felt the wish — I will not say once, but full many a time — that he were dead rather than alive. Calamities fall upon us; sicknesses vex and harass us, and make life, short though it be, to appear long. So death, through the wretchedness of our life, is a most sweet refuge to our race; and God, who gives the tastes that we enjoy of pleasant times, is seen, in his very gift, to be envious.’”

Oh Herodotus, in some ways I feel like he was my college roommate - fore I spent that much time with him... very enjoyable reading from the "Father of History" about the spread of Hellenism and the Persian empire. Read for my senior thesis in undergrad - it was good to read these classics.

It took me awhile to get through this one, as there was just so much research that needed to accompany it to find out where and what was always being referenced. Thank goodness for wiki! I had always heard how incredible Herodotus was as a historian, but I found that he was very humble in what he proposed. For example he would reference this or that peoples living in a mountain or eating certain fruits etc. and then he would say that he found the part about them having one eye very unbelievable but basically he would put in the information because it was what was commonly said of them at the time. I think this is a brilliant way to go about recording history. Sure facts get muddled with hearsay, but it gives you a great picture of how the greeks must have seen the rest of the ancient world, their neighbors and the wars that surrounded their history, and as Herodotus was in many ways one of the earliest historians that we have record of he did not have much else to go off of so I think he did an excellent job. This was not only intellectually stimulating but very engagingly written and fairly fast paced for the amount of incidences he recorded.

Bir solukta okursunuz, destansı üslubunu seversiniz, başta sayfa sayısı çok gibi gelir, ne zaman bitti anlamazsınız.

Yunan-Pers mücadelesi özellikle Leonidas ve Kserkses arası mücadeleleri anlatıldığı bölüm nefisti!

Kütüphaneden alarak okudum, Calibromda e kitap olarak var ama en kısa zamanda basılı bir versiyonu da kütüphanemizde olsun isterim.

Baş ucu eseri!

Ayrıca Müntekim Ökmen'de harika dip notlar hazmış. Kafanız takılınca hızır gibi yetişiyor. Ölmeden mutlaka okuyun, okutun!

The kids bought me this for Christmas and it is a thing of infinite beauty. I’ve been meaning to read these histories for years and never quite got around to it. I had never realised quite how remarkable this book would be.

This version of the book is the third that I now own – I’ve also got a copy of the Penguin Classics and I’ve just finished listening to this as a talking book. But I am going to make my way through this book eventually, as it is hard to focus on many of the details of the wars and so on without a decent map in front of you to refer to – and this book has lots of maps and drawings and other illustrations, although, annoyingly, no illustration of the Egyptian labyrinth which Herodotus said was even more remarkable than the pyramids.

Along the way Herodotus tells some incredible stories. Some of them sound like they are straight out of the 1001 nights. Others make your jaw drop open.

There are also discussions of things like what is the source of the Nile, that really have whetted my curiosity to read more about the 19th century types who finally discovered the source. Now, why was this such a big question in the ancient world? Well, the problem was that the Nile seemed to come out of the desert and that isn’t exactly the sort of place where you would expect to find lots and lots of water. The winds that came for where the Nile seemed to flow out from were also always hot – and so the idea that perhaps the water in the Nile swelled once a year due to the melting of snow (although partly reasonable, obviously) didn’t seem to make a lot of sense when you thought that the river was coming out of a desert (deserts being the natural enemy of snow). It really is fascinating listening to Herodotus discussing these speculations about the source of the Nile and the paradoxes such speculations provided.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring”. There are interesting asides about the Trojan war and how Herodotus speculates that Helen was probably dead by the time of the war started and so when the Greeks asked for the Trojans to hand her over they literally couldn’t. He can’t see why else they would have allowed their civilisation to be crushed for the sake of one woman, beautiful or not.

There is a woman who commanded a ship on the side of the Persians, there are women who come back as ghosts and complain about being cold (which their husband should know as the last time he tried to bake his bread the oven was cold – this would have taken me a while to understand if Herodotus did not explain that the husband had lain with her after she had died.) But this is not really a history that involves many women – this is a story about blokes doing what blokes like most – killing other blokes.

All the same, my favourite bit of this came quite early in the piece. The story of the theft of Rhampsinitos’ treasure. I’m going to give you the short McCandless version of this as it really is a wonderful story and I can’t leave this review without talking about it.

