Inspirational Quotations by Herodotus (Ancient Greek Historian)

Herodotus (c.485–425 BCE) was a Greek historian. Considered the first great European historian, he is the first Greek writer who succeeded in writing an extensive historical narrative that has survived the passage of time.

Born in Halicarnassus, a Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor, now Bodrum in Turkey, Herodotus travelled widely in Asia Minor and the Middle East when the colonies were freed from the Persian yoke. In 443 BCE, he joined the colony of Thurii, from where he visited Sicily and Lower Italy.

On his travels, Herodotus collected historical, geographical, ethnological, mythological, and archaeological material for his great narrative history. Beginning with the subjugation of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor by the Lydian King, Croesus, he wrote a history of Lydia, Persia, Babylon, and Egypt.

Herodotus’s the History of the Greco-Persian Wars is the first great narrative history produced in the ancient world. It remains the leading source of information about the struggle of Greece against the Persian Empire in the Persian Wars between 550–479 BCE. It also provides an insight into the Mediterranean world of western Asia and of Egypt at that time.

Herodotus is respected for and the skill and honesty with which he built up his complex and mostly dependable descriptions. He was the first to make the events of the past the topic of research and verification, and Cicero and others have named him “the father of history.”

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