10/29/13 Herodotus: A Historian for All Time | History Today www.historytoday.com/paul-cartledge/herodotus-historian-all-time 1/3 Search the archive Tuesday, 29 October 2013 | Login / Register Tweet 39 2 Herodotus: A Historian for All Time By Paul Cartledge (/taxonomy/term/157) | Published in History Today (/taxonomy/term/43) Volume: 63 Issue: 10 (/taxonomy/term/31551) 2013 (/taxonomy/term/28711) (/PRINT/93051) (/PRINTMAIL/93051) HISTORIOGRAPHY (/TAXONOMY/TERM/13946) ANCIENT GREECE (/TAXONOMY/TERM/14838) As a new translation of the writings of the‘father of history’ is published, Paul Cartledge looks at the methods of enquiry that make the Greek master such a crucial influence on historians today. Tales of war: A detail from the fourth-century bc Sarcophagus of Alexander shows a Persian horseman killing a Greek warrior In the beginning was the word – historiê, ‘enquiry’ or ‘research’: the word used by the West’s first historian in order to describe both his method and his achievement, his ergon (‘deed’). Herodotus of Halicarnassus was born in or about 484 BC. The Greek city of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) was then a subject of the mighty Persian empire, which had been founded some two to three generations earlier by Cyrus II and by now stretched from the Punjab to the Aegean. Halicarnassus was itself originally a foreign implant, settled by Greeks from the Peloponnese at the turn of the last millennium BC, among the non-Greek, ‘barbarian-voiced’ Carians, as Homer had called them in the second book of the Iliad. Herodotus’ own immediate family indeed bore Carian or Carian-inflected names. Happily, though, Herodotus (‘Gift of Hera’) proved to be one of the Greeks least infected by the sort of virulent anti-barbarian prejudice that was fanned by the subject he made his own life’s work: the Greco-Persian Wars of 480 and 479 BC and their more immediate origins. Herodotus’ declared aim in his preface was to ensure: Like 56
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Herodotus: A Historian for All Time...Herodotus, Edward Gibbon wisely opined in a footnote to the Decline and Fall, ‘sometimes writes for children and sometimes for philosophers’.
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10/29/13 Herodotus: A Historian for All Time | History Today