Chronicling the remarkable victory of Greece n its war (499-479 B.C.) against the invading Persians, Herodotus was the first historian to research the sites he described, traveling the world to gather a wealth of data for his enthralling epic." The Histories also inaugurated the practice of ethnogra[...]

Herodotus (c480-c425) is 'The Father of History' and his Histories are the first piece of Western historical writing. They are also the most entertaining. Why did Pheidippides run the 26 miles and 385 yards (or 42.195 kilometres) from Marathon to Athens? And what did he do when he got there? Was the[...]

Book I of the "Histories" provides a particularly good illustration of the discursiveness and diversity of Herodotus' materials and of the ingenuity with which he develops his narrative and welds it into an artistic whole. Here he deals first with the distant mythological and then in greater detail [...]

Herodotus' Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naive and [...]