In defence of Herodotus

How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether they know it or not? This is a new translation. of a book that remains more relevant than ever. by the popular historian Tom Holland, with an introduction by the Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge, doyen of classicists, citizen of Sparta and a Herodotean to the core.

The Histories is a masterpiece on the grandest scale, a chronological history of the Persian Wars from the invasions of the empire-building Cyrus in the middle of the sixth century BC through the stories of the ill-fated Cambyses and the opportunist regicide Darius to the depredations of that arch-megalomaniac Xerxes in the early fifth.

Yet it is much more than that. It is also the world’s first prose epic, a thrilling discourse on war and empire, the frailty of the human condition, fortune’s ebb and flow, freedom versus tyranny, the immutability of fate, the vanity of power, religion, love, the importance of custom and the capriciousness of the gods. Chronicling the epochal encounter between Ancient Greeks and Persians, Herodotus is also the first to bear witness to the birth of the West. If that’s not enough for you, there’s lots of sex in it, too.

Herodotus may still be in print, but his journey through the centuries has not always been plain sailing. Ever since Plutarch put the knife in with his mean-spirited book The Malice of Herodotus, which branded him the ‘Father of Lies’, Herodotus has always suffered from the slur that he was a bit of a fibber and a fantasist, an elegant charlatan, an ancient-world Walter Mitty who told whoppers.