When Rhampsinitos (an Egyptian king) decided to have a place built for his treasure he didn’t know that the builder would put a stone into the works that could be easily removed. The builder told his sons about this stone as he lay dying and once the builder had died his sons nipped around to the king’s treasury and helped themselves to the riches inside. The king noticed this sudden loss of wealth and set a trap to capture those who were all too frequently popping in and stealing his goodies. The trap was quite successful and one of the brothers ended up getting caught. He told his other brother to cut off his head so that they wouldn’t both be discovered. This his all too obliging brother did. The king then had a body without a head in his treasury, but still had no idea how anyone could get into the treasury room without breaking any of the seals on the locks.

So, he had the body of the thief hung up and guarded so that whoever cried in front of it would be brought before him. The thief who had cut off his brother’s head was then told by his mother that he had better do something to rescue his brother’s body or else all hell would break lose. He came up with a plan to get the guards drunk and to steal the body, which he did and also shaved half of their beards off to make sure they quite understood how stupid they had been made to look. The king was, needless to say, bloody furious. (I did mention this reminded me of the 1001 nights, yeah?) Anyway, the king then decides to get his daughter to work in a brothel, but before she sleeps with anyone she is to ask them what is the worst thing they have ever done and if any of them say anything like they cut off their brother’s head and stole his body from the king’s guards, she is to grab hold of him and call for the police (or whatever the Egyptian equivalent was at the time). The thief decides to play along, and goes to the brothel with the severed arm of a freshly dead corpse under his jumper. When he tells the king’s daughter about his exploits she makes a grab for him and he holds out the dead man’s arm, which she holds onto while the thief cleverly makes his escape. The king is so impressed with this man’s exploits that he begs him to come forward and receive a reward, which he does and ends up getting to marry the king’s daughter – I assume the daughter he gets to marry is the prostitute mentioned earlier, but I guess no one actually ever called her that to her face.

The best bit of this is that it shows something Herodotus does the whole way through these histories. He will be telling one of these stories and suddenly they will start to become completely unbelievable and he will say, “of course, I don’t believe this stuff for a minute, but this is the story I was told in Egypt and what would you have me do? I have to tell you what I was told.”

The other story that held me enthralled was of the self-mutilation of Zopyros – honestly, this is utterly remarkable. It is worth reading the book just for this story alone.

There are lots of occasions where fathers are forced to do horrible things to their sons – my favourite is the story of a king who punishes one of his advisors by feeding him his son as the meat portion of a feast. The king then leaves this advisor in a position where he can revenge himself on the king. You know, if I was to feed someone their own child I would probably kill him straight away afterwards – call me overly cautious, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the person who has feed you the flesh of one of your kids is never going to be one of you best friends ever again, no matter what else they do for you.

This book is fantastic and the Landmark edition is like its name implies, really something special.

I feel quite a sense of accomplishment having finished Herodotus' 'Histories'. It is a formidably large text that I am sure will overshadow any other historical non-fiction I decide to read this year. For that reason, I am not even going to attempt anything as onerous as a chronological review of its contents here.

The Histories is comprised of nine books that chart the events of successive Persian dynasts, including Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes. Epithetically known as the "Father of History," Herodotus is a candid raconteur: he tells stories with an intimacy and ingenuousness that immediately draw you in.

Many tales of impetuous or improvident kings have a proverbial quality to them, reading more like perennial myths that have been orally bequeathed over generations - which can lead one to doubt their veracity. The most salient example occurs in Book One, where Grecian king Croesus seeks counsel from the Delphic Oracle as to whether he should attack the Persians under Cyrus. Ever cryptic, the Pythia's response was that if he did, a great empire would perish. Croesus mistook this to mean Cyrus's empire, not his own, much to his chagrin. Later, captured and fettered, Croesus's wit and sagacity endear him to Cyrus the Great, who decides to employ the erstwhile king as his chief advisor. Every cloud has a... Persian rug capable of flying through it, I suppose…

The Histories often read like you were being taken on a magic carpet ride through antiquity. Book Two explores the Egyptian Empire, delineating the customs, rituals, rulers, and the myriad of ways in which they contrasted with the Greeks. There are fascinating anecdotes that document a sort of cross-pollination of cultural influence; for instance, the Egyptian ruler Amasis' yearly edict that each citizen has to declare the source of their income to the provincial governor; a failure to prove honest income was punishable by death - a law subsequently borrowed by Solon of Athens.

