Talk:Herodotus

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[edit] Wikipedia policy

It is Wikipedia policy that things be under their MOST COMMON name. Please move "Herodotos" back to "Herodotus" where it was and where by Wikipedia policy it is supposed to be. In the article itself, he should also be called "Herodotus" as that is the way he is generally refered to in English (this IS the ENGLISH Wikipedia). But, by all means, include in the article all the data about the word "Herodotos" and how it relates to this guy. Thanks. 4.250.168.94 18:52, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you. Care to list it on WP:RM? dab (ᛏ) 19:43, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Done, although the talk page is still at Herodotos...this one will have to be deleted, but I wanted to let you know first. Adam Bishop 19:53, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Herodotos is just an alternative transliteration of the Greek which is more faithful than the Latinized Herodotus. In anglophone scholarship, he appears about a 1/3 of the time as Herodotos. ajc--Ajcee7 09:01, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Massive issues with the scrutiny of his work areas with sentences ranging from giant ants to the very out of place. Looks like a large section of veiled vandalism with extreme obvious bias.


[edit] Father of Lies

Oh yes, he was the Baba Gee of lies, maybe something in their can be written on the extent of lies he told about the persians, one which can be fully proven to be false is the number of the Persian army under xerxes... who traveled into Greece.... he said with confidence that that number was more than 1.7 million which is a lie, an article in iranchamber.com (podium section) gathers this information and cites modern historians claiming it to be around 100,000 (these are only the conservative ones) others believe the number to be 40,000 .... this is proven by analysing the capacity of the ships xerxes sent to Greece, and accounts about how long it took the army to march over the bridge they built.

this shoudl be included as it is seen in history as one of the biggest fabrication created thanks to herodotus's extreme bias!


Dude, the sheer amount of misspellings and poor grammer (as well as your terrible writing style) don't exactly help your cause. Out of curiousity, why are you so pissed off at a guy who was dead roughly 2300 years before you were born? Sure Herodotus had some false information, but what leads you to believe that INCREASING the size of the invading force is evidence of bias. Leaving aside the fact that you seem to pick and choose ancient accounts to believe, how is a miscount tantamount to delibrite fabrication? There are plenty of arguments to be made against Herodotus, this one sucks ass.

You spelt "grammar" wrong, lol.

Herodotus has always mentioned Persia as a group of evil, crazy, lunatics. He has said that they were cruel beings that enslaved much of the world. And that the Greeks were great people who's way of democracy was the perfect form of government. Now, here's a question, why did Herodotus choose to live in Persia rather than Greece? A possible answer defending him - he sacrificed his life trying live in an evil nation to write about them and tell the rest of the world and the people of the future about the cruelty of Persia. Well then why didn't Persia enslave him, sentence him to death, or even imprison him?

Response to above: I am sorry, but have you actually READ the Histories? Herodotus is not generally considered to have been "biased" or "racist" against the Persians - in fact, a lot of his fellow Greeks denigrated him because they thought that he had depicted the Persians TOO WELL... They would call him "philo-barbarian" - a "lover of barbarians" - because he seemed to respect and admire other cultures and civilizations too much. In other words, many Greeks felt he was too "internationlist" and not "patriotic" enough. I would highly suggest that before you post such claims again, you should actually READ the Histories. You will be plesantly surprised I think to find that some of the most interesting, most noble, most intelligent, and most wise characters in the Histories are not Greeks, but Persians.... look up the names "Artabanus" (also spelled "Artabanos") or "Otanes" - these two Persians present speeches that form a crucial thematic core for the Histories, and they are definitely described in very glowing terms by Herodotus. Or, just turn to the last page of the text and read the final speech that Cyrus gives to the Persians - it basically encapsulates Herodotus' view of the Persian Empire, and you will find that is not what you may have thought!

More on Herodotus' biography: To try to rectify the record, Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus around 484 BCE (the modern-day city of Bodrum in Turkey), which was indeed at the time part of the Persian Empire. However, it is believed that he left following a failed rebellion against Persian rule in 457 BCE (in which a relative of his, Panyassis, took part - perhaps Herodotus himself was also involved in the uprising, or at least supportive of it?). It seems that he spent the next ten years doing most of the travels that would supply the core of his information for the Histories (the topic of exactly where he went and when, and who he talked to, is another matter altogether).

Anyway, around 447 BCE, he arrived in Athens, where he seems to have associated with the intellectual elite centered on its leader, Pericles - including such figures as the orator Antiphon, the musician Damon, the philosophers Protagoras and Zeno, and the playwrights Euripides (author of Medea and the Bacchae among others) and Sophocles (of Oedipus Rex-fame). However, since it was very difficult to become a citizen of Athens, he left Athens in 443 BCE to join a group of colonists in founding the city of Thurii in southern Italy (he thereby would have become a citizen of Thurii since he was one of the "founding fathers"). He died in Thurii in either 425 or 414 BCE (there is some disagreement among the sources).

