Tom Harrison: Why does herodotus pay so much attention to egypt in the first part of the history, talking about the nile and the flooding of the nile? He says it is because of the depth of its history, the number of its monuments. Egypt's also kind of like a laboratory for him, in methodlogical terms. It's a place where he can show off and say what's distinctive about his approach. And then another really important thing to say about about the egyptian account. All these ethnographies are kind of framed by persian advance.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of histories, dubbed by his detractors as the father of lies. Herodotus (c484 to 425 BC or later) was raised in Halicarnassus in modern Turkey when it was part of the Persian empire and, in the years after the Persian Wars, set about an inquiry into the deep background to those wars. He also aimed to preserve what he called the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks, seeking out the best evidence for past events and presenting the range of evidence for readers to assess. Plutarch was to criticise Herodotus for using this to promote the least flattering accounts of his fellow Greeks, hence the 'father of lies', but the depth and breadth of his Histories have secured his reputation from his lifetime down to the present day.
With
Tom Harrison
Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews
Esther Eidinow
Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol
And
Paul Cartledge
A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson