Twenty-five centuries ago, a Greek from Halicarnassus decided he was going to walk the known world from end to end, talk to everyone who crossed his path, write down whatever he saw, heard or was told, and then publish it. All of it. No filter. What came out of that was the first History book of mankind… and also, according to his enemies, the greatest collection of tall tales ever gathered in a single volume. We are going to find out who was right — and I warn you now: you will not entirely like the answer.
A boy who runs for his life
The year 484 before Christ. Halicarnassus, a Dorian colony on the coast of present-day Turkey that had spent more than a century under the Persian boot. There, to Lyxes and Dryo, a boy named Herodotus is born.
Of his childhood we know little and suspect much: that he was sharp, that he asked too many questions, and that he had that uncomfortable restlessness of people who will not settle for «because it has always been this way». Nobody in that city could have imagined that the boy would end up inventing a profession.
His adult life begins not with a calling but with a fright. His cousin Panyassis — a poet, a respected man — is executed for treason on the orders of Lygdamis II, the local tyrant, a puppet of the Persians. And Herodotus has to pack his bags in a hurry and flee to the island of Samos so as not to end up the same way.
Note the irony, dear readers, because it is one of the good ones: the greatest work of Antiquity was born of an escape. Had that tyrant not killed his cousin, Herodotus would probably have lived and died in Halicarnassus as a comfortable, bored and utterly anonymous citizen. Instead, destiny kicked him in the backside and set the whole world in front of him.
The greatest traveller of Antiquity
And my, did he make the most of it.
With the money of a well-off family behind him, Herodotus set out on a journey no Greek of his time had even dreamed of. The whole of mainland Greece. The Aegean islands. Southern Italy. The Balkans. The Black Sea. Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel. Egypt from north to south, sailing up the Nile. Libya. And all of Persia: the Iran and Iraq of today.
Let us put that in perspective, because otherwise the list says nothing. We are talking about the fifth century before Christ. No compass, no reliable maps, no embassies, no travel insurance and nobody to complain to if you were robbed on a road in Anatolia. Travelling back then meant weeks at sea at the mercy of the wind, caravans, mules, and the reasonable certainty that you might never come back. Herodotus did it for decades — and for pleasure.
In Athens, which was the New York of its day, he moved in the best possible circles: he kept company with Pericles, with the sculptor Phidias and with the poet Sophocles. Picture that table. Picture those conversations.
And around the year 430, by then settled in the Italian colony of Thurii, in Calabria, he sat down to write. Out of that came the nine books of the Histories, each christened with the name of a muse: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope. He died around 425 without ever suspecting that people would still be reading it twenty-five centuries later.
The Father of History… and the father of lies
Here comes the awkward question, the one that gives this article its title and has gone two thousand years without being fully settled.
The title of Father of History, with a capital H, was pinned on him by no less than Cicero. And with good reason: Herodotus was the first to turn the investigation of the past into a discipline with a method. Before him there were only myths, epics and the propaganda of kings. He wanted to know something else: what really happened, how, and why. The Greek word he used, historíai, literally meant «investigations». He is the one who gave it the meaning it carries today.
The trouble is that four centuries later Plutarch turned up and called him, without anaesthesia, the «father of lies».
And you have to admit he had ammunition. Herodotus writes, cool as you please, about flying snakes in Arabia. About ants the size of a fox that dig gold out of the Persian sand. About one-eyed peoples. He mixes what he saw with what he was told, and what he was told with what he suspected would make a good story.
So allow me, dear readers, to put the question to him directly. In the books of my Herodotus saga I have the habit of arguing with him, and I am not about to drop it here:
«Master, with all the respect in the world: giant ants that dig up gold. Seriously?»
«Seriously is how it was told to me, David. And I write down what I am told and what I see, and I always keep the one apart from the other. If the priests of Memphis swear to me that the crocodile weeps as it devours its prey, I note it down and I say who told me. My readers will decide. Or would you rather I hid half the world from you because I have not touched it with my own hands?»
And there, frankly, he leaves me without an answer. Because he is right about the essential thing: Herodotus does not lie, he cites. Almost always he says where he got each thing from, and more than once he adds that he does not believe it himself but writes it down anyway because it seems worth the telling. That is not a liar: that is a journalist, two and a half thousand years before the word existed.
And one more thing, for those who laugh too quickly: archaeology has spent a century proving him right on matters that were denied him for a thousand years. Egyptian customs taken for his own invention that turned out to be true. Details of the Persian army's logistics that check out. Even the famous giant ants have a reasonable explanation today: Himalayan marmots that churn up gold-bearing earth and whose Persian name sounded much like «mountain ant». He did not lie. He mistranslated.
Clio: when History was still about revenge
The first book, the one of the muse Clio, opens in a way no modern historian would dare put his name to: with tales of abducted women.
The kidnapping of princess Io of Argos by Phoenician sailors. That of Europa from Tyre. That of Medea from Colchis. And finally that of Helen of Sparta, which unleashed Troy. For Herodotus, the Trojan War and the Persian Wars are not two stories: they are chapters of the same unfinished book, a score that East and West have been settling with each other for centuries.
