Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek born in Halicarnassus decided to travel the known world from end to end, speak to everyone he met, note down everything he saw, heard or was told — and write it all. His name was Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and what he wrote changed forever the way human beings remember the past.
A curious boy in Halicarnassus
In 484 BC, in the Greek city of Halicarnassus — a Doric colony on the western coast of present-day Turkey, under Persian rule for over a century — a boy was born to whom his parents, Lyxes and Dryo, gave the name Herodotus. He was extraordinarily curious, intelligent and possessed of that restless wandering spirit found only in truly free souls. No one at that moment could have imagined that this boy would become the first historian of humanity as we understand the word today.
His life began with political turbulence. His cousin Panyassis was executed for treason by the local tyrant Lygdamis II, a Persian puppet. The young Herodotus was forced to flee hastily to the island of Samos to save his life. That forced exile was, paradoxically, the greatest gift destiny could have given him: it set the whole world before him.
The greatest traveller of Antiquity
With the financial means provided by his wealthy family, Herodotus undertook a journey no Greek of his era had ever dreamed of. He visited all of mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, southern Italy, the Balkans, the Black Sea, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya and all of Persia — present-day Iran and Iraq. It was in Athens that he frequented Pericles, the sculptor Pheidias and the poet Sophocles. In Egypt he travelled the country from north to south, fascinated by its temples, pharaohs, sacred river and customs.
Around 430 BC, settled in the Italian colony of Thurii in Calabria, he wrote the Nine Books of History, known today simply as the Histories. Each carried the name of one of the nine Greek Muses: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope. He died around 425 BC, not knowing his work would last two and a half millennia.
Father of History or Father of Lies?
The question has been open for centuries. The title Father of History — History with a capital H — was given to him by Cicero himself, and with good reason: Herodotus was the first to make the systematic investigation of past events a discipline with its own methodology. Before him there were only myths, epics and royal propaganda. He wanted to know what really happened, how and why.
But his critics were not slow to arrive. Plutarch, four centuries later, bluntly called him "father of lies". The charge has a real basis: Herodotus writes about flying serpents in Arabia, about ants the size of foxes that dig for gold in Persia, about Phoenicians who circumnavigated Africa with the sun on their right instead of their left. He mixes what he saw with what he was told, and what he was told with what he suspected was interesting.
"Master, with all due respect, a small clarification is needed here: when you make mistakes, you do so always with the best intentions — to tell us something new and interesting. There is no bad faith. There is overflowing enthusiasm, not always reliable local sources, and the inevitable limits of fifth-century BC knowledge."
H. "David, I write what I am told and what I see. If the priests of Memphis tell me that the crocodile is a sacred animal that weeps crocodile tears as it devours its prey, I note it down. My readers will decide."
Clio: Greece, Persia and the origins of conflict
The first book, dedicated to the Muse Clio, opens with the prehistory of the conflict between Greece and the East: the abduction of Princess Io of Argos by Phoenician sailors, the kidnapping of Europa from Tyre, of Medea from Colchis, and finally of Helen from Sparta. For Herodotus, the Trojan War and the Persian Wars are chapters of the same unfinished book.
The great protagonist of the Muse Clio is Croesus, the enormously wealthy king of Lydia, whose conversation with the Athenian sage Solon about human happiness is one of the most memorable passages in all ancient literature. Then comes Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, raised by shepherds after his grandfather Astyages had ordered him killed at birth. And the terrible revenge of Harpagus, the general whom Astyages forced to eat the flesh of his own son at a banquet.
Herodotus is not merely a chronicler: he is a storyteller. He knows exactly when to slow the pace, when to add a detail that makes the skin crawl, when to let the reader draw their own conclusions.
Euterpe: Ancient Egypt and its secrets
The second book, the Muse Euterpe, is a treatise on Ancient Egypt that remains, two and a half millennia later, one of the most valuable documents we possess about that world. Herodotus travelled it in person: he sailed up the Nile, visited the temples, spoke with priests, observed embalming customs, noted the sacred animals — the crocodile, the ibis, the cat, the cobra — and asked about the pharaohs.
His Egyptian sources were not always reliable. He wrote that Pharaoh Cheops prostituted his own daughter to finance the Great Pyramid. That Pharaoh Psamtik I had two children raised without human contact to discover which was humanity's first language. That Helen of Troy and Paris, on their way to Troy, were stranded on the Egyptian coast by a storm — and that the real Trojan War was fought over a woman who was never there.
In my adaptation Herodotus: Histories Reloaded 2.0, I have corrected, expanded and contextualised all these episodes with the archaeological and historical knowledge of the twenty-first century, dialoguing directly with the Master in those small exchanges that punctuate the text and which are, for many readers, the most entertaining part of the books.
Why Herodotus remains indispensable
The question with which this article opens — father of history or father of lies? — has an honest answer: both at once, and precisely for that reason he remains irreplaceable. A historian who only records the verifiable produces a register. A narrator who mixes data, rumour, myth and personal observation produces something far harder to manufacture: a living image of the ancient world.
Without Herodotus we would never have heard of Candaules, the perverted king who lost his life for showing his naked wife to his bodyguard. We would not know the Zoroastrian customs and practices of the Persians. We would have no first-hand description of fifth-century BC pharaonic Egypt. We would not know that a single Spartan, named Lacrineus, appeared before Cyrus the Great to tell him to his face not to dare touch any Greek city. Films like 300, Troy, Prince of Persia, Disney's Hercules — they all come from him.