Prosaic details of everyday life are punctuated with barbarous accounts of violence, such as that of the insane ruler Cambyses, who, in an egregious demonstration of his own martial skills, shoots an arrow through the heart of a young boy - the son of one of Cambyses' servants - to somehow prove that the Persians have been talking nonsense about him, and that he is, in fact, not insane! After hitting the mark, the boy drops dead, and Cambyses exclaims, "You see Prexaspes? I am not mad! It is the Persians who have lost their wits!" Afraid for his own life, Prexaspes is forced to congratulate Cambyses on a good shot.

It is striking how nonchalantly Herodotus documents abhorrent acts of savagery; there is scarcely a page that doesn't detail a castration, evisceration, or one tribe rummaging through some freshly extracted animal entrails to decipher a portent of some kind. Moreover, accounts of gratuitous sacrifice are common throughout the book, as are the methods that distinguish the peoples enacting the atrocities. At one point, the Taurians capture shipwrecked Greeks, decapitate them, and offer their bodies to Iphigenia; the daughter of Agamemnon who, in Aeschylus's play, is sacrificed by her father so that he might secure a favorable sea-wind in order to sail back from Troy.

It is hard to imagine a world replete with the ubiquitous barbarity of this magnitude, but I suppose in attempting to, we can appreciate exactly why these peoples were in a state of continual war: their way of life and the survival of their children depended on them not succumbing to the force and brutality of their neighbours. This was a world devoid of morality in any recognisable sense; instead, it was a world of constant provocation, hostility, and superstition. Each tribe was well aware of the modus operandi practiced by the victors. For instance, in retribution for previous atrocities committed by the Ionians, the Persians would invade the land, kill the men, rape and enslave the women, castrate the boys turning them into eunuchs, and dispatch the girls to the king.

What I found most interesting was Herodotus' perspicacity; the meticulousness with which he details the object of his focus - equally impressive is his inclusion of etymological and genealogical information that serves to buttress the account he provides. Take the following, for example: "The Greeks called the Persians the 'Cephenes'. Then Perseus, the son of Danaë and Zeus, arrived at the court of Cepheus, the son of Belus, married his daughter Andromeda, and fathered a child whom he named Perses. Perseus left this son behind because Cepheus had no male offspring. It was from this same Perses that the Persians then derived their name”.

The final books, eight and nine, were cumbersome to get through; this is predominantly due to the fact that a huge war involving an infinitesimal number of tribes is being recounted, and Herodotus goes heavy on the genealogy here; and I mean Old Testament heavy. By the end of the book, my head was swimming in names: Lacedaemonians, Boeotians, Lydians, Milesians, Corinthians, Scythians, Mycenaeans, Thegeans, Phoenicians, and on, and on, ad nauseam. Perhaps if I had approached the final chapters with fresh eyes, I might not have found them as arduous to get through; admittedly, fatigue did set in towards the end. But fundamentally, this is a monumental book of inestimable significance. It is understandably considered to be one of the most important texts in Western history.

Absolutely bonkers read, he was just saying anything about anything. There is one story about a guy who gets blinded in an accident, and an oracle tells him the urine of a woman who has only ever been with her husband will cure him, so he tries washing his eyes with the urine of many different women, and eventually it WORKS, so he gathers up all the women whose urine didn't work (which includes his wife) and sets them all on fire.

The history of the Persian/Greek wars, the war between Athens' democracy and freedom against Persia's slavery and tyranny, the first history book ever written, and, according to this translator, the greatest shaggydog story ever told (and he's right). It's hard to classify this as non-fiction - the Gods still exist and have power, but contrary to (for example) the Odyssey, they've taken a backseat. Instead of mingling with the mortals, their power is indirect; all those who do wrong are correctly identified and punished:

No sooner had they blinded Euenius, however, than their livestock stopped giving birth and their soil turned similarly barren. When the Appollonians asked [the oracles] at Dodona and Delphi the reason for the calamity they were experiencing[, both gave the same answer]: that they had unjustly deprived Euenius, the guardian of the sacred flock, of his sight.

The oracles are always right - except when they're bribed and then themselves duly punished - their prophecies always come true, often in ironic ways, as known from Oedipus.

If you attack you will destroy a great empire.

Reading this is often like reading through an ancient Wikipedia, since Herodotus lists as many facts as he could collect. Like Wikipedia's links, every time Herodotus mentions a new place or a thing he can't help but immediately list everything about it, with the consequence that this reads like a phylogeny of stories, with branches branching off other branches, as if you'd replace all links in the Wikipedia by their respective articles' texts. You have to be careful when reading this, if you're tired when reading Herodotus' frequent sidetracking will confuse you.

