Herodotus: Introduction

"Who was Herodotus, anyway?" was my mother's question when I broached the topic of my Herodotus project to her. As I began to explain his significance as the so-called Father of History in the Ancient Greek world, she almost immediately stopped listening. She did, however, ask me if there was a statue of him. The answer was actually, yes! There are statues of Herodotus at the Louvre, in front of the Parliament building in Vienna, and this bust pictured above that I personally photographed two weeks ago at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, Italy. Certainly, it's been wonderful to travel again after the shutdowns of the global pandemic last year, but there will be plenty of time to talk about travel and other topics coming up. All the time, in fact.

But who was Herodotus, anyway? To my knowledge, we know very little about the man who wrote The Histories, the oldest prose narrative of historical events coming out of Ancient Greece, except what he tells us himself in his work. He was born in Halicarnassus, now part of modern Turkey, and he must have either traveled a great deal, or talked to many people who had, in order to gather the information for the nine books of The Histories. His great work will form the structure for this blog.

I am not an academic historian or classicist. I am just a therapist and amateur novelist who went to film school and decided to read The Histories along with a friend as a pastime during the pandemic. So my Herodotus project is not an expert commentary on the work. I don't even read Ancient Greek. Rather, I found that as I read Herodotus, I ended up relating his writing to various other topics, not unlike his own well known habit of digression. Herodotus: All the Time will go through The Histories, but like the man himself, I may take a while to get to the famous Persian Wars. After all, I have many related cinematic, literary, musical, artistic, theatrical, culinary, and personal digressions to make along the way! So, dear reader, thank you for joining me on this Herodotus journey. I am excited to see where the road may take us...

Next, Book 1.1: The Heifer