All of this information can be found in the "Barnes & Noble Classics" edition of the Histories; it is translated by G.C. Macaulay and has an excellent introduction by Donald Lateiner (from which introduction by Lateiner the above bio has been written).

Anyone noticed that in the article, it said that Herodotus "actually criticized Aristotle and other poets who wrote about the past for distorting it"? Isn't Aristotle after Herodotus' time?

[edit] New Archeological Evidence

Herodotus has been called the "Father of Lies" as the article states, but new archeological evidence has proven that at least some of what Herodotus wrote that was doubtful is actually true. Two examples that come immediately to mind are the recent discoveries of Scythian burial sites which parallel Herodotus' descriptions and a dedication by Sostratus, a wealthy Greek who is mentioned in "The Histories". It seems to me that this recent reassessment of Herodotus should be mentioned [I'm not sure if it's up to the original writer but thought it should be noted].

I've removed this sentence (which predates the above comments) "Recent archaeology has begun to prove his Histories were largely accurate." I don't know what discoveries this refers to to, but it seems inappropriate to anticipate the results of archaelogical research by saying that it has begun to prove something as yet unproved. The concept of "largely accurate" is also highly ambiguous. No one has ever thought that the Histories were completly made up (Sostratus, for example, is mentioned by other writers). Paul B 16:04, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Somebody at IP: 160.39.147.17 vandalized the page and it needs to be reverted.

[edit] Doubt

I have and doubt: Who whas the Herodotus book that talk about the existence of lions in Greece and Balkans in your time??

   Are you saying you doubt that there were lions in Greece and the Balkans, or you doubt that Herodotus mentions them? --Dcsmith 02:17, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

there were lions in the ancient meditteranian until they were over hunted by the romans among others because they were popular for the colloseum.Several historians say this including Philip Matzyk (pico)

[edit] Herodotus "Father of Lies"

I just think overall this section needs more source citation, either pro or con. The only source listed is one that validates a Herodotus claim. I'm sure there is more out there. Agne27 20:24, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I think the entire article need citations. Just take a look at the Article about the Mormons and see how good Wiki is at that. If only some of that energy were directed towards serious articles like this one... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.86.200.65 (talk) 02:17, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major Renovation

This article in no way reflects the state of scholarship on Herodotus at the moment. The following I feel should be rectified:

  • It takes an overly sceptical view of his work which is now generally discounted as misconceiving the aims and nature of his work. Detlev Fehling's rabidly anti-herodotean stance claiming that he is a 'liar' has been roundly shown to fundamentally miss the point and import modern ideas about historiography, culture and society into a context in which they inevitably make no sense (the locus classicus contra Fehling is Nino Luraghi's article "local knowledge in herodotus", but see also Flory, Thomas, Gould, Griffiths etc).
  • The two main developments in herodotean studies, oral tradition and sophistic influence, are nowhere mentioned. For oral tradition, Rosalind Thomas' "Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece" is best, along with the articles in which she addresses her findings to the problem of Herodotus. With regard to sophistic influence, again Thomas' "Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion" is key, along with the insights of R.L.Myres, though Thomas' book being so new (relatively speaking - 2000), the full implications have not cohered themselves into several more works in this area quite yet.
  • This leads in to the wider question of Herodotus as an 'historian'. His intellectual interests were far wider than this and history, rather than a profession as it is today, was a new genre which he created in order to cohere his other interests (incidentally, the fact that he is creating a genre instantly puts pay to Fehling's claim that he is lie and fabricating, since this would presuppose a genre to parody which, a priori, is impossible).
  • It should be noted that the majority of authobiographical material about Herodotus is apocryphal, created either in the ancient tradition to fit with the characteristics of his work, or by modern scholars to help massage evidence from Herodotus to fit their theories (this is now less the case, but was typical of those who would 'correct' Herodotus, e.g. Cawkwell, Burn, de Ste Croix, How & Wells, Grote etc.)
  • A discussion of the relative merits of different translations would be helpful - there is certainly an alarming disparity in quality between the various texts, with some cutting out sections deemed 'improper' altogether (e.g. blind scythian slaves shoving pipes up the vaginas of female horses to milk them).
  • In the last few years, a trend has emerged in the scholarship which increasingly argues for the ubiquity of events contemporary to Herodotus being reflected in his historical interpretation of the past. Crucially, this brings Herodotus far closer in method to Thucydides in his method, since, though in different ways, they thus both become historians of their own time. Certainly, the indirect and direct approaches to contemporary histroy which their styles encapsulate can be said to be two sides of the same coin. The importance of a genos, polis or ethne's history was of immediate political significance in diplomatic disputes, social interaction and the creation and manipulation of identity. Thus, Herodotus' work is not antiquarian, but in many respects rather daring in coming to fairly frank and uncomfortable conclusions about important families (the Alcmeonids most notably), poleis (Sparta, Athens and Corinth primarily) and ethnai (in particular the Ionians).
  • Considering how major this all is, I have removed the recommendation for this article to be put on Wikipedia CD since it is in such a state it may as well be a stub.

