Herodotus · Civilisations
How Herodotus, by turning ‘inquiry’ into a written record of human deeds, created a wholly new way of preserving and understanding the past.
Before Herodotus, the Greeks remembered their past through myth - the tales of gods and heroes sung by poets like Homer - and through bare lists of kings and priests. Herodotus, a Greek from Halicarnassus in the fifth century BCE, did something unprecedented: he set out to inquire systematically into the human past, to investigate what had actually happened and why, and to write it down in prose. The Greek word for what he did was historie - ‘inquiry’ or ‘investigation’ - and from it comes our word ‘history.’ He quite literally invented the thing.
Herodotus states his purpose in his very first sentence, and it is twofold. First, commemoration: so that the great and marvellous deeds of human beings - Greeks and barbarians alike - should not be forgotten or lose their glory with the passage of time. Like the poets, he wants to preserve memory and fame; but he extends this care to all peoples, not just Greek heroes. Second, and more original, explanation: he wants to record ‘the cause’ of the great conflict between Greeks and Persians - to understand why it happened. Memory and explanation together: the past preserved, and the past made intelligible.
The Roman orator Cicero called Herodotus the ‘Father of History’ (pater historiae), and the title has stuck for over two thousand years. It honours a genuine and monumental achievement: the creation, more or less from nothing, of an entire way of knowing - the systematic, evidence-based, causal inquiry into the human past. Almost everything later historians do, Herodotus did first, however imperfectly: travel and interview, weigh sources, report variants, seek causes, describe other cultures, narrate great events. He stands at the head of one of humanity’s most important intellectual traditions. But the same Cicero’s contemporaries also called him the ‘Father of Lies’ - and that tension runs through his whole legacy.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Herodotus turned historie (inquiry) into the new craft of history. Explain what was genuinely new about it, and one limit of his approach, in your own words.
Leads to Leopold von Ranke.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.