For Herodotus was an endlessly curious man and gathered information about the world around him from as many people and places as he could investigate. Indeed few history books written since can compare for sheer drama with Herodotus’ narrative of the Persian invasions of Greece, and the Histories contains much more than that besides all human life is there. Holland has returned to Herodotus many times since he was ten and never once been bored by him.

In my view, Holland’s is a powerful rendering that allows all the drama and mysteriousness of this great book to be fully appreciated by modern readers. It was my eagerly undertaken task to vet (and annotate) his translation, from the standpoint of a professional classicist who has been reading Herodotus in the original Greek since the age of 19. But for this absorbing new translation of Herodotus, a project that can be traced back to the excitement of his ten-year-old self after discovering a two-volume translation, Holland had to get his Greek up to a sufficient level of competence to cope with the peculiarities and quiddities of a prose dialect (Ionic) that is both idiosyncratic and not the standard Attic. He is well known to ancient historians as the author of Persian Fire, his history of the Greco-Persian wars. That human achievement may be spared the ravages of time, and that everything great and astounding, and all the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect, be kept alive – and additionally, and most importantly, to give the reason they went to war.Īt least that was his aim according to a new translation of the entire Histories by Tom Holland (Allen Lane).

Herodotus’ declared aim in his preface was to ensure: Happily, though, Herodotus (‘Gift of Hera’) proved to be one of the Greeks least infected by the sort of virulent anti-barbarian prejudice that was fanned by the subject he made his own life’s work: the Greco-Persian Wars of 480 and 479 BC and their more immediate origins. Herodotus’ own immediate family indeed bore Carian or Carian-inflected names. Halicarnassus was itself originally a foreign implant, settled by Greeks from the Peloponnese at the turn of the last millennium BC, among the non-Greek, ‘barbarian-voiced’ Carians, as Homer had called them in the second book of the Iliad. The Greek city of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) was then a subject of the mighty Persian empire, which had been founded some two to three generations earlier by Cyrus II and by now stretched from the Punjab to the Aegean.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus was born in or about 484 BC. In the beginning was the word – historiê, ‘enquiry’ or ‘research’: the word used by the West’s first historian in order to describe both his method and his achievement, his ergon (‘deed’).

Herodotus on the persian wars