Herodotus couldn't walk into the Athens library and check out a scroll or two on Egyptian history. was that almost nothing was written down. The challenge for an investigator of the past working in the fifth century B.C.E.
But a new generation of historians are rescuing Herodotus's reputation as the true "father of history," a man who traveled to the edges of the known world and interviewed everyone from Egyptian priests to Babylonian farmers, collected stories of powerful queens and Median shepherd girls, in order to make sense of the complex course of human events, both great and small. Until recently, people prized him less as a "serious" historian than as a skilled raconteur who valued the entertainment impact of a juicy tale from the past rather than asking whether it actually happened. Scholars haven't always been kind to Herodotus. Herodotus himself might remain a mystery, but his voice on the page is personal, engaging and playful, that of a natural-born storyteller with a seemingly endless curiosity to better understand the world around him, past and present.
"The Histories," written sometime in the later fifth century B.C.E., is a sprawling record of the growth of the Persian Empire over about a century, leading to the defeat of the huge Persian army and navy in Greece in 480-79 B.C.E., in what are called by the Greeks the "Persian Wars." Herodotus takes long and meandering detours describing among other things the amazing city of Babylon, the course of Egyptian history and even the habits of the nomad Scythians north of the Black Sea. Experts believe that he must have come from a wealthy family given the breadth of his travels and the fact that his writing style was so polished, which implies that he was highly educated. But how? Did Herodotus inherit a bunch of money from his family? Was he a successful merchant or traveling lecturer? Herodotus doesn't say.
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