The Ancients - Herodotus: The Father of History

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

What drove Herodotus to write the first great story of history? Tristan Hughes speaks with Dr. Roel Konijnendijk to uncover the world of Herodotus of Halicarnassus - the traveler, investigator, and storyteller behind The Histories.From Persian kings to Greek heroes, they explore his methods, digressions, and the quest to explain why empires rose, wars raged, and memory became history.MOREHomerListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Persian Wars: Darius, Athens and the Battle of MarathonListen on AppleListen on SpotifyWatch this episode on our YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. What Herodotus from Halicarnassus has learnt by inquiry is here set forth, in order that, so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners, and especially the reason why they warred against each other, may not lack renown. Herodotus. He's known as the father of history, immortalised through his great surviving work written 2,500 years ago.

A dramatic narrative of the Persian invasions of Greece, an attempt to explain the origins of hostility between Greeks and non-Greeks, what they called barbarians, an ethnography, exploring beliefs and legends of these foreign peoples who lived across the Mediterranean in world and beyond. It's known as the Histories, a paragon work of ancient nonfiction that has fascinated people for centuries. In this episode, we're going to explore what is known about Herodotus and some of the key themes from his histories, with our fan-favorite returning guest, Dr. Rul Caninadike. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Herodotus, the father of history.

Rool, it is great to have you back on the podcast. Welcome back. So good to be back, Tristan. Thanks for having me. You're more than welcome, and this is the second time we've done it in person. We did the Spartan warrior a couple of years ago now. Yeah, it was a while ago, actually, yeah. But here we're talking about, I guess, something related to the Greco-Persian wars, but Herodotus, he feels of all the ancient historical accounts that we have. He feels like the big one, at least with ancient Greek history.

Yeah, when we're talking about the Persian wars, I mean, it feels like exploring rooms where this is the building, right? this is basically what we're talking about. There's a lot of other sources that we can draw on when we're trying to talk about the Persians and the Persian wars, but Herodotus is the one who decided this should be a story that was worth commemorating, worth writing down in full detail. And we rely on him so much. I mean, there are parts of this whole story for which we have basically nothing about Herodotus.

And so he is the one who gives us, not just all the details, but the whole idea that this is a narrative, right? This is something that has a beginning and an end and it has a message and it has all these participants and all these actors that he describes. I mean, this is basically his idea of how to tell this story. So how does he get the name, the father of history? So it's something he's already called in ancient times, right? So this is something that's been around for a long time because he is the earliest narrative

history that survives. Now, I really want to qualify this. You can hear me sort of thinking about how I should put it. He's not the first person to conceive the idea of history, right? Obviously, there are various people in this world who are already trying to write down ways of talking about the past. And this goes right back to Mesopotamian emblem. The Babylonians, I was thinking, yeah.

Exactly, yeah. Campaign narratives and talking about what they did in each separate year, they're writing chronicles, which basically just goes year by year. This is what happened because for them, it's very important to connect that to astronomical, meteorological events, right? So there's a lot of their understanding of the world is wrapped up in understanding history. But there isn't this sense of a causal narrative. This is kind of what Herodic first sort of brings into it.

It's this idea of like, things happen for a reason. Things happen because other things have happened and because personalities have an influence on it and other forces have an influence on it. And so he's trying to construct not just a list of things that happened or specific sort of stories that are being collected by, for instance, sort of priests and sanctuaries and places like that, or noble families that are kind of collecting the history of their household. But he's trying to bring all those things together to tell a bigger story that isn't necessarily like the acts of one king or anything like that, but something that is in its conception much bigger or much more all-encompassing. And because he's the first one

to do that, whose work survives in full, we kind of see him as the person who invents this, right, who invents the idea of what history is and what it looks like. I mean, that's his significance, and we'll certainly get to his work, the histories. But before that, I'd actually like to ask more about Herodotus, the man. Do we actually know much about this figure, who he was about his life? No, no, frustratingly, no, because often with these people, I mean, the only thing that survives of them is their work. And this is also true for people like Thicydides, who comes after Herodotus, obviously,

it writes history, the Peloponnesian War. pretty much nothing about these people except what they drop into their story by themselves, where they drop in a little sort of autobiographical detail. They describe something, they'll say, oh, and I saw this myself, or, you know, and I talk to this person, and so that's how they found out. Sometimes they do this, and that will tell us a lot. And then there are some later sort of biographical accounts. We're always very shy to accept uncritically what they tell us because they're much later.

We don't know if they derive from any kind of factual information, or if they're just kind of projecting onto these figures what they want us to know. And so, you know, for earlier poets like Homer, for instance, there are quite substantial biographies that survive, and we don't believe any of that. Because these figures themselves were not the subject of history, the details of their lives were lost. So do we know at least where he came from? Does he actually come from ancient Greece? He did not come, strictly speaking, from the Greek world. It came from the Persian empire, but a Greek part of it, or a Greek and Carian part of it. He opens his histories by introducing himself. He says, I'm Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Right.

Halicarnassus is in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey. So that's Caria that you mentioned. That's Caria, right. But on the coast, you get sort of more and more Hellenized communities. And so Herodic is, while his name is obviously very Greek, sort of gift of Hira, quite a lot of people suspect that at least one of his parents was Carian. So this is the local population that is sort of interacted with the Greeks for centuries by this point.