Funny enough, it takes Herodotus about 6 or 7 of the 9 books until the "action" of the wars really starts; before that, he draws a picture of his world as complete and detailed as possible, knowing that this all will be lost and forgotten if not for his work. Book 2 is all about Egypt and what an amazing place it was, book 4 is about the Scythians and their customs. Darius, King of Persia and first enemy of Athens appears in book 3 - he dies in book 7, to be followed by Xerxes, who subsequently raises the biggest army the world had ever seen, literally drinking rivers dry, and their subsequent bloody run-in with the Spartans (here often Lacedaemonians, after the region of which Sparta was the capital) at Thermopylae under Leonidas (you know the comic and movie) and the subsequent defeat of the Persian fleet by the Greek fleet.

In between there are numerous speeches, fights, customs, small stories, rapes and brutal murders, intrigues, bribes, lootings, valorous acts in battle, stupid decisions, hilarious events, and philosophies.

Herodotus himself has a strong voice and judges the stories as told to him by others; sometimes highly skeptical, sometimes blindly trusting (in which case Holland's footnotes play the skeptic's part). By the way, the footnotes are numerous and extremely helpful in locating cross-references by Herodotus (or these cases where Herodotus says "I'll talk about this later" and then forgets all about it). In my ebook version with my font and size settings, the book ends at 68%, the rest is footnotes.

Recommended for: Everyone.

As a history nerd I always had the idea that I would one day read Herodotus. After all he’s generally regarded as the guy who kicked off the whole show. I had put it off due to the length of the book, but Audible were offering it “free” with my membership for a limited period, and it was that which led me to finally conclude “It is time!”

One thing about Audible is that it doesn’t always tell the reader about the translator. I could tell that the version I had was in 19th century English, and from what I can find out, it seems to be the Rawlinson translation.

Apart from a history the book is also a geography and an ethnology. Herodotus, who was a great traveller, describes the world as it was known to him. The Persian Empire is described in detail, as far as “India”, which I think are the lands we now know as Pakistan (of course it was all “India” in Rawlinson’s day). Egypt is also described in detail, and beyond it lies “Ethiopia”, which I think was the country we now call Sudan. The rest of Africa he calls “Libya”, describing how it extends west beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and south to a great sandy desert. Mediterranean Europe is well known but Northern Europe is the subject of garbled rumour. He says he can find out nothing about a northern sea from whence amber is procured (actually true and a reference to the Baltic), nor anything about “the Tin Islands”, (probably a reference to The British Isles). He does know of the Danube, which he calls the Ister, and the Black Sea, which he calls the Euxine. To the north of these are the lands of the Scythians, a “land without marvels”, excepting huge rivers and “the vastness of the plain.”

Herodotus is careful to distinguish hearsay from what he has seen himself. He will frequently make comments along the lines of “In this, I merely repeat what the Libyans say” and at other times will repeat a local legend but add that he personally places no credence in it.

One thing I found interesting, if this translation is accurate, is that on a couple of occasions Herodotus seems to suggest that the ancient Egyptians were black-skinned, “with wooly hair”, adding to my own knowledge of the continuing debate on the appearance of the ancient Egyptians, which will of course never be resolved. Opposing Herodotus is the evidence from hieroglyphs and other sources, suggesting that a range of skin tones existed amongst the ancient Egyptians.

In his build-up to the description of the Graeco-Persian Wars, Herodotus describes how the Persians conquered Asia Minor, including the cities of the Ionian Greeks, and how they also conquered Egypt. Subsequent expeditions against the Ethiopians failed, and Herodotus also describes an early example of asymmetrical warfare when he relates how King Darius invaded the lands of the Scythians with a huge army, via Thrace. Being a nomadic people with no cities to defend, the Scythians simply moved away from Darius, driving their herds with them and always keeping at least a day’s march between themselves and the Persian Army. Darius could do nothing other than simply wander about the plains until his supplies ran out and he had to retreat back across the Danube.

The most dramatic part of the book is of course around the Persian invasions of Greece. The stories of the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea are well-known, but it was great to read the original source material for these events.

There are times when Herodotus gets a little tiresome for the modern reader, and there’s too much mythology in here, but ultimately I’m really glad that I’ve finally read “The Histories.”

I absolutely adore this book! It is among my top favorites. What I'm sure most people identify it with, if they can identify it at all, is the movie 300. Yes, this book does relate the first, true story of the 300 Spartans and not with comic pictures. It is one of my favorite stories in this book (there are many: suicidal cats, burning of Athens, Croesus and Solon, etc.), but it is far from the baseness of the horribly inaccurate movie.