Herodotus
Herodotusof Halicarnassus (now Bodrum on the Aegean coast of Turkey), historian. 1. ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus’ are (in Greek) the first two words of a long historical narrative, the earliest we possess. It looks back to the fall of the Lydian kingdom in western Turkey in 545 BC and forwards to events in the early 420s, during the great war between Athens and Sparta, but it has as its focus and raison d'être (1. 1) the ‘war between Greeks and non-Greeks’, which we call the Persian Wars. We do not know exactly when it was written but it was already familiar in Athens in 425 BC, when Aristophanes parodied its opening chapters in one of his plays (Acharnenses 515ff.). We know very little about the life of its author: he nowhere claims to have been an eyewitness or participant in any of the major events or battles that he describes (unlike Aeschylus), but records conversations with those...
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