It's a community that is ruled by the Persians, but it is locally autonomous. So there are some local rulers that govern this area who are themselves sort of Carian, but Hellenized Carian people. And so Herodos is from this community. But it seems as though his father was involved potentially in a coup in Helicarnassus or in some kind of political upheaval. So he was driven out, which means that Herodotus actually grew up in Seamus, which is very much part of the Eegean Greek world. And that's an island just off the coast from Halicanasis. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also you mentioned there in passing, which was really interesting. So the name Herodotus, so Herodotus. What did you say it meant? A gift of Hera is a very common thing with Greek proper names that they are what's called theophoric. So they carry the name of a divinity. So you have lots of names that are essentially just adaptations of like Demetrius being an adaptation of Demeter or something like that. And the very particular one that they use very often is either Doros or Dotos at the end of a divine name, which means gift of essentially.

Or that's how we interpret it anyway. So you have people called Apollodorus or Deodorus and Herodotus is another version of that. Of course. Oh, yeah. Thank you for explaining that. I had no idea. Does his exile to Samos, does that actually allow him to do a lot of traveling around the Mediterranean? I mean, do we think he's quite a well-travelled man?

He certainly is. I mean, this is where we get his autobiographical detail talking about the things that he saw, or even just sort of looking at his account and seeing which things he is able to describe in more detail. You get this sense of like, okay, there are things you saw and there are things you just heard about. And so we get a sense because he's clearly from a wealthy background, despite the fact that he was in exile, he lived a life of the leisure gentleman. So he was traveling around the Greek world quite a bit. There's always a suspicion that he spent a lot of time in Athens, which is widely assumed

because he knows so much about it. But he traveled very far around the Greek world. is involved later in life in the foundation of Thuryai, which is in southern Italy. So it's a new Greek settlement, new Greek community is being established there, and it's considered to be one of his great works to be part of that undertaking in the 440s BC. It's almost certain that we went to Skiddea, so what is now Ukraine, that he traveled into the east, he went to Egypt, he also traveled into Mesopotamia. We're not quite sure how far he got.

But there's huge parts of the Greek Mediterranean world and beyond that he saw for himself. That's quite something for an exiled Greek or the one who had been in the Persian Empire, to be able to go, it said, to Mesopotamia, to Egypt, but then to Skivia and Athens, when, I don't know if you'd have a bodyguard or something like that, but you think it's probably quite a dangerous world to do that on the seas or overland on these road routes, and yet he accomplishes it. Yeah, so on the one hand, we don't really know what that looks like, right? So we don't know if he traveled with a large entourage or with a bodyguard

or if he had someone with him to guide him. I'm a sudden the impression you get from these travelers is basically you just have your personal servants and somebody presumably to carry around your stuff. but fundamentally it is on the one hand a dangerous world that it can be quite lawless in places, especially in the areas that are not under any kind of central control or supervision. But it's also a world that's relatively open, right? So it's not like anybody's checking him at the border and saying, hold on, you can't come here. So there's quite a lot of opportunity to travel as long as you're willing to undertake those risks.

And so by the end, you say he goes to Italy, the story of the Western Greeks, Magna Gratia, so greater Greece, do we think that's where he ends his story as well? So it's not certain where he dies, actually. I think most people think that he died in Athens because some of the details that he gives towards the furthest forward in time in his work all relate to Athenian matters and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

And so it's suspected that even though he was involved in this great foundation settlement, he then traveled back to mainland Greece where he spent the last potentially decade of his life. Is this all happening in the 5th century BC? Do we know any more accurate dates about when he lived or can we just do approximations? It's really hard to know.

actually. I mean, the most common approximation is that he was born somewhere in the 480s BC. So basically between the Battle of Marathon and Xerxes invasion of Greece, he was a small child when there's this great scene that, I don't remember which scholar wrote this down, it's this great scene imagining what it was like for Herodotus as a four or five-year-old boy to watch Artemisia and the remains of her tattered detachment that had fought at Salamis sail back into the harbor at Haliccanassus. She was the queen of Haliccanassus. Exactly. And so, like, seeing that, seeing that detachment return home, you know, after its defeat and, and one wondering what happened to it, you know, what was this story? What was this about? Which I think

is a really nice image to imagine, but he would have been a little boy at the time, so who knows if he had any interest yet. But that's when he was born. And then when he died, again, not entirely sure. Some people stretch this as far back down as maybe 400, but most people I think would say it was quite a bit earlier, maybe around 430 that he passed away, or at least that is what we can derive from his work, that he was still around to see the event of 431, but then after that very quickly, we stopped being very confident about how much more he saw, and so we assumed that he might have died. This feels like that's basically all we can say about Herodotus, the man and his life,

apart from, of course, when we now get to his work, the thing that he's remembered for. Do we have any idea how long it would have taken him to compose his histories? Do we think this was his life work? Generally, yes, although we don't know how long he worked at it. So we have no idea of, like, Thucydides, who says, I started taking notes at the beginning of this work, because I knew it was going to be important, and I wrote it all the way to the end, which we don't even, you know, no one ever had. He didn't finish it.

But like, it would have been helpful if Orodotus made some kind of comment like that, but he didn't. And so what we have is essentially just, as I already mentioned, these moments in the story when he looks ahead to things that haven't happened yet at the time where he is in his narrative. It looks ahead to later events in Greek history. And we can get a sense from that of how much he saw, like how long he was around for,

and also what was presumably happening around him for him to be taking notes about these things. So it's usually assumed that this was a long-term endeavor that he was working on this for decades and that he was presenting parts of it as he went. So he was going through different cities and states and essentially saying, you want to hear the story of this or that, essentially presenting it as a piece of entertainment.