ajc --Ajcee7 09:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

This critique is as perceptive and relevant today as it was last year when it was written. Too bad we appear to have lost this editor. Time to get out the books and do some work. Alcmaeonid 18:22, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sahara sandstorm

The History Channel recently aired a program called The Sahara (9/23/06). They said Herodotus reported a Saharan sandstorm that killed 40,000 people, though modern historians do not believe it. Do you know where that might be found in his writings? (I tried to navigate The History Channel's website to ask this questions but without success.)

[edit] Cultural depictions of Herodotus

I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information. I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list. Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article. Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here. Regards, Durova 17:49, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] citations

people keep asking for citations for passages in the book! you wouldnt do that in harry potter would you


[edit] ?? Liar ??

Did Herodotus say anything that Christian church does not like? If yes, then he will be called by all bad names by Christian historians.

[edit] Index of places and people

Any reader Herodotus will be frustrated by the very large number of unfamiliar (ancient) place names and, to a somwhat lesser extent, personal names. Does anyone know of a good index or map to accompany the reading? (please respond to my personal page) Many thanks. --Philopedia 17:20, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unnecessary? (in contributions section)

"For example, he reports that the annual flooding of the Nile was said to be the result of melting snows far to the south, and comments that he cannot understand how there can be snow in Africa, the hottest part of the known world; he concludes that the snow must be from Mount Kilimanjaro, a very large mountain in southern Africa.[citation needed] Although this hypothesis proved to be wrong, if it were not for Herodotus' method of comparing all theories known to him, we might never have discovered that such speculation existed in ancient Greece."

The point being asserted is merely that Herodotus' speculation proves to us today that such a speculation existed. It doesn't add any value to the article, nor does it enhance a reader's understanding of Ancient Greece or Herodotus; it is just a triviality that, although interesting, is not significant enough to be deemed one of Herodotus', the Father of History's contributions to human thought. It appears to be a subtle, even covert, attempt to erode the historian's reputation outside of the criticism section.

Response to above: Actually, this may not be an attempt to "erode the historian's reputation" but rather an actual defense of Herodotus' style and methodolgy - essentially, the point is made that Herodotus was using a "scientifically" objective method to weigh and compare the various sources of evidence that were available to him. In other words, Herodotus neither reported the very first idea that he heard nor was he satisfied with simple, widespread rumors or beliefs. Rather, he is consciously and meticulously investigating each claim that he had access to. Thus, even though he may have been wrong in the end (but then again, can we really expect that anyone in the ancient world would have had reliable geographic data? In an era before longitude and latitude, before even the idea that the Earth was in fact round, maps lacked any modern notion of "accuracy" or "veracity"), Herodotus is using a sound scientific method to derive his theory using the evidence he could find. The contribution is not the final answer, but the method by which Herodous worked. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.110.241.33 (talk) 19:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suspicions about copyrighted material

Some of the material on this page - particular under the 'contribution' sub head - seems very familiar, and I'm sure I've read it somewhere else recently. I can't put my finger on it. Tom Holland's Persian Fire, maybe? I need to check. However, in the meantime, could someone who has really read around the topic give it a quick look and see if it rings any bells? Particularly the material about the crossing of 'liminal' spaces. I may well be imagining this completely, in which case I offer my profound apologies to whoever wrote it.Bedesboy 22:43, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Apology or Encyclopedia article?

The article sounds as if it is essentially defending the implausibilities within Herodotus's work.

