Herodotus
484 BCE – 425 BCE Greek historian
The Father of History, author of the first great prose narrative of the past.
- Religion
- Greek polytheism, with a strong sense of divine justice shaping human affairs.
- Affiliations
- None.
Herodotus wrote the Histories, an account of the wars between Greece and Persia woven with ethnography, geography, and storytelling. He was the first to gather evidence and inquiry into a sustained written history. His curiosity about other peoples set the pattern for the discipline.
Connections
- influenced Thucydides — Thucydides wrote in reaction to Herodotus, favoring strict factual method.
In the timeline
- 485 BCE Birth of the historian Herodotus central figure