Herodotos the Historian. His Problems, Methods, and Originality.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - A very good and clean copy. - The work of Herodotos of Halikarnassos, 'the father of history,' differs in many ways from that of modern historians, and it poses special problems to the student. For the first time in fifty years, K. H. Waters offers in this book a comprehensive introduction to Herodotos' background, aims, and methods; a portrait of the historian and his oeuvre seen whole. Herodotos' history of the Persian Wars, written in the second half of the fifth century B.C., was both the first attempt at a comprehensive secular history and the first lengthy prose narrative in the Western world. Its literary parentage was, on the one side, the Homeric poems with their legendary subject matter and, on the other, the prose tracts of Greece's New Learning, which were the products of the rising interest in all knowledge and rational inquiry. There was an almost total lack of written historical evidence in Greece, and the intelligentsia were ignorant of foreign languages such as Persian and Egyptian. The audiences who paid to hear Herodotos' lectures also expected historical dramatizations and enjoyed descriptive material and anecdotes that today would be relegated to notes. By uniting such disparate traditions, Herodotos laid the foundation for subsequent historical writing. Yet modern readers will find his great work foreign without the knowledge of his influences that this book provides. In a lively, informative style, K. H. Waters summarizes the current state of scholarship on Herodotos and offers a level-headed approach to this historian who has excited extreme modern views. - K. H. Waters is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Classics, University of Tasmania. He earned his master's degree at Cambridge University. ISBN 9780806119281