Sparta he gives an official line, for Athens a version based at least in part on particular aristocratic
traditions; the narrative is concerned with events and wars, rational in tone, without moral or religious
colouring, and designed to enhance or justify the status of particular groups. At Delphi a different type
of tradition was available, a series of stories told by the priests and related to the monuments and
offerings at the shrine. These stories contain many folk-tale motifs and have a strong moral tone: the
hero moves from prosperity to misfortune as a victim of divine envy - the ethical teaching is not
aristocratic, but belongs to the shrine of a god whose temple carried the mottoes, 'Know yourself, and
'Nothing too much'. The same types of story pattern are dominant in Ionia: Herodotus' history of his
home area is far less 'historical' and far less political than his account of mainland Greece. He is, for
instance, often thought to have had particularly good sources for the history of Samos, where he spent
much of his youth, yet his account of the tyrant Polycrates only two generations earlier has already
turned into a folk-tale.
This characteristic of his Ionian sources suggests a popular, non-aristocratic tradition of story-telling
which is directly related to Herodotus' achievement. For the overall shape of his history shows the same
moral patterning as his Ionian and Delphic stories: the story of the Persian Wars is a story of how 'the
god strikes with his thunderbolt the tall, and will not allow them to display themselves, while small
beings do not vex him; you see how the lightning throws down always the greatest buildings and the
finest trees' (7. 10). The message is created through a series of devices derived from the art of the folk-
tale: the warning dream, the figure of the wise counsellor disregarded, the recurrent story pattern. Just as
behind Homer there lies a long tradition of oral poetry sung by professional bards, so behind Herodotus
there lies an Ionian tradition of storytelling of which he himself was the last and greatest master.
Thus Herodotus' collecting of information was not guided by any spirit of systematic enquiry, neither
was it the product of random curiosity. It was informed from the start with the principle of the logos.
Herodotus uses the word logos to refer to the whole of his work, to its major sections (the Egyptian or
the Lydian logos), and to the individual stories within it: he surely regarded himself as a logos-maker in
the same way as he regarded both Hecataeus the mythographer and Aesop the creator of animal fables;
Thucydides indeed dismisses him as a 'logos-writer'. The word logos in this context may very often
seem to mean little more than the English 'story', as long as we remember that a story has a shape, a
purpose: it is not an isolated fact preserved for its own sake; it may be true, but it must be interesting.
The achievement of Herodotus was to harness the skills of the logos-maker to the description of human
societies in peace and war.
From the evidence for his friendship with the poet Sophocles, Herodotus was already active as a lecturer
in the late forties of the fifth century; the final version of his history was published shortly before 425 B.
C., when Aristophanes parodied his account of the causes of the Persian Wars in his comedy, The
Acharnians. Already Herodotus seemed old-fashioned, for the wider Ionian responsiveness to the
interplay of civilizations had been replaced by a narrower concern with the Greek city-state and its
interests; history became the history of the polis, and took new directions.
Local History and Chronography