Herodotus
Herodotus has been called the "father of history."
He was the first writer that we know of (probably really the first)
who tried to (in his own words) find out what had happened in the past
"so that what people did will be remembered later, so that the great
and admirable monuments that the Greeks and the barbarians
made would be famous, and, among other things, to write down the reasons
why they had a war."
Herodotus was born around 485 BC in Turkey,
in a Greek town called Halicarnassus. Like other
writers of his time, Herodotus was from a rich family, and always
had plenty of money himself. He was able to go to school,
and he learned all the works of Homer as a boy.
The most important thing that happened while Herodotus was a child was
that the Persians
and the Greeks fought a war. The Persians conquered Herodotus' own hometown
of Halicarnassus shortly before he was born, but when they attacked
Athens and Sparta, in mainland Greece, they were defeated. Everybody
was surprised that Athens and Sparta had been able to defeat the Persians,
and when Herodotus grew up he devoted his life to trying to explain
how this had happened.
Herodotus decided that the main point was that the Persians were ruled
by a king, and the king
had too much power. This led the king to think he was able to control
things that really only the gods
could control, like the weather,
or who won a war. Pride, says Herodotus,
goes before a fall.
But Herodotus also thought that the Greeks could learn a lot from the
people around them. So Herodotus also wrote a lot about other cultures
that he visited, like the Egyptians
and the Scythians.
And he also wrote about places he had never been, like India
and Africa.
Often Herodotus got things wrong. Sometimes he didn't really understand
what he saw in another country. Sometimes people told him things that
weren't true. But much of what he says is certainly true.
To find out more about Herodotus, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Ancient Greeks: Creating the Classical Tradition (Oxford Profiles) by Rosalie F. Baker and Charles F. Baker (reprinted 1997). Short biographies of many famous Greeks including Herodotus.
The Persian Wars, by Herodotus. Straight from the Greek historian himself
Herodotus: And the Explorers of the Classical Age, by Ann Gaines (1993). For kids.
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