There is the conversation between King Croesus of Lydia and the Athenian statesman, reformer and poet Solon, on the true nature of human happiness.

Yet as soon as one pauses and appreciates the stories for what they are one cannot but marvel at the events Herodotus relates. To the reader accustomed to a stable cast of characters and a straightforward plot with a clear beginning, middle and end, Herodotus’ Histories read like a digression from a digression from a digression. Many characters appear only once, never to be seen again.

They seem peripheral, if not entirely unrelated, to the account of the Persian Wars and their pre-history. Most of the tales have no clear link to the main story. His love of stories and storytelling, however, was notorious already in antiquity: Plutarch called him the “father of lies”. His principal aim was to explain the unlikely Greek victory against the much stronger Persian army in the so-called Persian Wars that ravaged the Greek world between 500 and 449 BCE.įor his pioneering critical enquiry into the past he was named “father of history” by Cicero. Herodotus, a Greek from the city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor (today’s Bodrum in Turkey), published his Histories sometime between 426 and 415 BCE. We have only just embarked on the Histories’ central theme – the origins of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians in the fifth century BCE – when the narrative suddenly changes tack and we find ourselves in a boudoir tale of nudity, intrigue and murder, only to veer off again when a dolphin saves the singer Arion from drowning. Too much is going on, right from the start. It is easy to see why Herodotus’ Histories may seem overwhelming.

Herodotus the histories sparknotes