But the great protagonist of Clio is Croesus, the king of Lydia, the richest man in the known world — hence «rich as Croesus». And his conversation with the Athenian sage Solon about what it means to be happy is, without exaggeration, one of the ten finest passages in all ancient literature. Croesus shows him his treasures and waits for Solon to tell him he is the most fortunate man on earth. Solon replies that no man may be called happy before you have seen how he ends. Croesus dismisses him for impertinence. Years later, bound to a pyre and about to burn on the orders of Cyrus, he remembers the Athenian and speaks his name aloud.
Then comes Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, raised by shepherds because his grandfather Astyages had ordered him killed at birth after a premonitory dream. And with him, the most appalling scene in the book: the revenge of Astyages against Harpagus, the general who disobeyed that order. He invites him to a banquet. He serves him an exquisite dish. Harpagus eats and praises it. And then the king has a covered platter brought in and shows him the head and hands of his own son, so that he understands what he has just dined on.
Herodotus tells that without adjectives, without a sermon, without a single line of indignation. And that is why it works.
Because here is the key his critics keep missing: Herodotus is not a chronicler, he is a storyteller. He knows when to slow the pace. He knows when to plant the detail that makes your skin crawl. And he knows, above all, when to fall silent and let the reader draw his own conclusions. That cannot be learned: you either have it or you do not.
Euterpe: twenty-five hundred years of tourism in Egypt
The second book, the muse Euterpe, is outright a treatise on Ancient Egypt. And it remains, twenty-five centuries later, one of the most valuable documents we possess about that world, for a very simple reason: he was there.
He sailed up the Nile. He entered the temples. He spoke with the priests. He stood watching how they embalmed, took note of the sacred animals — the crocodile, the ibis, the cat, the cobra — and asked about the pharaohs of everyone who would let himself be asked.
Now, his Egyptian guides had a remarkable talent for telling him what the tourist wanted to hear. Hence a few gems:
That the pharaoh Cheops, to pay for the Great Pyramid, prostituted his own daughter; and that she, while she was at it, asked each client for a block of stone to build one of her own. That the pharaoh Psammetichus I had two newborns raised without anyone ever speaking a word to them, to find out which was the original language of mankind — the first linguistic experiment in History, and also the cruellest. And that Helen of Troy never reached Troy: that a storm stranded her in Egypt with Paris, that she remained there through the ten years of the war, and that the Greeks besieged an entire city to recover a woman who was not inside.
That last one, if you think about it, is devastating. Herodotus is insinuating that the founding epic of his own people may have been a colossal misunderstanding. And he tells it with an enviable poker face.
In my adaptation, Herodotus · Histories Reloaded 2.0, I have corrected, expanded and set in context all these episodes with what we know today, arguing with the Master in those exchanges that pepper the text and which, so many readers write to me, are what they enjoy most about the book. I have a good time too. He, I suspect, would defend himself better than I would like.
Why he remains indispensable
Back to the question in the title, for it is high time.
Father of History or father of lies? The honest answer is uncomfortable: both at once. And that is precisely why he remains irreplaceable.
Think about it. A historian who records only the verifiable produces a register: dates, names, figures. Useful, rigorous and dead. Herodotus does something else. He mixes the fact with the rumour, the observation with the legend, what he saw with what people swore to him was true. And what comes out of that mixture is something no register can manufacture: a living image of a world that no longer exists. Not just what happened, but what people thought, what they feared, what made them laugh and what stories they told themselves.
And without him we would be missing half of Antiquity.
Without Herodotus we would know nothing of Candaules, the perverted king who lost his throne and his life through his insistence on showing his naked wife to his bodyguard. We would not know the Zoroastrian customs of the Persians. We would have no first-hand description of pharaonic Egypt in the fifth century. We would not know that a single Spartan, one Lacrines, planted himself before Cyrus the Great — the most powerful man on the planet — to tell him to his face not to dare touch a single Greek city.
And there is more, painful as it is to admit: every time you watch 300, or Troy, or Prince of Persia, or even Disney's Hercules, you are watching Herodotus. All that iconography comes from him. Hollywood has spent a century looting a Greek who died twenty-four ago.
So yes: he exaggerated, he let himself be fooled and he wrote down impossible things. But he was the first to ask «and why did this happen?» instead of settling for «the gods willed it». And that leap — from mythology to investigation — is probably the most important the human mind has ever taken.
Everything else, giant ants included, is forgiven him.
Sources and references
- Herodotus, Histories, Books I–IX (5th century BC).
- Cicero, De legibus, I, 5 — origin of the title "Father of History".
There is NO fiction in this article
Everything is documented, starting with his own books. Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote the nine Histories in the fifth century BC, travelled to gather testimony on the ground, and Cicero called him «Father of History» in De legibus. The other part is true as well: already in Antiquity he was called «father of lies», and some of his pages — the giant ants that dig gold out of the sand, the one-eyed peoples — do not survive examination. But archaeology has spent a century proving him right on things that were denied him for a thousand years, from Egyptian customs to the logistics of the Persian army. This article separates the one from the other. The narrator's ironies belong to the personal literary voice of the author, David S. Matrecano.
