theme. Herodotus of Halicarnassus in fact deserves his ancient title of 'father of history'. His work is the
earliest Greek book in prose to have survived intact; it is some 600 pages or nine 'books' long. Its theme
is presented in the first sentence: 'This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus,
undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time and the great and
marvelous works of both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, and not least the reason
why they fought one another.'
The ultimate justification of the work is the account of the conflict between Greece and Persia,
culminating in the Great Expedition of Xerxes to Greece in 480 B.C. described in the last three books: it
is the story of how an army of (allegedly) one and three-quarter million men and a navy of 1,200 ships
was defeated by the fragmented forces of the Greeks, who in no battle could muster more than 40,000
men and 378 ships; we may doubt the Persian numbers, but the strategy shows that we cannot doubt the
fact that the Greeks were heavily outnumbered on each occasion (above pp. 44 ff.) A fleet from
Herodotus' city had fought on the Persian side, and one of his earliest memories was perhaps of the
setting out and return of that fateful expedition; he grew up in an Ionia suffering the joys and pains of its
liberation and then subjection by the victorious Athenian navy (above, pp. 133 ff.) For the generation of
Herodotus the epic achievements of their fathers had created the world in which they lived, as the return
of the exiles from Babylon had created the world of Ezra. In his last books Herodotus sought to raise a
fitting monument to the new race of heroes, using all the literary skills at his command, 'so that the
achievements of men should not be obliterated by time'.
The central theme of this conflict requires Herodotus to go back to its origins: 'who was the first in
actual fact to harm the Greeks'. So the work begins with the earlier struggles between the Ionian Greeks
and the kingdom of Lydia, before passing on to the origins of Persian power and the story of Cyrus the
Great, and then the further conquests of the Persians, in Egypt and north Africa, and around the Black
Sea, until we see that the conflict -was inevitable.
But this central theme is merely one aspect of the work; there is another, at least as important - 'the
account of the investigation' or 'researches' of Herodotus (this is in fact the original meaning and the first
recorded use of the word historie). Like Hecataeus, Herodotus was a traveller: in the first four books and
often thereafter the theme of the conflict is subordinate, a thread on which to hang a series of accounts or
stories gathered from different places. These range from individual stories about famous figures (the
mythical poet Arion or the Persian court doctor Democedes of Croton, for instance) to substantial
histories of the rise and fall of cities (Athens, Sparta, Naucratis in Egypt) and finally to full-scale
geographical and ethnographic accounts of civilizations, the most extended of which, on Egypt, occupies
the whole of Book 2.
The result is far more than an account of the causes and events of a mere conflict. It is rather a total
picture of the known world, in -which the geography, customs, beliefs, and monuments of each people
are at least as important as their often tenuous relationship to the war. It is this which gives added depth
to Herodotus' account, and makes it both a great work of art and a convincing history of a conflict not
just between two peoples but between two types of society, the Mediterranean egalitarian city-state and
the oriental despotisms of the Middle East. It also makes Herodotus more modern than any other ancient