Like, you know, the rhapsodes were presenting their poetry. He was presenting his histories. And that may well have meant that he was sort of honing it and working at it and building pieces of it, building blocks of it for a very, very long time until, you know, maybe into the 430s or even beyond that. So could he have also been a bit of a celebrity, academic, traveling academic of the time?

you know, people would have, oh, Herodotis is in town, and he's telling the story of his first book in the histories or something like that. Could that potentially have been happening? May well be true, yeah. So one of the ways in which we interpret this is we get this sneer from Thucydides, who is obviously a very serious and very dry and very sort of serious-minded person who makes this little jab saying, okay, my history is a possession for all time, not as a entertainment for the moment, not as a little bit of, you know, a bit of fun at a symposium or a festival where you have these performances going on. And so from that, we usually assume, that he's talking about Rorotis there. He's talking about somebody who is seeing his history, not as a sort of didactic work that everybody should sort of digest and preserve, but rather as something that he can present, you know, as a form of entertainment.

And so it's quite likely that, like famous rhapsodes, like famous sort of performers in that period, that he might have drawn quite an audience. Well, let's explore now his work. Let's explore the histories. And does Herodotus make it clear right from the beginning? What is overarching aim? What his purpose is with this massive work?

So hopefully he's very explicit about that, right? He says exactly at the beginning why he's doing this. He says that he wants to preserve the great deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks. That is the overall thing. He thinks that there are things worth commemorating, things worth seeing and admiring, and his job is just to record it to make sure that it isn't lost, isn't forgotten. That's what he sets out to do. And then he narrows it down and says, okay, these are all the kind of things that I'm interested in,

but specifically why the Greeks and non-Greeks, the Greeks and barbarians, as he calls them, went to war with each other. So that's where he's talking about the Persian words. Do you think, does he have an agenda right from the start? Is it clear that he sees the Greeks as superior? Does he follow that view that he thinks the non-Greeks? He said you use that word barbarians. Does he seem to view them as inferior in his work?

I mean, how do you think he portrays that? Early on in Greek culture and Greek literature, barbarian doesn't have those negative connotations that it has now. That emerges later on. And so when he's talking about barbarians, I mean, the obvious sort of etymology that we're always told is like it's just referring to foreign speech, foreign language. It's not negative.

It's not pejorative. these are just foreigners. And so different translators will choose different ways of translating that barbarians, they might not use the English word barbarian. They might just say non-Greeks or they might say foreigners. Herodotus is very, very happy to acknowledge the great deeds of foreigners. As I said, that is explicit from the start. He's saying, you know, both Greeks and non-Greeks have done great things,

and I'm going to talk to you about all of them. And so he isn't interested in saying, like, oh, but the Greeks have obviously achieved more. He's actually trying to give everyone their due. This was very interesting that you mentioned there. of course, the word barbarian gets more negative connotations to it. So I'm really glad we highlighted that straight away. Another kind of big question, you've kind of mentioned it already, but I'll ask it because it's kind of more straight to the point.

Can we call the history's history? It's actually an interesting question. Obviously, the word history comes from, again, that first paragraph of the histories, where he says, these are the histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. I mean, that's how he introduces the work. But the word he uses there is Historia, which means investigations. So this is a Greek word, which is the origin of what we call history, but which at the time essentially means, you know, I went around and looked some things

up and found some things out, and that's what this is. And so we can obviously call it the histories because that's what it calls itself. But at the same time, what that means is a little bit different from what we might say a history is. He's a reporter, if it was like almost, an ancient Greek reporter in a way. Yeah, well, so there's a lot of different things that his work has been characterized as. Obviously, there is a lot of history there, sort of narrative history. There's also a lot of ethnography. There's a lot of interest in foreign lands and peoples and customs. and there is also this political dimension of trying to give peoples their due, trying to give different states and communities,

they're due trying to assess the contribution of certain individuals and their character. So there's a lot of interesting things in there that are perhaps more literary in their intention, or perhaps more political as well. And all of that kind of goes into the modern study of history as well. I mean, we really are still looking at this as one of the things that tells us how to do our job to some extent. It has all these different facets. It has all these different moments of focus.

It's very complex. And you mentioned that key word there, ethnography that I really wanted us to talk about, because I think it's so important to Herodotus' story. So do he get quite a lot of the histories? Does he go into quite a lot of detail? Exploring what might seem to him, the quite strange, the different customs and beliefs of these non-Greek peoples, across the Mediterranean pond and further?

Yeah, so he's absolutely fascinated by them. There are these huge digressions in the work. I mean, the most important ones, obviously in book two, he goes into the Egyptians in tremendous detail. Book one actually talks about the Persians quite a lot. Persian customs, religion, habits, kingship, etc. And the backstory of the Persian Empire, you know, however much you want to believe that. And then in book four, he talked about the Skidians, so the people of Central Asia that he knows through Ukraine, essentially where there are Greek settlements. And he talks, I mean, in book five, he has another big digression on the Thracians. There are lots of these different

bits of ethnography, and he applies that even internally, where he has a little piece in his work talking about the Spartans in almost the same terms, right? He's saying, oh, the Spartans, you know, obviously they're Greeks, but they're a little bit weird and here's how, you know. And there's almost explicitly like they're almost like foreigners to me in this way, you know, in particular when it comes to their royal houses and things like that. So he's interested in that too. And the whole thing is just the result of that is a narrative that is constantly interrupted with digressions where he says, oh, now I've got to tell you the origin about this. Get ready. Where was I? Oh, yes, several chapters later. Yeah, yeah. He's just so fascinated by

And so a lot of reading it is actually, it's a very nice experience in a way because you can see his enthusiasm. It's a passion project, right? It's absolutely just like, oh, and I know this one too. And these other people have told me this and you've got to know this because it's great. And it really lives up to this idea, this initial intention to say, if there is anything worth mentioning, anything worth admiring, I will tell you about it. And I'm not going to hold back. The problem is if you're interested in a sort of steady sort of narrative history that explains why things happened, it can be very frustrating because he does not just stick with his story. He does not just tell you the facts or the events one after the other.

