Birthdate: c. 484 BC
Nationality: Greek
Bio:
Herodotus was one of the earliest known historians in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC. Often referred to as the “Father of History,” he traveled widely across western Asia and Egypt, conducting interviews and making keen observations of the places, peoples and past events he encountered. His resulting multi-volume work, known as the Histories, became one of the West’s earliest extensive works of prose literature.
In the Histories, Herodotus aimed to record and explain the history leading up to the Greco-Persian Wars. To do so, he wove together geographical and ethnographic accounts with legends, mythology and probable events in an engaging narrative style. His works reflect experiences seeing cities and battle sites firsthand, as well as meeting informants such as Egyptian priests and Persian nobles. While sometimes criticized for including dubious sources, he demonstrated a drive for accuracy and broadened research methods that became a hallmark of historians.
Though living centuries before the times of the modern historian, Herodotus helped pioneer the craft of historical writing. He blended reportage with storytelling to produce one of the earliest surviving examples of writing world history as a single, coherent narrative. For these achievements, along with his singular ability to bring remote peoples and cultures vividly to life through his pen, Herodotus remains a towering figure who helped shape how both history and humanity are understood.
