He's been in and out of fashion hrolotus for over two thousand years. He was always seen as a charming story teller, but just a rather a kind of naive recorder of other people's accounts. His focus on who is telling what story in their own from their own perspective mirrors the polyphanous effect of social media. But i think there also about the way in which he reflects our experience of hearing many stories and trying to make sense of them. So we appreciate him perhaps as in some ways, a founder of anthropological and ethnographical approaches.
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