This is an episodic narrative full of digression because each of those could have been one of those presentation pieces. Each one of those could have been like the story he told when he went to a different town and said, okay, you want to hear the story of what you guys did during the Persian Wars or how you guys got your constitution or, you know, things like that. And that's obviously part of how it came together, but it's still there as a testament to the breadth of his fascination with the world. And does he distinguish between the types of sources he uses for the information, you know,

information that he gets first-hand, information that he hears from someone else telling him that he'd heard from someone else or she'd heard from someone else, does it become clear that he kind of distinguishes the evidence that he has and how plausible he thinks it is? Yeah, so he does this actually quite a lot in the sense that Herodotus is much more explicit

than Thucydides, who is supposed to be like the better, more scientific historian, according to many modern commentators, Herodotus is much more explicit about what he's doing when he's telling his story. He will often say, where he got it, and often this is very vague,

you know, the Corinthians told me, that's not very specific, but at least he's trying to tell you, like, there are different versions that come from different places. Often he's comparing them explicitly, so this is what they say and this is what these other people say. And often he will butt in to kind of add little comments saying, like, you know, but I'm not sure I can believe this. Or, you know, but I also saw this and that actually proves it wrong. Or, you know, just using some basic logic or some other information or just to add a sort of sprinkle bit of doubt on these stories, just to be like, I'm not sure that this is actually true. And a lot of that is to some extent is relativism, right? It's this idea of when you talk to many people, you get different versions of a lot of different

stories and you will never know which one is true, right? Or you will never be able to determine whether there is a single truth or whether there's just all these different versions that suit different people, different agents. But there's also this element of, you know, do we really know? Like, who are we to say what the truth is, right? And there's explicitly some stories that try to make this point. He has a very famous sort of anecdote about how the Persian king supposedly brought together Greeks and Indians from opposite ends of his empire to essentially say, what do you do with the dead?

because apparently their habits were opposite. The Greeks burned them and the Indians ate them, supposedly. And this is obviously just a story. I know we don't really believe this, but there are obviously ways in which you can say, okay, this maybe goes back to some real origin story. And the idea is that the Persian king then told them, okay, the Greeks, now you must eat your dead and the Indians, you must burn them. And they're both completely outraged by the idea that we should do this

because they both believed very strongly that they were doing right by their ancestors and they were doing right by the deceased. And they absolutely refused to believe that any other way could be true one, but they were in direct opposition to each other. And Herodotus tells this story to kind of indicate more broadly that there are so many different ways of living in the world and there isn't a single one that is right. You also mentioned India there,

so although Horatistus doesn't seem like from what you were saying, he visited India, but he seems pretty well researched. He seems to, I mean, what do we know about the extent of his knowledge of the geography of the world at that time? Does he see India right at the edges? So he does know more than I think most of the other authors of his time. Like he has a much broader worldview, partly because of his travels and partly because that is what he's interested in.

He's interested in particular in describing the Persian Empire and all its preformity. And the Persians would have happily helped him with this because that actually corresponds a lot with their royal ideology, right? They are always stressing how many peoples they rule over, the vast extent of their empire. They are trying to express the far corners of it in order to say, like, look at this geographical span. But even for eruditis, it was very difficult to see beyond that. So when you get past the borders of the spaces and the peoples that the Persians essentially have interacted with, or the Greeks themselves, but more likely the Persian, you get into very fuzzy territory. And quite literally, you know, when he goes north inland into Central Asia, he says, okay, first there are the Skysians. But then beyond them, there's the Amazons, and beyond them, there are like people eaters, and then beyond them.

And you get this sort of increasing sort of fantastical idea of people's living in faraway places become more and more extreme and more. more divorced from what's normal and less and less reliable as an indicator of the actual ethnography of the world. And do we also get a sense then if he's more focused on the Persian Empire and the Greek world in the Eastern Mediterranean area? Does he know less than about the Western Mediterranean? I'm thinking maybe like, of course you've got Marseille, don't you? That's a Greek colony and the Carthaginians and Sicily and so on. But is he a bit less knowledgeable about further west, the further west he goes?

Actually, he enumerates the peoples of North Africa all the way down to the Atlantic. It's just that a lot of that, again, is become more and more fantastical as you go. So obviously, Greeks living in Libya and he knows the Carthaginians, and in that sense, we have quite a bit of information. He talks about the chariot riders of the Nassimones and people like that, right? Exactly. Yeah. So these are people that Greeks and Carthaginians and Persians have interacted with.

And so in that sense, he knows something about them that we can trace back to a source, you know, potentially. But then you get further on and on, and you get all sorts of peoples that he describes that, you know, people of the Atlas Mountains and things like that, which he doesn't know anything much about them. He just knows that the world extends to the Straits of Gibraltar, and so he has to sort of people it in some way. And then when you're talking about Europe, there is almost nothing like that.

I mean, the Greekssters are fundamentally not very interested and knowledgeable about inland Europe. So they don't go very far north beyond the settlements on the sea that you mentioned on Massilia, Emporion in Iberia and a couple of other places. And he mentions actually this one Samian trader who went all the way to essentially Bayetica, right, the Roman province. So he went beyond the pillars of Hercules. So out into the Atlantic and then traded with a kingdom that had never been opened up, essentially, to Greek trade.

Is this present-day Portugal area? So this southern Spain, right? So, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the name escapes me now, the actual Greek name. But fundamentally, he's trading with this kingdom that no one's ever touched. And so he came back. Tartesos? It is Tartesos, right?

