A Commentary on Herodotus

Herodotus invented history. Before him, chroniclers recorded events as divine mandates or royal decrees. He asked different questions: What happened, and why? What did peoples believe about themselves? His "Histories" - our only complete account of the Greco-Persian Wars - rewrote the rules of how humans understand time. This commentary, first published in 1912, was the standard English-language guide to his revolutionary text for decades. How and Wells methodically work through Herodotus's nine books, unpacking his narrative strategies, his ethnographic digressions on Egyptian priests and Scythian nomads, his investigations into the causes of war between East and West. The appendices tackle knotty problems of text and translation that remain relevant today. A full introduction establishes what we can know about Herodotus himself - his travels, his methods, his controversial reputation among ancient critics. This is not casual reading. It is a labor of classical scholarship, dense and dedicated. But for anyone who wants to understand where historical thinking came from - or who is tracing the intellectual genealogy of how we know what we know about the past - this remains an essential companion to the man Cicero called the Father of History.