Classical Greece, 5th century BCE

The Histories

Name: The Histories
Author: Herodotus of Halicarnassus

Herodotus's enquiry into the wars between Greece and Persia — the earliest work of history in the Western tradition, the fullest narrative source for the Achaemenid empire, and a text the platform reads both for what it preserves about Persia and for the Greek lens through which it sees it.

By Herodotus of Halicarnassus · c. 440–425 BCE

What it is

The Histories of Herodotus is the earliest surviving work of history in the Western tradition — a long prose enquiry (historiē, "investigation") into the causes and course of the wars between the Greek cities and the Persian empire, culminating in the Persian invasions of 490 and 480–479 BCE. In nine books, it ranges across the whole known world, weaving ethnography, geography, anecdote and narrative into a single account of how Greeks and "barbarians" came into conflict.

Historical context and structure

Herodotus, from Halicarnassus on the Anatolian coast — itself under Persian rule in his lifetime — wrote in the mid-fifth century BCE, within living memory of the Persian Wars. For the platform's purposes the work's most important feature is its structure: the first half is essentially a history of the rise of the Achaemenid empire. Book 1 covers Cyrus and the conquest of Lydia and Babylon; Books 2–3 Cambyses and Egypt and the accession of Darius; Books 4–6 Darius's empire, the Scythian campaign and the Ionian Revolt; Books 7–9 Xerxes's great invasion and the Greek victories at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. It is, in effect, the only continuous narrative history of the early Persian empire that antiquity has left us.

What it argues

Herodotus's enquiry is organised around the encounter between freedom and empire — between the self-governing Greek cities and the vast, ordered, monarchical Persian world. He is genuinely curious about Persia, often admiring, and preserves an enormous amount about Achaemenid administration, custom and ideology that no other narrative source supplies: the satrapal organisation, the tribute lists, the royal road and the imperial post, the debate (Book 3) on the best form of government among the Persian conspirators. The platform reads the work under empire and diversity as much as under the history of the wars.

Reception and the question of bias

Herodotus has been called both "the father of history" and "the father of lies" since antiquity. The platform reads him with that double reputation firmly in view. He is a Greek writing for Greeks, and the Persian Wars are, in his telling, the triumph of free men over a despot's slaves — a framing that shaped the entire later Western image of Persia as the archetype of "Oriental despotism." Where he can be checked against the Achaemenid record (Behistun, the Persepolis tablets) he is sometimes strikingly accurate and sometimes schematic or wrong. The discipline the platform applies — read Persia through Greek eyes — is to use Herodotus as the indispensable narrative he is, while reading his interpretive frame as a Greek artefact rather than a Persian fact.

Source discipline and citing

Cite by book and chapter (e.g. Hdt. 1.108; Hdt. 7.8 for Xerxes's war council). The standard Greek text is Hude's Oxford Classical Text. Note that Herodotus's Histories is distinct from the later Histories of Tacitus and of Polybius. See our Sources page.

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