Argumentative Essay About Herodotus

Historians often vigorously debate about Herodotus and most things pertaining to him and his work. There is not a lot of information about Herodotus and most of our information about him comes from his actual writing itself. What we do know is that in a certain respect he is one of the earliest of all historians in the proper sense of whose work we possess. He lived during the fifth century (c.484 – 425 BC) and was born in Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, which is now modern day Bodrum in Turkey (de Ste. Croix. 1997:137). Halicarnassus was a Greek settlement in Caria that soon became under Persian domination. He was the son of Lyxes and Dryo and they were one of the leading families there. Coming from such a well-off family, Herodotus had the opportunity to receive the best education that was available to

Historie meaning inquiry, is where we get the modern meaning of the word “history”. Herodotus practiced historie, he investigated the world that he lived in—looking into why things had happened, such as why the Greeks fought the Persians and why the Greeks won. In order to acquire all of this information Herodotus did extensive amounts of travelling. He was able to do so because he was considered to be a cultural hybrid of sorts, especially with how well he was familiar with different customs. Being as Herodotus was not a mainstream Greek, he did not solely focus on them, therefore, instead of writing the history of one single city, he chose to present the history of the entire known world. He visited Egypt, Thrace, Phoenicia, the coasts of Syria, the edge of the Scythian territory North of the Black Sea, and the Eastern regions as far as Babylon (Finley, 1959:27-28). Whilst in all of these places he wrote down his observations incidentally causing him to become the earliest anthropologist and ethnologist whose work survives (de Ste. Croix.