Father of History or Father of Lies? Why Herodotus Still Divides Historians

Herodotus is called the "Father of History" because his Histories, an account of the Greco-Persian Wars written in the 5th century BC, is regarded as the founding work of history in Western literature, and because the Roman orator Cicero gave him that very title. He was a Greek historian and geographer from Halicarnassus, the city that is now Bodrum in Turkey, and his book established history as a genre and a field of study in the Western world. Yet the same man has also been mocked as the "Father of Lies", and the tension between those two nicknames is the best way into his life and work.

A Greek writer born inside the Persian Empire

It is generally accepted that Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, on the coast of Anatolia, around 485 BC. At that time the city lay inside the Persian Empire, which means that the man who would later write the great Greek story of the war against Persia was himself born a Persian subject. A Byzantine encyclopaedia from the 10th century, the Suda, says his family was influential and that he was related to an epic poet named Panyassis; because some family names are Carian, scholars think he was at least partly of Carian origin rather than purely Greek.

The Suda also tells a heroic story in which young Herodotus fled to the island of Samos, then returned to lead a revolt that overthrew the tyrant of his home city. Modern scholars are cautious here: the Suda is the only source for that romantic picture of Herodotus as a liberator, and that alone casts doubt on it. This is a pattern you will see again and again with ancient lives. We have a few solid facts, a lot of later tradition, and the job of the reader is to keep the two apart.

The traveller who asked questions

What made Herodotus unusual was how far he went to collect his material. He claims to have travelled widely around the ancient world, interviewing people and gathering stories, and almost everything he covers lies inside the territories of the Persian Empire. His own eyewitness descriptions suggest he visited Egypt, probably after 454 BC, and he probably went on to Tyre and then down the Euphrates to Babylon.

Around 447 BC he moved to Athens, a city whose people and democratic institutions he openly admired. A few years later, in 443 BC or soon after, he joined an Athenian-sponsored colony at Thurii in southern Italy, which is why Aristotle could refer to "Herodotus of Thurium". Nothing in his book can be dated with certainty to later than 430 BC, so he is generally thought to have died not long after that, possibly in Athens, in Macedonia or back in Thurii.

What the Histories is actually about

The Histories is one of the earliest accounts of the rise of the Persian Empire and of the causes and events of the wars between Persia and the Greek city-states. It follows famous kings and battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, but it constantly wanders away from the main road to describe the customs, landscapes and past of the peoples involved. Those digressions are not padding. They are an essential part of the story, and for many modern readers they are the most fascinating part.

Later editors divided the work into nine books, and each book is conventionally named after one of the nine Muses. Herodotus himself explained his purpose in the opening lines: he was publishing his research so that human actions would not fade with time, so that the great deeds of both Greeks and non-Greeks would not go unremembered, and to show why they went to war with each other. That last point is important. He was not just listing events; he was asking why they happened, and that question about causes is a big part of why he is seen as the first historian in the Western sense.

Why "Father of History"?

Several things come together in the title. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact, so in a very practical sense it is where the written tradition of Greek history begins for us. Earlier writers such as Hecataeus of Miletus survive only in fragments, and they did not record events within living memory, nor did they place Greek oral traditions inside a larger history of the eastern world as Herodotus did. Herodotus also claimed to rely on observation to correct older, overly neat theories; for example, he argued against the old picture of a perfectly circular earth with continents of equal size.

Modern scholars have added other titles too. He has been called the father of comparative anthropology and the father of ethnography, and has even been described as more modern than any other ancient historian in his ideal of a total history. When you read his long descriptions of Egyptian customs or Scythian burials, it is easy to see why.

Why "Father of Lies"?

The other nickname comes from the same habit of collecting everything he heard. Because his book includes many strange stories and folk-tales, critics branded him the "Father of Lies". The historian Thucydides, who wrote about the Peloponnesian War a generation later, dismissed him as a story-teller, and the comic playwright Aristophanes mocked his way of explaining the origins of war. Other ancient writers piled on: Duris of Samos called him a "myth-monger", and a grammarian named Harpocration wrote a whole book on the lies of Herodotus.

The most famous example is his story of fox-sized "ants" in a desert of the far east that dug up gold dust. It sounds like pure fantasy, but the explorer Michel Peissel later suggested it might reflect Himalayan marmots on a gold-rich plateau in northern Pakistan, perhaps confused through a Persian word. Herodotus did not claim to have seen the creatures himself. His defence, then and now, is simple: he reported what he could see and what he was told.

How reliable is he, really?

The honest answer is "partly". Many present-day historians believe his accounts are at least partly inaccurate, often because of exaggeration. The German scholar Detlev Fehling went much further, arguing that Herodotus exaggerated his travels and invented many of his sources, and some specialists doubt how much he really saw of Egypt.

On the other side, archaeology has repeatedly surprised the sceptics. He described the Scythian city of Gelonus as enormous, which was widely disbelieved until the site was rediscovered in 1975, and finds at the sunken Egyptian port of Thonis-Heracleion, including a type of boat he described, have supported parts of his account. Above all, he remains the main and often the only source for events in the Greek world and the Persian Empire in the two centuries before his own time. A good way to read him today is the way a careful listener treats a well-travelled friend: enjoy the stories, notice when he says "they told me", and check the big claims against other evidence.

A storyteller at the festival

Herodotus probably shared his research by reading it aloud to audiences, as was common in his day. The writer Lucian later claimed that he read the entire Histories to the crowd at the Olympic Games in one sitting and was cheered at the end, while another ancient tale says he waited for clouds to give him shade until the audience had gone home. Both are later anecdotes rather than solid facts, but they show how strongly people remembered him as a performer as well as a researcher.

Learn with Herodotus: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to take something with a grain of salt	to doubt that something is fully true	Take his travel stories with a grain of salt.
a tall tale	a story that is hard to believe	The giant gold-digging ants sound like a tall tale.
first-hand	seen or experienced yourself	He gave a first-hand account of Egypt.
hearsay	information you heard from others, not checked	Much of the book is based on hearsay.
to go off on a tangent	to suddenly change to a different topic	Herodotus often goes off on a tangent.

Try this: Describe a story a friend once told you in three English sentences, using "first-hand" and "take it with a grain of salt".