While it is understandable to list counterpoints within an article, the entire 'Criticisms' section sounds apologetic. This article barely touches on the fact that Herodotus was a secondary source himself, and that almost all of his military figures for the Persian Wars are false by better than a 1000%+ margin of error. Some of his stories relating to Cyrus the Great are not supported historically either. Herodotus, throughout the Persian Wars, paints the Greeks as patrons for freedom... He completely ignored the fact that the majority of Sparta was living in the Helot caste, over a third of Athenians were enslaved, and women within Athens were property at best. Women and religious minorities within the Persian Empire were granted more rights than in probobly any other classical empire, despite the fact that it was an autocracy. Further, not all Greek states were even democratic, which makes Herodotus's claims even more bizarre. The fact that he peacefully lived within the Persian Empire his entire life is also considerable, when one looks at how much disgust he has for the empire in his writings. He certainly wasn't thrown in prison for his beliefs like many Greek scholars were (for supposedly being pro-Persian). If anything, one could make a fair argument that the Persians were closer to a free society when it comes to free speech, freedom of residence, minority protection, religious freedom, and women's rights. The Persians were also pivotal in ending Human Sacrifice throughout their territories. But of course, Herodotus paints them as devil hordes. My statements above by no means prove that Herodotus was completely false or that he was purposefully lying, but it does expose him as blatantly partisan in his work. By no means should he be passed off as an objective historian.

Response to above: I am sorry, but have you actually READ the Histories? Herodotus is not generally considered to have been "biased" or "racist" against the Persians - in fact, a lot of his fellow Greeks denigrated him because they thought that he had depicted the Persians TOO WELL... They would call him "philo-barbarian" - a "lover of barbarians" - because he seemed to respect and admire other cultures and civilizations too much. In other words, many Greeks felt he was too "internationlist" and not "patriotic" enough. I would highly suggest that before you post such claims again, you should actually READ the Histories. You will be plesantly surprised I think to find that some of the most interesting, most noble, most intelligent, and most wise characters in the Histories are not Greeks, but Persians.... look up the names "Artabanus" (also spelled "Artabanos") or "Otanes" - these two Persians present speeches that form a crucial thematic core for the Histories, and they are definitely described in very glowing terms by Herodotus. Or, just turn to the last page of the text and read the final speech that Cyrus gives to the Persians - it basically encapsulates Herodotus' view of the Persian Empire, and you will find that is not what you may have thought!

Some of his outlandish claims have recently been defended with new information, but that doesn't mean we need sentences like this in an encyclopedia article: "Herodotus was, however, by his day's standards, reasonably accurate in his accounts, respectful of evidence, and a master of narrative. It is unfair, in other words, to condemn him for relating tales of giant man-eating ants, if such stories were told to him." By Herodotus's day's standards, there wasn't exactly an established field of history like there was for astronomy and mathematics. This claim doesn't say much. The second sentence essentially apologizes for the mythological nature of Herodotus's work. Whether or not Herodotus's intention was for "The Histories" to be mythological or factual, the fact of the matter is: much of it is mythological or embellished.


"Herodotus is now recognized as a pioneer not only in history, but in ethnography and also anthropology." - Again, why is Herodotus being glorified in the Criticisms section? Regardless, I highly doubt there is a consensus on this claim.


Herodotus's work is interwoven with too much fairy tale to truly be defended as fervently as this article does. Herodotus's work was interesting, but it was, in many ways, good literature more than it was reliable history.

[edit] The "Further reading" section

The Further reading section of this article is out of hand with listings that are likely mostly promotional in nature. I think it should at least be trimmed down, but I would be more satisfied to eliminate it entirely. Thoughts? Ashanda (talk) 01:19, 27 April 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Gold photo

I don't see the relevance of the newly added photo of panned gold from Alaska. It should be removed if it IS in fact irrelevant. Kdammers (talk) 04:40, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The text alongside is all about gold-dust, which is what the picture shows. Irrelevant? Try reading the article. Peterlewis (talk) 05:06, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
The phot is of nuggets. There is no scale to the photo, so it hardly adds any-thing specific. Why don't we also include a picture of a marmot - that would be much more useful? Kdammers (talk) 05:21, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Kdammers that the photo of gold is not needed in this article. Presumably most people will know what gold is, and if they don't, they can look it up elsewhere in Wikipedia. I feel that this picture of gold nuggets doesn't enhance a reader's understanding of Herodotus or his work. --Kyoko 06:31, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

"Presumably" is a loaded question. The whole idea of an encyclopedia is to educate and inform. Not many people have actually seen a nugget or gold dust, and the story of gold-digging ants is famous. These articles on historians and classical authors are very poorly illustrated, so why not include your picture of a marmot? Peterlewis (talk) 06:50, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

You have a point about the fame of the gold-digging ants, and I also see why you might want to break up that section of text with an image. At the same time, I wouldn't want to see it become cluttered. At the very least, I suggest removing the caption, because Alaska has nothing to do with Herodotus. --Kyoko 07:02, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bust

The familiar bust has now been labeled as uncertain. Perhaps we should instead use the bust here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/index.htm if it is available. Kdammers (talk) 11:33, 29 May 2008 (UTC)