Histories (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) [Paperback]

Herodotus (Author), George Rawlinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 1999

Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining. Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the Battle of Salamis fought between sausage-sellers? Which is the oldest language in the world? Why did Leonidas and his 300 Spartans spend the morning before the battle of Thermopylae combing their hair? Why did every Babylonian woman have to sit in the Temple of Aphrodite until a man threw a coin into her lap, and how long was she likely to sit there? And what is the best way to kill a crocodile? This wide-ranging history provides the answers to all these fascinating questions as well as providing many fascinating insights into the Ancient World.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Donald Lateiner's Introduction to The Histories

"Herodotus sometimes writes for children and sometimes for philosophers," said the greatest of modern historians, Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-1788, chapter 24, note 54). Casual and serious readers alike have loved the first historian, the inventor of history, for his narrative genius and tragi-comic view of human events, great and small. He has been equally criticized and damned by professional historians, ethnographers, and geographers for errors of fact and method, and even for his Greek. Cicero was not the first to call him "the father of lies." The German scholar Detlev Fehling (see "For Further Reading") actually avers that he never left Greece or perhaps even his Anatolian study, copying others' lies and travelers' tales, inventing claims of visits to exotic places and familiar monuments, and fabricating hundreds of alleged sources.



Whereas other ancient historians who followed his large footsteps narrowed their scope in terms of topic (Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust), time (Theopompus, Livy, Tacitus), or territory (the local historians, such as those of Athens, the Atthidographers, or the chroniclers of other poleis), Herodotus Homerically encompasses vast realms in topic, time, and territory. After leaving his birthplace, Halicarnassos on the western edge of Asia Minor (Anatolia, now roughly Turkey), he sailed on various voyages, perhaps as a merchant, south to Egypt, east to Sidon, north to the Hellespont and Black Sea, and west to Italy and Sicily. He then traveled inland in all these directions, although one cannot always separate his reports based on personal visits from what he heard or thought he heard, through interpreters who were sometimes comparatively informed and sometimes no better than local loungers eager to help a tourist. He saw the earth beneath his feet and existing structures at Delphi, Marathon, and Delos. He traveled to the edges of the known and unknown inhabited world in Egypt and Italy, and around the Black Sea. He heard about Spain, Babylon (in modern Iraq), Afghanistan, cold Britain, and the hot Sahara. This last region, described with wonder and some disparagement in the latter half of book IV, is crucial to the story of Ondaatje's protagonist in The English Patient, a Central European explorer of North Africa. Herodotus was his guide in those vast spaces, and he was never separated from this talisman, a kind of Bible for his restless search in life.



Herodotus—the inquirer, evaluator, and judge (a combination of the three is what "historian" means in Greek)—tells us what he observed. He saw pyramids, inscriptions, and other natural and artificial alterations of the environment. He heard facts and fictions from combatants, travelers, and survivors. He gathered legends and anecdotes from oral traditional tales. And he surmised certain things to be possible or probable from his own penetrating critiques of humans, their normal and odd behaviors, and their environment. Some of his alleged errors turn out to be misunderstandings of what he wrote. Some real errors (such as his disbelief [4.42] in the possibility of Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa) derive from his honest mistakes in a young and illiterate world without prose books—his was one of the first and certainly the most ambitious work of research to his day.

Notwithstanding the somewhat exceptional case of the Athenians and the unavailability of scribal records of the Eastern autocracies, his world possessed few public records, no libraries or databases, only many personal and parochial biases and foreign tongues. His sources and source materials include Egyptian, African, Persian, Phoenician, Scythian, Celtic, and Ethiopian as well as Greek information. For one exotic example, his account of gold-digging, furry giant ants in the northeastern corner of the Persian Empire (Pactyike; 3.102-105) may have misreported, through many intermediary sources, the habits of a larger animal. The large burrowing marmots of the Dansar plateau, which overlooks the Indus in Kashmir, may have given rise to Herodotus' bizarre account of mining insects; see Michel Peissel's The Ants' Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the Himalayas (1984) and an article by Marlise Simons ("Gold-Digging Ants' Mystery Seems Solved, After Bugging Scholars for Centuries"; New York Times, November 25, 1996). In "The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography," the eminent student of ancient historiography Arnaldo Momigliano wrote: "If we had to give an a priori estimate of . . . success in writing history by Herodotus' method, we should probably shake our heads in sheer despondency."

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd (December 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1853264660
• ISBN-13: 978-1853264665
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,295,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Great Authors are Great Books apt to come forth!, December 4, 2007

By 

Adrian Ion (Plano, Texas, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Histories (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Hardcover)

This is the first time that I ever studied Herodotus. Nevertheless, Donald Lateiner's excellent introduction allowed even a novice like me to gain an understanding of the marvelous world which Herodotus describes, of the historian himself and of his methods, and of the lasting influence of 'The Histories.' The translation by G.C. Macauly is very lyrical and a true joy to read (I cannot, unfortunately, compare it to other translations). Donald Lateiner provides a list of the other major translations of 'The Histories' for those who are interested. As for 'The Histories' themselves, what can I possibly say: they are the most comprehensive view of ancient Europe and the Middle East ever penned. Here are wonders to amaze the soul, forgotten realms and far away lands, tales of the common people as well as the greatest kings, and philosophies to enlighten and transcend the mind. History at its finest. Herodotus not only wrote the first prose narrative, but also one of the best!!! I wish I could give it an infinite number of stars- a mere five is simply not enough!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The gall of it all, April 21, 2010

By 

Paul Lawrence "'EJL'" (Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Histories (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) (Paperback)

Indeed the gall. The gall of an academic amoeba such as I daring to review a work such as this is quite ridiculous. How could I for a moment think I could recreate in words the excitement I felt when I read this for the first time back in high school. The fact that this work took my fancy far more than the rubbish the English department was foisting onto me in terms of actual having some fluidity, emotion, action and adventure to its brew. For this work does indeed transport the reader to a different time and place entirely and while obviously much of that is down to the translator the actual original must also have been a great read. And that is very much the crux of the matter - the fact that you can read this tome on a number of levels, either you can switch your brain on `full suction' in an academic manner and really pore over the thing like an archaeological vulture or you can sit back and just enjoy reading a selection of first hand accounts, imaginative retelling of earlier tales or mere repetition of hearsay.

Inappropriate is another word that springs to mind when I think of how wrong it is that I should try to review this item when, ultimately, I am incapable of providing you with a blow by blow analysis of the historical importance of this work by the father of history. Suffice to say that it's still a standard text throughout a number of school systems and surely has provided fertile grounds for armchair historians and yes, even travel buffs, for many years given the almost fantastical episodes and details that flow from the page and one is force to wonder if the father of lies himself didn't have a sparkle in his eye as he wrote his masterwork all those centuries ago. Not to mention how it has been trawled through with a fine tooth comb by so many of the worlds historical scholars. One can only imagine how many university students have gone cross eyed while studying this gift from antiquity into the wee small hours.

Presumptuous is probably an apt word that others may use in reference to me if I were to post a review on this product given how my own feeble prose is so inadequate for the task of trying to convey the importance of this work to our understanding of not just the cut and dried aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world but also the more intangible attitudes and social mores of the time. And certainly I would have to admit to myself my presumptuous nature if I were to dare to wholeheartedly recommend this to anybody with an overarching interest in antiquity, in classical fiction such as Jason and the Argonauts and the like and indeed anybody enamoured of history. I won't recommend it however to history students. After all, you'll probably be assigned it as required reading. And if you aren't, read it during a break between semesters for your own enjoyment.

All up I trust that you, dear reader, understand why I won't review this work due to my inability to do the product justice.