Histories

What It Is

Nine books of Greek prose from around 440 BC, and the first work of history in the Western world. The word comes from what Herodotus called his project: historia, meaning inquiry. His great subject is the collision between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. Before he gets anywhere near it, he means to show you the world.

So the Histories contains Egypt, Scythia, Lydia, Babylon, Libya and India. Embalmers, burial rites, marriage customs. The sources of rivers, the habits of crocodiles, the reliability of oracles, and a great many stories he heard from someone who heard them from someone else. He tells you which ones he believes. More often he tells you he is reporting what he was told and is under no obligation to believe it, a sentence that founded a discipline.

It is long. Six hundred pages and more, and it is a pleasure the whole way.

Why It Matters

Cicero called him the father of history. Plutarch called him the father of lies. Both were right, and the tension between them is why he matters. Herodotus is the first person we know of who decided the past could be investigated rather than merely sung: who gathered evidence, named his sources, set contradictory accounts side by side and let the reader judge.

He also invented ethnography, and something more valuable than ethnography: the idea that other peoples' customs are worth understanding rather than despising. He goes to Egypt and comes back convinced the Egyptians know things the Greeks do not. In the fifth century BC that is close to a moral revolution, and it is still not universally accepted.

Underneath the marvels runs the oldest political argument in the West: freedom against despotism, the citizen against the subject, the small self-governing community against the empire that can raise a million men. Herodotus wants to know what makes people willing to fight for a way of life, and what happens to power that meets no limit.

Before You Read

Twenty-five to thirty hours. Not difficult, but big. Herodotus is chatty and curious and easy company, and nothing in the sentences will trouble you.

The challenge is the sprawl and the names. Read for pleasure rather than retention; you are not being examined. Maps matter enormously here, so whatever edition you read, keep a good one at your elbow.

The first four books range across the known world; the last five turn to the war. Some readers find the ethnographic middle slower going, and skimming the longest lists on a first read costs you nothing.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. The most fluid modern English version, with an introduction and notes by Carolyn Dewald that are as good as anything written on Herodotus for the general reader. Portable, affordable, and the version to actually read. The cost: the notes are endnotes, so you will be flipping, and the maps are thin beside the Landmark's. View on Amazon →
• The Landmark Herodotus (translated by Andrea Purvis, edited by Robert Strassler, Pantheon, 2007). The reference edition: maps on nearly every spread, a chronology, a superb index, appendices by leading scholars. Nothing else makes the geography of the ancient world this clear. The cost: it is a brick, Purvis's English is serviceable rather than lively, and the marginal summaries tell you what is about to happen on every page, which flattens the surprise out of a book that is full of it.
• Tom Holland (Penguin Classics, 2013). The most fun to read. A narrative historian's English, swinging and confident, with an introduction by Paul Cartledge. The cost: colloquial to the point of anachronism, and it puts a modern voice between you and a very old one.

Take Waterfield as your text and keep the Landmark open beside it for the maps. Take Holland if you want to be swept along and are not fussy about register.

The Folio Society has produced the Histories as a fine illustrated edition. That is the one to own rather than the one to carry.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it like a traveller, not a student. Herodotus is taking you somewhere. Let him.

Do not fact-check him. Where he is wrong, and he often is, the error is itself evidence: it tells you what a curious and intelligent Greek in the fifth century BC believed the world was like, and you can get that nowhere else.

Read a book a week and let it take two months. Read the introduction afterwards; Dewald's is analytical and takes the whole work in view, and Herodotus works best on a reader who does not know what is coming.

The commonest mistake is to treat the digressions as interruptions of the main story. They are not detours from the argument. They are the argument.