Mysterious Tartesos. Right. So he arrives in this place Tartesos and makes it killing, essentially, because they'd never interacted, never traded with the Greeks. And so he got to sell his cargo for immense prices. And so he says that's one of the people who came back with the biggest hole ever, right? So he's interested in people who are sort of trying to push those boundaries, but he himself struggles to articulate that.

And there's this really interesting anecdote where he clearly shows the extent of his knowledge and the limits of his knowledge and the extent of his ignorance. When he says that north of the Thracians, there's the Danube, the Istor. And you can't live north of there because of bees. Bees. Bees. All the things. Swarms of killer bees.

As soon as you touch the northern bank of the Danube, you're done. He will be taking no further. questions at this time. If you wanted to know what kind of bees these are, Herodicus doesn't know. What are you also mentioned in passing, the Amazons, and we recently did do an episode with David Braun all about the Amazons in Greek mythology, and he mentioned the story in Herodotus about Herodotus about how Herodotus links a particular Sidian people to the Amazons and Amazon women, the Saromatai, I think, the Salmatians. So is Herodotus? He's not afraid at some points to talk about Greek mythology and link it to actual historical people to the ethnographies of

certain non-Greek peoples. Yeah, in fact, that's how he starts his story, right? So the thing about his narrative is that he struggles at first to kind of know where to start the story of Greeks coming into conflict with non-Greeks, right, coming into conflict with the Persian. But what he chooses to do at the very beginning is to say, like, there was always this kind of conflict because you have all these stories that come from myth, essentially, of abductions between Greeks and Asians. So Phoenicians will sail to Greece and abduct some princess in Argos, or the Greeks obviously sail to Phoenicia or to the coast of Lydia, and they abduct some people there.

And these are the kind of stories that he thinks are sort of the ultimate beginning, that there's always this sense of, you know, Tifrat, and there's an injustice been done, and instead of trying to negotiate and arbitrate that conflict, they tried to kind of do it back at them, and that sort of escalates. And so he says the ultimate reason why Greeks and Persians went to war is that when the Asiatics did it again, when they took Helen from Sparta and took her to Troy, the Greeks escalated, but he went to war. And that is ultimately what started this sort of cycle of injustice, because they are the ones who said, okay, well, we can't just let this go.

We have to actually do massive violence to you. And that starts this cycle of essentially Greeks and peoples from Asia doing massive violence to each other in retaliation. And so how does he therefore structure his book? You already mentioned the big digress. And of course, we can't go into absolutely every story today, or we need several podcast episodes, I think, and too much of your time. But how does he overarchingly give us an overview of how he structures the whole histories and how he lays it out? So he's really interested in origins, as I said. So he starts with that, and that means the origin of the Persian Empire, first of all.

So it's book one. Yeah. So it's absolutely involved in like, who is Cyrus the Great? What is he doing? How does he come into contact with the Greek world? Because, of course, from Cyrus onward, you have Greeks living under the Persian Empire, so under Persian rule. And he's in interesting how that came about. And so that's the first beginning for him. And then he has to start telling the story of all the different peoples that are encountered that way, and that's where he has all this sort of... It still progresses chronologically forward slowly, right? You still start talking about later events in the history of this period. But he's taking his time because he really wants to populate this world before he starts bringing out the conflict.

But does he also then talk about people who we might immediately think from Greek mythology like Cresis, like Cresis, like kind of the King Cresus of Lydia, who's actually a historical figure? So he's probably a good source for someone like Cresus at the same time, Rich as Creece. You know, I'm already simplifying the sense. I say he starts with Persia. He starts with creases, right? That is his, the first story is the rise of the Lydian kingdom, which goes back to the 7th century BC, and then the Lydian kingdom provokes the Persians. Then he has to start talking about the Persians. So the Persians come in from that side, and then you see all these other people, I mean, everybody else that is becoming, there's going to be a big player later on

as introduced early. Also Athens and Sparta, you get this kind of little forward-looking, like, anecdotes about their early origins as well. So there's actually quite a lot going on. I'm always having to kind of simplify this in one way or another. It starts to the Lydians, then the Persians, and then he starts to sort of progressively populate this world while he's also talking about bellicrities of Seamus and other figures who increase this kind of intense conflict between Greeks and the Aegean and the Persians. And then eventually, essentially he moves towards, firstly, obviously through the early Persian king Cyrus, then Cambyses, and then you have to talk about Egypt. And then he comes to Darius. And then, of course, you have to talk about the

Skittians, because the Darius crosses into Europe and invades Skidthia. But that is when he gets to the actual meat of it, which is from book 5 on which is about the halfway point, he starts talking about the Ionian Revolt. And this is the moment when a number of these Greek states in Western Asian minor rebel against the Persians, and this essentially brings this increasing desire for retaliation and revenge and further expansion. It brings it down onto the Greek. So it focuses the Persians on the Greek world, and this is what sets in motion this series of events, which is the Ionian Revolt, the Invasion of Marathon, which is in book six. And then Xerxes invasion, which covers book 7, 8, 9.

