The Histories

The Father of History

Herodotus opens his Histories with a statement of purpose: to preserve what has been done by men so that great deeds do not lose their fame, and to investigate the cause of the Greeks and the Persians going to war. The word he uses — historie — means inquiry or investigation. He is the inventor of the practice.

The main narrative covers the Persian Wars, from Darius’s expedition to Greece (ended at Marathon in 490 BCE) through Xerxes’s invasion of 480-479 BCE, with its defining battles at Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. But the digressions are half the book: extended accounts of Egypt, Scythia, Babylon, Libya, and dozens of peoples encountered along the Persian road to disaster.

The Method

Herodotus includes stories he does not believe. He says so: “I am obliged to report what people say, but I am not obliged to believe it.” This is simultaneously a limitation (his history is not always accurate) and a virtue (his record of what the ancient world believed about itself is invaluable). Modern historians have repeatedly found that legends he recorded contain historical cores.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Histories apart: The digressions — on Egypt, on Scythian customs, on Babylonian marriage practices — are as interesting as the main narrative; Herodotus’s method of including multiple conflicting accounts without adjudicating between them is honest in a way later historians often are not; and The battle narratives (Thermopylae, Salamis) are gripping even at two and a half millennia’s distance. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Herodotus established the practice of investigation (historie means ‘inquiry’) as the basis for writing about the past — the first historian in the modern sense. The Histories argue that the Persian Wars were caused by the cycle of hybris (overreach) and nemesis (retribution) — a moral framework applied to political history. Herodotus’s ethnographic interest — his genuine curiosity about how different peoples live and why — makes him the first anthropologist as well as the first historian. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

Why It Endures

The Histories belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Herodotus’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The digressions that make the book rich also interrupt the main narrative — readers who want a direct account of the wars will be frustrated. Modern readers should approach the ethnographic sections with awareness that Herodotus was writing within ancient Greek frameworks of otherness. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of ancient history and anyone interested in the Persian Wars, Greek civilization, and the origins of historical writing.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — The father of history — rich, digressive, unreliable, and essential.

Reading Guides

• History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides — Full Review

The Father of History and the Text’s Survival

The Histories was composed c. 440–430 BCE; Herodotus may have read sections of it publicly at Athens and possibly at Olympia. The nine books are named after the nine Muses — a division imposed later by Alexandrian scholars rather than by Herodotus himself. Cicero, in De Legibus, called Herodotus “the Father of History” (pater historiae), a title that has stuck despite centuries of qualification; ancient critics from Plutarch onwards also called him “the Father of Lies” for his willingness to include mythological material and travellers’ accounts that his more skeptical successors found implausible.

The text survived through the Byzantine manuscript tradition; the oldest substantially complete manuscripts date from roughly the 10th century CE, compiled from earlier copies whose chain of transmission goes back to ancient copies made in the late classical and Hellenistic periods. The rediscovery of classical texts in Western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries — partly through contact with Byzantine scholars — made the Histories available to Renaissance readers for the first time since late antiquity.

Herodotus’s method of including oral testimony, local legends, and his own first-hand observations alongside administrative records distinguishes him from Thucydides, his near-contemporary, who restricted himself to events he could verify. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) uses a character’s heavily annotated copy of Herodotus as a symbol of personal history threaded through public history — one of the most sustained tributes to the Histories in modern fiction.

The Oldest Manuscripts

The oldest substantially complete manuscript of The Histories — the Codex Florentinus (10th century CE), now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence — was among the Byzantine texts that shaped the standard modern edition. Herodotus’s method of explicitly attributing accounts to named sources and recording multiple contradictory versions of the same event — with markers like “the Persians say” and “I am unable to verify this” — has been recognized by contemporary historians as a sophisticated form of source criticism rather than naivety.