Biography of herodotus

Early Life 

Herodotus was born in about B.C. in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, a lively commercial center on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. He came from a wealthy and cosmopolitan Greek-Carian merchant family. (The Carians, of Minoan descent, had arrived in that part of Asia Minor before the Greeks had.)

In the middle of the 6th century B.C., Halicarnassus became a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire and was ruled by the tyrant Lygdamis. Herodotus’ family opposed Lygdamis’ rule and was sent into exile on the island of Samos.

When he was a young man, Herodotus returned briefly to Halicarnassus to take part in an abortive anti-Persian rebellion. After that, however, the writer never returned to his home city again.

Origins of ‘The Histories’ 

Instead of settling in one place, Herodotus spent his life traveling from one Persian territory to another. He crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt and traveled through Palestine to Syria and Babylon. He headed to Macedonia and visited all the islands of the Greek Archipelago: Rhodes, Cyprus, Delos, Paros, Thasos, Samothrace, Crete, Samos, Cythera and Aegina.

Herodotus sailed through the Hellespont to the Black Sea and kept going until he hit the Danube River. While he traveled, Herodotus collected what he called “autopsies,” or “personal inquiries”: He listened to ancient myths and legends, recorded oral histories and made notes of the places and things that he saw.

When Herodotus was not traveling, he returned to Athens; there, he became something of a celebrity. He gave readings in public places and collected fees from officials for his appearances.

In B.C., the people of Athens voted to give him a prize of 10 talents—almost $, in today’s money—to honor him for his contributions to the city’s in

People, Places, Events and Terms To Know:

I. Introduction: Herodotus and the Birth of History

A. Who was Herodotus?

Our understanding of the cultural and political forces which gave rise to the Classical Age of Greece ( BCE), a watershed in Western Civilization, rests largely on the work of one remarkable individual, an ancient Greek merchant named Herodotus. Unfortunately, very little is known today about his life. He was born, we are told, in Halicarnassus, a coastal city in southwestern Asia Minor (modern Tu

Herodotus (hirr-OD-ə-təs; Ancient Greek: Ἡρόδοτος, romanized:&#;Hēródotos, Attic Greek pronunciation:&#;[hɛːródotos]; c.&#;&#;– c.&#;BC) was an Ancient Greekhistorian. He was born in Halicarnassus, a town in south-west Asia Minor (now Bodrum, Turkey)

Herodotus was called the "Father of History" by Cicero. He wrote about the ancient empires of Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, and about the Ancient Greeks.

During his life, Herodotus probably told his stories in front of large numbers of people in Greek cities. Some men at the time did this for pay. 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.

In his books, Herodotus tells us that he travelled a lot. He says that he went to what is now Italy (including Sicily), Ukraine, Egypt and Pakistan. He may also have travelled to Babylon in today's Iraq. He often used stories from people he met to write about other places and happenings.

Some people think that Herodotus wrote about things that were not true. That is possible, because he would have relied on information from various sources. His work is important because there is very little writing on these subjects before his works.

The works of Herodotus are available today in translations.

References

Other websites

Greek historian and geographer (c–c BC)

For other uses, see Herodotus (disambiguation).

Herodotus (Ancient Greek: Ἡρόδοτος, romanized:&#;Hēródotos; c.&#;&#;– c.&#; BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey), under Persian control in the 5th century BC, and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He wrote the Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars among other subjects such as the rise of the Achaemenid Dynasty of Cyrus, and was the first writer to apply the scientific method to historical events. He has been described as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero, and the "Father of Lies" by others.

The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information.

Herodotus was criticized in his times for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides who covered the infamous Peloponnesian War in his History of the Peloponnesian War would separately accuse Herodotus of making up stories for entertainment. Herodotus retorted that he reported what he could see and what he was told. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists.

Life

Current scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life, supplemented with archaic yet much later sources, such as the ByzantineSuda, a 10th-century encyclopedia which possibly took its information from traditional accounts. St