So as much of the ethnography being done by the time you get to book 5, so he said he's kind of covered the origins and the stories of these different peoples that the Persians encounter and with the Greeks as well, and then it is more laser focus on the Greco-Persian walls that existed just before Horridges. There's no laser focus in Herodotus. I mean, this is really not how he goes about it. No, so it's actually then that you get, oh, he comes back and says, oh, actually, there's a lot of other stuff that happened in, you know,

with Spartans and Athenians. in the meantime, so I've got to tell you about that. And then also whenever anybody comes into the narrative, like the Thracians that's the beginning of book five, and you also get these moments where, for instance, the Greeks send people out to Sicily, where there are a lot of Greek communities, and they ask them, will you help us against this coming invasion? And then, of course, he has to talk about what's been going on in Sicily. And so he starts talking about the denominate tyrants. And these kinds of things are, you know, they just pop up. And as they become relevant, he will talk about them. And so he's never done. He's never done giving you ethnographic details. He's never done

giving you the backstories of political systems and individuals. He's never done telling you about things that might happen later that are irrelevant to the story that show the kind of aftermath or the consequences of these actions. There are some stretches of the story that are more straightforward, especially in the later books, especially from book 789 when he's narrating Xerxes invasion. A lot of that is more straightforward. But even then, if you're looking for that one bit of eruditis where you're like, I remember he talked about this one thing at one point, I mean, good luck finding it by just looking for

in the chronologically obvious position because it very likely isn't there. Is he also a really important source for you or for any experts when trying to understand more about ancient Sparta in this period, not just during the Greco-Persian wars, but also before as well. Because you have other sources later like Plutag,

the famous Spartan Mirage, the creation of what the Spartans were believed to have been in these great warriors and so on. But is Herodotus a more reliable source for understanding more about the Spartans in this period? So he's the main source for the Spartan in this period. period, really. I mean, you have the Spartan poets in the archaic period, which tell us quite a lot,

and you have quite a bit of archaeology in the 6th century in particular, but then that kind of dries up around the time of the Persian Wars. And there's not a huge amount of stuff from Sparta during the classical periods of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. And so you really need these people who give you this sort of moment, this little beacon in the fog, of saying, like, okay, this is a time at which I actually investigated the Spartans, and this is what I found out. And obviously, these are still outsiders talking about them, but they are still, you know, capable of finding out quite a bit. And so it's Herodotus talking about Sparta in this period, early 5th century. And then we kind of have to wait for maybe not even Thucydides, who doesn't

know all that much about Sparta, but for instance, Xenophon in the 4th century, who tells us a lot more in detail. And so Herodotus is one of those great beacons when we were interested in Sparta, and he shows us what it was like in the 5th century, for which we have very little else. So it's actually really, really helpful, not least because of his ethnographic interest, because he takes an interest in Sparta that goes beyond just what they did. And he tries to find out something about the story of how they got to to being the leaders of the Greek world around the time of the Persian Wars, which is invaluable. Are there things that he finds particularly peculiar about the Spartans compared to other

Greeks? He mentioned doesn't seem that he pays other Greek cities, their cultures and traditions, as much attention as the Spartans. And is there a key reason for that in what they did and how they acted? Yeah, so it's very interesting. He's very interested in Spartan kingship in particular, because that is something the Spartans have that most other Greek communities don't. I mean, you get some kings in Cyrene, for instance, in Libya, and you, you

you get kings in, or maybe they're tyrants, maybe they're kings in the Greeks of the Bosperin kingdoms or Crimea. But in mainland Greece, kings have gone out of style. And so he's looking at the Spartans thinking, oh, this is curious. Like, why do you have it like this? And there's all sorts of traditions surrounding the kingship that he can describe because other Greeks just don't know them, don't have them. But you also can really tell that his way of telling the history of the Spartans in this period

is not a history of political campaigns and motives and policies and conquests and sieges and battles. There is some of that, but most of that history, most of the things he's able to tell us, are essentially dynastic stories, right? So there are stories about how someone came to be born after a long period of infertility in a marriage, or how someone was exiled after a conflict between their rival king, things like that. And these stories seem very much like sort of the court stories that we hear about from the Persian Empire. And they suggest that Herodotus's sources for Sparta were very much with these royal households maintaining something of a history of what had gone on with them, which he sort of weaves into his more general narrative about Greek affairs.

If we go to the court stories of the Persians next and kind of focus on the Persians in Herodotus' histories, does it feel that he really delves into those fascinating details of some of the more intrigue parts of the stories? Yes, no, his stories of certain Persian kings and several narratives about the deaths of some of them, and some of them really having pretty brutal deaths, and he really goes into that. Yeah, so you're always a little bit worried about Herodotus already giving us this kind of image of the Persians that the Greeks really reveled in, right? This idea of these despots with unlimited power who are clearly sort of corrupted by this, right, who are turned into these men of great sort of lust and violence and excess and indifference to the lives of their subjects. He really does

indulge in that in some cases, but there's very much this sense of narrative balance. Like, there are good kings and bad kings. There is very much this pattern where Cyrus is great, Cambyses is a monster. Darius is great, Xerxes is a monster. There's very much that sort of back and forth between, you know, the fathers are good, the sons are bad, which also recurs in his stories about Greek tyrants. So there's always like the first one is actually good and stable and helping people. And the second one is, you know, the despotic excesses of luxury, decadence and violence. So there's often that kind of pattern that you see in those stories repeated in the stories about the Persian court as well. So that's one aspect of it.

And the other part is, as I said, I mean, he is really actually quite interested in Persia and in giving Persians they're due for their achievements. And so even figures like Xerxes, although they commit a lot of horrors, which may or may not be part of how they profile themselves, they're also presented as people who are really quite keen to do the right thing. They're driven by forces beyond their control. They're also very interested in the things they do. They're always investigating. They're always looking at things and always asking about things. And so it's not a single-minded profile of, you know, this sort of cartoon villain that he gives of any of these rulers. He is sort of interested in creating fully fleshed out characters. I think, who are to some extent fated to be who they are. And so if, generally speaking, it seems that Herodotus is quite a good opinion of Darius the first, Darius the Great, the Persian king, doesn't have a good opinion of Xerxes. I must then ask, does Herodotus treat the portrayal of the Persians differently in the first Greco-Persian War compared to the second one? The first Greco-Persian War, of course, is that expedition.

