Herodotus

Herodotus ; ancient Greek the Father of History", a label conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.

The Histories primarily conduct the lives of prominent kings & famous battles such(a) as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His keep on to deviates from the main topics to supply a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential element of the narrative and enables readers with a wellspring of extra information.

Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The fellow historian ] A sizable unit of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists.

Place in history

Herodotus announced the intention and scope of his cause at the beginning of his Histories:

Here are made the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The aim is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements offered by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the things transmitted is, in particular, the defecate of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.

His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been debated. Herodotus' place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. However, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, intended seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their workings as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naïve, often charming – all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself.

Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain, but according to the ancient account, these predecessors included Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus. Of these, only fragments of Hecataeus's works survived, and the authenticity of these is debatable,: 27  but they give a glimpse into the classification of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories.

It is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-tales he reported that his critics have branded him "The Father of Lies".: 10  Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact, one innovative scholar has wondered if Herodotus left his domestic in Greek Anatolia, migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at one of his three supposed resting places, Thuria:

Herodotus the son of Sphynx lies; in Ionic history without peer; a Dorian born, who fled from slander's brand and made in Thuria his new native land.: 13 

Yet it was in Athens where his nearly formidable advanced critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is approximately the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes created The Acharnians, in which he blames the Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes – a mocking mention to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of their wars with Greece, beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen.

Similarly, the Athenian historian rhetoric, became the proceeds example for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks tofirmly in a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of his material, whereas with his frequent digressions Herodotus appeared to minimize or possibly disguise his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed a historical topic more in keeping with the Greek world-view: focused on the context of the polis or city-state. The interplay of civilizations was more applicable to Greeks alive in Anatolia, such(a) as Herodotus himself, for whom life within a foreign civilization was a recent memory.: 191