He ̄rodotos (Mech.) (230 – 180 BCE?)
Made minor improvements to the traction machine of N, according to H-
in O Coll. 49.8 (CMG 6.2.2, p. 14); see P.
Drachmann (1963) 174–175; Michler (1968) 87, 130.
PTK
He ̄rodotos of Halikarnassos (445? – 420? BCE)
Born ca 485 BCE, author of the long prose
work that has come to be called Histories,
based on the opening sentence which
identifies the work as “the display of the
inquiry (historie ̄)” of the author. The
modern title should therefore not be inter-
preted as denoting an exclusively historical
focus; Inquiries might be more accurate.
While taking the events of ca 550 – 479 BCE
as his general framework, i.e. the rise of
the Achaemenid Persian Empire and its
escalating conflict with the Greek cities of
Europe, He ̄rodotos makes frequent and
sometimes lengthy excursuses into ques-
tions of geography, ethnography, and
natural science, exploring in discursive
fashion the topics that most intrigued him
and his contemporaries. The extremely
broad scope of his work and the range of
attitudes and methodologies found there
make the Histories a rich but often frustrat-
ingly complex source of insight into the evolution of scientific thinking in Greece of the
mid-5th c. BCE.
About He ̄rodotos’ life little is known, but if his own account of his travels is believed
(as most scholars do), he ranks as one of the Classical world’s great explorers. He visited
upper Egypt, the Black Sea coast, southern Italy, the Levant, and perhaps even the city of
Babylo ̄n. At least some of his travels seem to have been undertaken for the purpose of
historical, geographical and anthropological research. His visit to Egypt provided the
material for an extremely long excursus filling all of the second book of the Histories, almost
15% of the work’s total length, which investigates matters as diverse as the source of the
Nile and the causes of its annual flooding, the geology of the Nile valley, local flora and
fauna, and the religious practices of the inhabitants. When discussing the many mysteries of
the Nile, He ̄rodotos shows great independence of mind and acute powers of observation, as
he rejects the myth-based or speculative accounts of his Ionian predecessors in favor of
deductions grounded in empirical evidence. At one point (2.12) he cites five first-hand
observations supporting his thesis that the land of Egypt had been formed from layers of silt
deposited by the Nile in a gulf of the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in his discussion of the
Nile, as well as in his discussion of global geography in his fourth book, He ̄rodotos rejects
He ̄rodotos of Halikarnassos © Biblioteca
Nazionale “Vittorio Emanuele III”, Naples, Italy.
Reproduced with permission of the Ministero per i
Beni e le Attività Culturali
HE ̄RODOTOS (MECH.)