When Darius is on the throne, the second one is the great one under Xerxes. thermopylae and so on. Does Herodotus portray the Persian forces and the Persian army differently between the two wars because of the monarchian control? I mean, it's a really interesting question, actually. I think there's just not enough detail in his account of the first of those expeditions to say, okay, he would have done it differently if he had given all of those features. The fact is simply that he spends so much more time on Xerxes invasion force and so much more time on the leadership of that force and its failing. And so when we hear about the marathon campaign, you do hear some of the way that these

Persian commanders, deities and artoprenes who commanded that expedition, how they managed things, how they conducted themselves. But you don't hear much about how their forces are composed, and you don't hear that much about what kind of councils they had among themselves, which would get much more for Xerxes. So this is obviously more distant in time for Herodicus, but it's also just not the meat of his account, so it's not the main event. And so he is, to some extent, holding back some of those later conflicts he's really going to spin out. Like, why does Xerxes attack the Greeks? Why does he decide to do the things he does and do it the way he's he does it. That is really where Xerxes comes to the four in book 789 as the main character.

And so it is the second Greco-Persian War book 7, 8, and 9. Is that really the true climax of Herodotus' work? How does he portray? Sorry, it's such a big question, and we don't have time to go into all the details. But how does he portray the second Greco-Persian War in his histories? So it's this huge campaign narrative, right? And this is the first time we actually get a detailed campaign narrative in any source. So Marathon in 490 BC is the first battle for which we have an actual description, right? The description of what happens and how it was won. There is nothing... But the champions, but the Spartans are those...

I mean, but you don't know how it was won, right? So you get battles that are mentioned. No, this is a very good point. Like, obviously, there are battles that are mentioned and the outcome is mentioned, but you don't get any sense of like, okay, how are the troops deployed, what kind of decisions that the generals make, what happened in the thick of it? You don't really get much of that. So there is no earlier battle for which we have any account like that, and we mostly rely on sort of references and poetry about what battle was like in general, rather than the specifics of, you know, what was done in order to win a particular battle, defeat a certain opponent, solve a certain tactical problem, whatever.

Marathon is the first one of those. And then the Persian wars, or rather the invasion of Xerxes is the one where we get this full detailed account of like, okay, how do they march, how do they build their camps, where do they decide to move, what are their options in terms of geographical advances, and then what do they do when they encounter the enemy? And, you know, the Battle of Thermopylae, first of all, which is described in almost excruciating detail, you know, down to the final blows. But then you have the Battle of Salamis, similarly on the sea, Artemisian first and then Salamis. And then finally, you have the Battle of

Latia, which is, you know, in terms of Greek history, this is the longest, most detailed battle description that we get, right? It goes on for such a long time. All of the different moves and counter moves across 12 days of fighting across this plane. And so you get so many little details in vignettes about what it was like to be there. This is clearly his virtuoso piece, right? He's really talking about a decisive moment in Greek history and he wants to give it all the space it can. I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary. It's such an interesting narrative, isn't it? And following that with the end of Frodozis's histories, does he finish it there and then, or does he then almost kind of do a conclusion? I don't know, wrapping up his work or saying exactly what happened next,

how the Greco-Persian wars have ended, Greeks are victorious. I say Greeks, Lucy, because I know they were Greeks on the Persian side as well. But does he have an almost an end note or a conclusion after that? So it's actually the ending of Herodotus' histories is enigmatic since ancient times. People don't really get why he ends it the way he does. So what he does is he describes the aftermath of the Battle of Latia and then Mikale, where the Persian fleet is decisively defeated, which supposedly happened on the same day. So this is this big decisive moment. But then there are further campaigns after that.

So obviously after that, the Allied Greeks who were in this fleet start to retaliate and start to push back Persian control. And this is kind of the start of this story that Thucydides picks up, which is the story of the Athenian Empire, right, on the rise. And so there is that moment of looking forward At least one more campaign season, right? He goes on to 478 and describes the campaign on land to subject the Thebans

and the campaign on the sea to start liberating parts of the Greek world that have been subjected to the Persians. And he ends with this brutal scene of a siege of Sestos where the Athenians really commit all sorts of atrocities on the Persian garrison. That's on the Dardanelles area. That's right, on the Hellespons, essentially. So this is strategically super important for the Athenians.

This is where they get their grain from. So they actually really care about this area and liberating it or liberating or taking back control of it. And so they really commit some atrocities of their own, which has often been interpreted as a sort of mirror image of like, look, you know, if you object to imperialism, if you object to a figure like Xerxes behaving as he pleases, you shouldn't then sort of do the same thing. But the lure of imperialist power is kind of drawing you in that direction. That's usually how it's interpreted. But there are different ways that we might see this. But then he ends with, you know, there are some vagaries of Xerxes as travel back to Asia where he gets. into this spat because he's trying to have an affair with somebody who's married to a relative

or the daughter of that person. It's a really complex little sort of court story that kind of maybe anticipates the murder of Xerxes some years later, but more likely, it's just kind of looking ahead to the decadence and the sort of corruption within the Persian court, which is also a theme that obviously runs throughout. And then, weirdly, he has a little flashback to Cyrus the Great receiving someone in his court. And this seems to be a sort of general programmatic statement about what he's trying to say. There is this person who supposedly was trying to lure Cyrus into further conquest and said, you can conquer these places because the people who live there, they live in luxury, and so they are easy prey and you can just take them. And Cyrus objects to this

and he says, I don't think we should do this because we are living in Iran, which is a hard place, right? We are living in Paris and it's arid and it's dry and it's high up and it's a hard place. And so we've become a hard people, right? We've become very tough. We could easily conquer these people who live in, you know, Mesopotamia, where it's fertile and where life is, you know, abundant and rich. But we would start to become like them. We would conquer them, enjoy the luxuries that they possess, and we'd take them for ourselves, and we would go soft. And the result of that is that we would become prey ourselves, that we would become corrupted

