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Herodotus: Peoples
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Clearly, Herodotus was a well read and well traveled man, but no one could create such a work out of nothing. What was the well from which this wealth of knowledge was drawn? What sources did Herodotus use to create such a diverse and colorful History? What Herodotus learned from the people with whom he spoke to while on his travels he undoubtedly called upon while constructing his work, but he ... drew on the collective learning of all those who had gone before him. The fifth century BC marked the beginning of a period when records and genealogies were being "ferreted out,"<52> and while he was at the vanguard of that movement, it is clear that Herodotus did not move alone.
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During his life, Herodotus probably told his stories in front of large numbers of people in Greek cities. He may have been paid money for this. He is now most famous for his writings about the wars between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states. He told the story from the Greek side, although the war was mostly finished when he was still a child.
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Despite the obvious legends and myths that Herodotus discovered while in Scythia, he ... explored truly historic sites. The forts which Darius constructed to secure his advance into Greece were still in existence when Herodotus visited them. Similarly, correspondence between the Scythian kings and the Persian emperors was still in the collective memory of the peoples there and had great significance on the History Herodotus was to write.
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The Troglodyte Ethiopians provide an example of how Herodotus and the Greeks were willing and able to see quite fundamental differences between their own language and those of other peoples, and so to go to extremes in dehumanizing them. As well as the Troglodytes, we ... hear of the Atarantes, the only 'anonymous' people of whom we know (4.184.1), in that they have no personal names.[82] In other ways, however, just as Herodotus sees patterns in the geography of his world (the Nile mirroring the Danube) or in human customs (Egyptian men urinating sitting down and women standing up), so he tends to see artificial patterns in languages. It is this desire to systematise language, for example, that leads him to the false conclusion that all Persian names end in the letter sigma (1.139), or to the true observation that the names of all Greek festivals end in the letter alpha (1.148.2).[83] A similar schematism can be seen in the characterisations of foreign peoples (in terms both of their languages and other characteristics) listed in Appendix 1. It is all a little too tidy, too convenient, the manner in which human beings are presented as being the sum of five or six cultural components (e.g., the Androphagoi, 4.106), or when he is less concerned to give details, just two (e.g., the eastern Ethiopians, 7.70.1). The schematism of Herodotus' accounts of foreign peoples becomes even more pronounced on those occasions on which he attempts to blur his categories, for example by his observations on the language of the Geloni, half-Scythian, half-Greek (4.108.2), that of the Ammonians, 'between' Egyptian and Ethiopian (2.42.4), or the dress of the Sagartian nomads, half-Persian, half-Pactyan (7.85.1). That such an outlook was not uncommon can be seen from the widespread use of terms such as mixellen, meixobarbaros or hemibarbaros.[84]
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Herodotus (Greek: ΗΡΟΔΟΤΟΣ, Herodotos) was an ancient historian who lived in the 5th century BC (484 BC - c. 425 BC). He is famous for the descriptions he wrote of different places and people he met on his travels and his many books about the Persian invasion in Greece.
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Herodotus was much more than a mere storyteller. He was the first writer successfully to put together a long and involved historical narrative in which the main thread is never completely lost... far and often he may wander from it. Moreover, he did this with a remarkable degree of detachment, showing hardly any of the Greeks' usual bias against the hereditary enemy, Persia, or of their contempt for barbarian peoples. And if he does not often achieve the depth of understanding of his great successor, Thucydides, his range of interests is much wider, embracing not only politics and warfare but also economics, geography, and the many strange and wonderful ways of mankind. He was the first great European historian, and the skill and honesty with which he built up his complex and generally reliable account and the great literary merit of his writing fully justify the title that has been bestowed on him: "Father of History."
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