meaning foreign but not necessarily uncivilized). More particularly he aims to show
the reason why they came into conflict (I, 1). He then gives the Persian and Phoenician
versions of the origin of eastern hostility to the Greeks, going back to the story of Io
and the Trojan War. However, he quickly moves on from the mythical past:
This is what the Persians and Phoenicians say. I am not going to come down in
favour of this or that account of events, but I will talk about the man who, to my
certain knowledge, first undertook criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks.
I will show who it was who did this, and then proceed with the rest of the account.
I will cover minor and major human settlements equally, because most of those
that were important in the past have diminished in significance by now, and those
which were great in my own time were small in times past. I will mention both
equally because I know that human happiness never remains long in the same
place.
(1, 5)The stress here upon historical flux suggests the influence upon Herodotus of the
physical speculations of the Ionian natural philosophers, especially Heraclitus. In
actual fact, he finds the historical cause of the conflict to lie in the attack made by
Croesus of Lydia upon the neighbouring empire of King Cyrus of Persia, in the course
of which the Lydian empire, the buffer state between Persia and the Asiatic Greeks,
was destroyed. He then gives the history of the eastern part of the Persian empire,
concentrating upon the reign of Cyrus, who conquered first the Medes and then
extended westwards by way of Lydia to the Asiatic Greeks. His successor Cambyses
conquered Egypt; Darius and then Xerxes attempt the conquest of Europe. In the
course of his account he tells us of the prevailing customs of each foreign people,
notably the Lydians in Book One, the Persians in Books One and Three, the Egyptians
in Book Two and the Scythians and Libyans in Book Four. He therefore gives us a
history and description (geographical and ethnographical) of the whole of the Near
East. As in the case of Homer, there are many episodes and digressions, but essen-
tially they are related and subordinated to one grand uniting theme. It is by virtue of
this unity (reflecting the unity he saw in the human world), as well as the scale of the
work and of course the interest in cause and effect, that Herodotus merits the title
accorded to him in antiquity, ‘the father of history’, even though others had written
history before him, and it is by virtue of his interest in different customs and peoples
that he may also be called the father of anthropology and ethnology.
He acquired the material for his history sometimes from written records but
usually from what he saw for himself or was told by those he met on his extensive
travels. He lived for a time in Samos and at Athens, then after 444, for the last twenty
years of his life, in the Athenian colony of Thurii in southern Italy. He tells us that he
HISTORY 35