THE FATHER OF HISTORY: A NOVEL HERODOTUS

Herodotus is the nineteenth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. He was the first to ask not simply what happened, but why. He became known as the father of history. Before him, the Greek world preserved its past through myth and epic poetry: Homer's gods and heroes, not eyewitness testimony weighed against eyewitness testimony. Herodotus changed that. He called his book Historiai (Inquiries) and meant it literally: he travelled to Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and the Scythian steppe, interviewed survivors of battles and their children, recorded conflicting accounts side by side without forcing a false resolution, and named his sources. No one had done this before. He did it because he came from Halicarnassus, a city that was Greek and Carian and ruled by Persia all at once, and because exile had taught him that you cannot understand the world from the centre. You have to go out and ask. This novel follows Herodotus from his exiled youth on Samos, where he first learned to set one witness's account against another's, through the great logoi of Egypt, Babylon, and Scythia that make up the Histories' famous digressions, to the Persian Wars that give his book its narrative spine: the run at Marathon, the three days at Thermopylae and the epitaph for the Spartan dead, the naval chaos at Salamis where his own city's Queen Artemisia rammed an ally's ship to escape and fooled Xerxes into thinking she'd sunk an enemy. It follows him to Athens, where he gave public readings of his unfinished work, to the new colony at Thurii where he completed it, and to the ancient critics who accused him of credulity and bias, charges the novel takes seriously before showing what the following twenty-five centuries have vindicated. A vivid, curious, scrupulously honest reconstruction of the man who decided that someone's job was to stop human events from fading with time, and that the job had to be done by asking. The Father of History is the nineteenth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.