From: Mark Odegard
Message: 979
Date: 2000-01-19
Calling him the father of history and the father of lies does not do him justice. When he tells you something improbable, he generally tells us this is just what he has heard, what he has been told: he more of a journalist than a historian.
His Histories is the first real book (in the modern sense) in the history of the world. His prose style is rude and crude because he is the one who essentially invented prose style. This is also the first BIG book in the history of the world. Anything of any length before him was a compilation of sources. And while he mined other authors, this is his work. The text alone is longer than your usual pulp novel, and with full notes, runs to the length of almost that of the Old Testament. If you read him just to read him, it will take you more than just a day.
Complaining about Herodotus is rather like criticizing Issac Newton for not having also thought up quantum theory. Herodotus did not set out to invent history writing; all he wanted to do was entertain his audience. He was rather like those of us on this forum who like to share (hopefully) accurate nuggets of fact that others don't know, and hopefully, with a great deal of grace and wit. He liked showing off what he knew, and also enjoyed doing it in an entertaining way. It is unfair to call him a bad historian when he did not set out to write a history. Accusing thefather of history of being a bad historian is like accusing the father of gravity physics (Issac Newton) of being a bad gravity physicist.
And you also have to remember he seems to have been a pious and presumably reasonably observant communicant of the Olympian religion -- he took religion seriously, even as he dismissed the more absurd antics attributed to the gods as bad reporting, rather like modern Catholic commentators dismiss the sillier 'miracles' attributed to the saints. He accepted a great deal of what we call religious-historical nonsense at face value: if the priest said this is the way it was, that was the way it was. It's like accepting what Sister Mary Rita taught you in grade school; if Sister says it's so, it's Gospel (no, I'm not Catholic, and never have been)
Now, (ob-cybalist), Herodotus is an immensely important source for Indo-European studies. I've yet to read any serious workup of his testimony to Darius' campaign in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. What he gives us is a snapshot of the 6th-5th century Steppe -- the very earliest we have for anything about the Steppe. The picture he gives is not that much different than that found 2000 years later in the aftermath of the Mongols. It was a complicated ethnic and linguistic mixture, with its peoples following a mixture of lifestyles, ranging from urbanism to steppe nomadism and hunter-gathering. There are even some feminists who ride with their men (something like (if I recall correctly from my reading) 10% of the warrior Kurgan Steppe burials are those of FEMALE warriors); the Amazons are not entirely mythical.
If you read ever an ancient work, only The Odyssey comes before Herodotus in readability, entertainment value and historical importance. The Iliad comes third on my list. Then Suetonius (such smut!) and Aristophanes (even more smut!) and then the rest of the usual (and frequently less entertaining) suspects.
Read Herodotus!
Mark.