by this. And this is one of the things that Herodic believes, you know, that he believes that sort of governs the cycles of history, that people from difficult places like Greece will be victorious in war against people who are not as tough, not as, not as hardened by their conditions, they will conquer them, they will become soft in turn, and then another hard people will come in and will conquer them. And so this is kind of what he envisions as a warning to the Greeks. Like, this has happened to the Persians, and it could happen to you. Right. I love, although all the details that Herodotus has and all the stories he has,

that there are still those overarching messages that you can understand about Herodotus' personal beliefs, given that Herodotus goes into such detail about the Greco-Persian Wars, Does he give a sense of whether he thinks one particular city state or one particular Greek peoples was more involved in defeating the Persians than the others? Like, for instance, in World War II, you get a lot of Americans saying, oh, the US were the main ones who won World War II or the Soviets, or sometimes the Brits, get involved as well. Does Herodotus come down on one side or the other? He does very explicitly. I mean, it's very interesting when you consider this in light of his framing at the beginning saying,

I'm going to talk about all sorts of cities because we don't know which ones are going to be great later on, right? there's always big cities have fallen and small cities have become great. And so there's always that kind of thing in the background of like, you know, fortunes vary. But in the Persian wars, he says, you know, there's two of these leading states in the Greek world who took on this alliance, obviously, you know, who led it. It's the Spartans and the Athenians. The Spartans obviously claim that they did the most because they won this great victory at Latia. But according to Herodicus, and he's almost shy about it. He says, I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this. But it is because the Athenians committed everything they had, you know, even after their

city was taken and raised to the ground, they evacuated their people, they fought on. And because they were committed to this fight, they're the ones who brought it to a close. So he says it's the Athenians and the Athenian willingness to serve under Spartan leadership and to fight on after everything had been lost. That is what made the difference. Wow. But I do also like that he says, lots of people will disagree, but this is my thoughts, having done all the research. It's interesting to get his first-hand beliefs. It's his thoughts. It's interesting and quite refreshing to hear, quite frankly. Absolutely. People give Herodicus a bad rep for all sorts of reasons. I mean, especially the size of the Persian army. He's often gets mocked for this. I thought about asking

you that question, but I think that's not. Yeah, but it's specifically I want to bring that up because, you know, he is the first person to criticize that narrative. He actually says, when he goes through this, towards the end, when he gets a total of over five million, he says, but I don't really know if I should believe this because I don't think they could have fed that many. So when you're looking for criticism of erotus, you've got to start with Herodotus, and I love that about him. I mean, he's just very open about his, it is thinking. It's just, it's just, It just creeps in every time. One word, two word, three word answer.

I mean, what do we actually think was the size of the Persian army? If we also include, then, you know, attendance, people manning the fleet, soldiers, maybe 300,000. There's no, yeah, 300,000 words, you mean? There's no way. There's no way to say this in a short way. But all of these armies, you have to at least double the size of the fighting for us just to include, and this is what Herodotus does as well as simple math. You know, basically just doubles the numbers to give a rough approximation of how many people

are there just to support the effort right there, just camp followers and servants and attendance and entertainers and whatever else. So we're definitely talking about an enormous number of people, but whether we should be closer to 200,000, 300,000, I mean, we really don't know. And there's not going to be any additional evidence that it's going to solve this decisively for us. It's certainly going to be more in that ballpark, though,

than Herodicus is $5.5 million. Okay, good. That's a bit of a salve relief for me, because I said a quarter of a million and I was interviewed about it a few months ago. So roughly around them, maybe. I said, probably about right. Let's just go with that.

It's fine. As long as you'd not mean, it was 250,000 fighting men, because that is obviously a big distinction to make it. Thank you for that. Lastly, as a scholar of the Greco-Persian Wars and, you know, someone, you know, main interest is on classical Greece and military history in particular, how do you personally, how do you view Herodotus as a source and also just having studied him for so many years? I mean, he's lovely. He's one of the ones who's really fun to read because

he's always going to give you something else. And he's one of those people who, every time you go back to him and read him again, you'll find something. You forgot he said, but it's actually in there. And there's so much wealth of detail and information in every single passage that he offers. And you see scholars doing this all the time. They come back to eroticus and they'll find something that completely overturns some of the way that they've interpreted things for a long time. There is so much you can do with it. It's such a rich source. On the other hand, it's also immensely frustrating because of all the things that you would like him to add that he doesn't,

or that you'd like him to talk about in more detail that he doesn't, or where you would like him to have done a little bit more to try and get some kind of hard evidence, some kind of documentary evidence. You know, sometimes he'll cite, but Thucydides does as more often cite inscriptions and other documentary evidence that we find a little bit more reliable than the hearsay of of this noble family against that noble family or stories about the Persian court. But these kinds of things, I mean, you can obviously say it could have been better. That is always possible for every piece of history.

But if this is the first complete one that we have, I mean, we are so lucky. This is such an immense thing to possess. He's an incredible source there, said the father of history. and I'm really glad that we can finally dedicate an entire episode to Herodotus. Indeed, we didn't really cover it, but there's Herodotus in Egypt and all the detail we go to in Egypt. That's worthy of another episode in its own right. I mean, there is more, so much more to Rodotus' story, but you've given us a wonderful introduction overview to this incredibly important ancient Greek historian. And Ruhl, it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

It's been a great pleasure, Tristan. Thanks so much. Well, there you go. There was the fan favourite and ever popular Dr. Rool Canaanideke, returning to the show to talk all the things Herodotus and his histories. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the ancients, please make sure you're following the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to history, for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.