Herodotus announced the size and scope of his work at the very beginning of his
Researches or
Histories:
The extent of his own achievement has been debated ever since. His place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. However, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of Augustan Rome, listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naive, often charming - all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself. Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain but, according to the ancient account, these predecessors included for example Dionysius of Miletus, Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus. Only fragments of the latter's work survive (and the authenticity of these is debatable) yet they allow us glimpses into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own
Histories, as for example in the introduction to Hecataeus's work,
Genealogies:
This clearly points forward to the 'folksy' yet 'international' outlook typical of Herodotus and yet one modern scholar, reading between the lines, has described the work of Hecataeus as "a curious false start to history" because, in spite of its critical spirit, it still failed to liberate history from myth. Herodotus actually mentions Hecataeus in his
Histories, on one occasion mocking him for his naive genealogy and, on another occasion, quoting Athenian complaints against his handling of their national history. It is possible that Herodotus borrowed a lot of material from Hecataeus, as stated by Porphyry in a quote recorded by Eusebius - in particular, it is possible that he copied descriptions of the crocodile, hippopotamus and phoenix from Hecataeus's 'Circumnavigation of the Known World' (
Periegesis/
Periodos ges), even mis-representing the source as 'Heliopolitans' (
Histories 2.73). Unlike Herodotus, however, Hecataeus did not record events that had occurred within living memory, nor did he include the oral traditions of Greek history within the larger framework of oriental history. There is in fact no proof that Herodotus derived the ambitious scope of his own work, with its grand theme of civilizations in conflict, from any predecessor, known or unknown, despite a lot of scholarly speculation about this in modern times. Herodotus claims to be better informed than his predecessors, relying on empirical observation to correct their excessive schematism - thus for instance, he argues for continental asymmetry as opposed to the older theory of a perfectly circular earth with Europe and Asia/Africa equal in size (
Hist. 4.36 and 4.42). However, he himself retains idealising tendencies, as in his symmetrical notions of the Danube and Nile.
His debt to previous authors of prose 'histories' might be questionable but there is no doubt that he owed much to the example and inspiration of poets and story-tellers. Athenian tragic poets for example provided him with a world-view of a balance between conflicting forces, upset by the hubris of kings, and they provided his narrative with a model of episodic structure. His familiarity with Athenian tragedy is demonstrated, for example, in a number of passages echoing Aeschylus's Persae, including the epigramatic observation that the defeat of the Persian navy at Salamis caused the defeat of the land army (
Hist. 8.68 ~
Persae 728). The debt may have been repayed by Sophocles since there appear to be echoes of
The Histories in his plays, especially a passage in Antigone that resembles Herodotus's account of the death of Intaphernes (
Histories 3.119 ~
Antigone 904-20) - this however is one of the most contentious issues in modern scholarship.
Homer was another inspirational source.
Just as Homer drew extensively on a tradition of oral poetry, sung by wandering minstrels, so Herodotus appears to have drawn on an Ionian tradition of story-telling, collecting and interpreting the oral histories he chanced upon in his travels. These oral histories often contained folk-tale motifs and demonstrated a moral, yet they also contained substantial facts relating to geography, anthropology and history, all compiled by Herodotus in an entertaining style and format. It is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-tales he reported that his critics in early modern times branded him 'The Father of Lies'. Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact one modern scholar has wondered if Herodotus left his home in Asiatic Greece, migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at Thuria (one of his three supposed resting places):
- :::Herodotus the son of Lyxes here
- :::Lies; in Ionic history without peer;
- :::A Dorian born, who fled from Slander's brand
- :::And made in Thuria his new native land.
Yet it was in Athens where his most formidable contemporary critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist, Aristophanes, produced The Acharnians, in which he blames The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes - a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of their wars with Greece, beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io, Europa, Medea and Helen. Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a 'logos-writer' or story-teller. Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric, became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas Herodotus with his frequent digressions appeared to minimize (or possibly disguise) his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed a historical topic more in keeping with the Greek lifestyle - the polis or city-state - whereas the interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Asiatic Greeks (such as Herodotus himself), for whom life under foreign rule was a recent memory.
Although
The Histories were often criticized in antiquity for bias, inaccuracy and plagiarism ... Lucian of Samosata attacked Herodotus as a liar in
Verae Historiae and went as far as to deny him a place among the famous on the Island of the Blessed ... modern historians and philosophers take a more positive view of Herodotus's methodology, especially those searching for a paradigm of objective historical writing. A few modern scholars have argued that Herodotus exaggerated the extent of his travels and invented his sources yet his reputation continues largely intact: "The Father of History is also the father of comparative anthropology", "the father of ethnography" and he is "more modern than any other ancient historian in his approach to the ideal of total history."