Herodotus

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History , Objectivity and Poetry : The Ambivalent Legacy of Herodotus

Herodotus is one of the most famous historians of the ancient world . He traced , among other things , the wars between Greece and Persia , and attempted to create a universal history ' for the Hellenes . In inveterate traveller , he was known for his first hand accounts of complex ideas such as the Egyptian economy and his objective account of Greek military development . He was a true empiricist , in that his histories are developed from the collection of materials and

observation . For this reason alone is his fame warranted

For most of his life , he resided in Athens at a time where some of the greatest minds of this period , such as Sophocles , were active . The Athenian economy was prosperous and cvould well afford to support a long list of great Greek minds . Hence , a great degree of cross-fertilization was present . The beginnings of Greek science through the Ionian speculation , poetry and epic and rationalist history all developed from this Athenian matrix

For Herodotus , history was primarily both personal and ethnic . The notion of a truly ecumenical history ' was one that took into account not only the military battles between Greece and Persia , but the fact that these antagonists represented two different nations , two different civilizations , one Hellenic , the other Asian . While Herodotus lived in an era where myth was giving way to science (to put it simply Herodotus still was apart from that school of history that strung...