Herodotus: The Persian Subject From Halicarnassus Who Invented History

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Herodotus was born around 484 BC in Halicarnassus, a cosmopolitan frontier port in modern Turkey that made him technically a subject of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. His family was of mixed Greek and Carian heritage; his father was Lyxes and a relative, Panyassis, was an epic poet. After the family backed a failed uprising against the local tyrant Lygdamis, Herodotus was exiled to Samos. The Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda claims he later returned to overthrow the tyrant, a story modern historians largely dismiss. Exile pushed him onto merchant ships to Egypt, Tyre, the Black Sea and down the Euphrates to Babylon, where he gathered material through interpreters and questioned priests at Memphis, Thebes and Heliopolis, checking one temple's account against another's.

Around 447 BC he moved to Periclean Athens, mixed with the powerful Alcmaeonid family and performed his work aloud at festivals such as the Olympic Games, which helps explain its detachable digressions on gold-digging ants and flying snakes. Plutarch reports the Athenian assembly paid him ten talents. Around 443 BC he joined the new colony of Thurii in southern Italy and refined his histories there until his death around 425 BC. Critics followed: Aristophanes mocked his opening story of abducted women, and Thucydides dismissed writers of fables in favor of strict political and military analysis. Herodotus answered in advance that he was bound to report what he was told but not bound to believe it, and modern excavations have confirmed parts of his accounts of Scythian burial mounds and Egyptian rituals.

• The Greek word historia, which he used for his project, means inquiry.
• Earlier writers such as Hecataeus of Miletus produced lists of coastlines and genealogies; Herodotus looked for the causes behind events.
• He traced the rise of Persia through Lydia, Babylon and Egypt to explain the momentum that carried it into war with Greece.
• In The Acharnians of 425 BC, Aristophanes blamed the Peloponnesian War on the abduction of prostitutes, a jab at Herodotus' opening.
• Critics as late as the 18th century philosopher Giambattista Vico faulted him for filling history with legend and folklore.