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Herodotus....
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Herodotus (Greek: ΗΡΟΔΟΤΟΣ, Herodotos) was an ancient historian who
lived in the 5th century BC (484 BC - c. 425 BC). He is famous for his
writings on the conflict between Greece and
Persia, as well as the
descriptions he wrote of different places and people he met on his
travels.
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Herodotus wrote a history of the Persian invasion of
Greece in the early fifth century B.C., known simply as The Histories of
Herodotus. This work was recognized as a new form of literature soon after
its publication. Before Herodotus, there had been chronicles and epics, and
they too had preserved knowledge of the past. But Herodotus was the first
not only to record the past but also to treat it as a philosophical problem,
or research project, that could yield knowledge of human behavior. |
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As to Herodotus's life, we know that he was exiled from Halicarnassus after his involvement in an unsuccessful putsch against the
ruling dynasty, and he withdrew to the island of Samos. He seems never to
have returned to Halicarnassus, though in his Histories he appears to be
proud of his native city and its queen, Artemisia. It must have been during
his exile that he undertook the journeys that he describes in The Histories. |
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These journeys took him to Egypt,
as far south as the
first cataract of the Nile, to
Babylon, to Ukraine, and to Italy and
Sicily. Herodotus mentions an interview with an informant in Sparta, and
almost certainly he lived for a period in Athens. In Athens, he tapped the
oral traditions of the prominent families, in particular the Alkmaeonidai,
to which Pericles belonged on his maternal side. But the Athenians did not
accept foreigners as citizens, and when Athens sponsored the colony of
Thurii in the instep of Italy in 444 BC, Herodotus became a colonist.
Whether he died there or not is uncertain. |
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