Why is Herodotus called “The Father of History”? - Mark Robinson

2,446,436 views ・ 2017-12-11

TED-Ed


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Giant gold-digging ants,
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a furious king who orders the sea to be whipped 300 times,
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and a dolphin that saves a famous poet from drowning.
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These are just some of the stories from The Histories by Herodotus,
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an Ancient Greek writer from the 5th century BCE.
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Not all the events in the text may have happened
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exactly as Herodotus reported them,
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but this work revolutionized the way the past was recorded.
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Before Herodotus, the past was documented as a list of events
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with little or no attempt to explain their causes
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beyond accepting things as the will of the gods.
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Herodotus wanted a deeper, more rational understanding,
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so he took a new approach:
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looking at events from both sides to understand the reasons for them.
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Though he was Greek, Herodotus's hometown of Halicarnassus
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was part of the Persian Empire.
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He grew up during a series of wars between the powerful Persians
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and the smaller Greeks,
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and decided to find out all he could about the subject.
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In Herodotus's telling, the Persian Wars began in 499 BCE,
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when the Athenians assisted a rebellion by Greeks living under Persian rule.
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In 490, the Persian King, Darius, sent his army to take revenge on Athens.
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But at the Battle of Marathon, the Athenians won an unexpected victory.
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Ten years later, the Persians returned, planning to conquer the whole of Greece
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under the leadership of Darius's son, Xerxes.
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According to Herodotus, when Xerxes arrived,
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his million man army was initially opposed by a Greek force
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led by 300 Spartans at the mountain pass of Thermopylae.
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At great cost to the Persians,
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the Spartans and their king, Leonidas, were killed.
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This heroic defeat has been an inspiration to underdogs ever since.
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A few weeks later, the Greek navy tricked the Persian fleet
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into fighting in a narrow sea channel near Athens.
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The Persians were defeated and Xerxes fled, never to return.
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To explain how these wars broke out and why the Greeks triumphed,
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Herodotus collected stories from all around the Mediterranean.
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He recorded the achievements of both Greeks and non-Greeks
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before they were lost to the passage of time.
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The Histories opens with the famous sentence:
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"Herodotus, of Halicarnassus, here displays his inquiries."
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By framing the book as an “inquiry,”
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Herodotus allowed it to contain many different stories,
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some serious, others less so.
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He recorded the internal debates of the Persian court
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but also tales of Egyptian flying snakes
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and practical advice on how to catch a crocodile.
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The Greek word for this method of research is "autopsy,"
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meaning "seeing for oneself."
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Herodotus was the first writer to examine the past
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by combining the different kinds of evidence he collected:
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opsis, or eyewitness accounts,
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akoe, or hearsay,
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and ta legomena, or tradition.
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He then used gnome, or reason,
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to reach conclusions about what actually happened.
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Many of the book's early readers were actually listeners.
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The Histories was originally written in 28 sections,
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each of which took about four hours to read aloud.
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As the Greeks increased in influence and power,
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Herodotus's writing and the idea of history spread across the Mediterranean.
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As the first proper historian, Herodotus wasn't perfect.
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On occasions, he favored the Greeks over the Persians
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and was too quick to believe some of the stories that he heard,
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which made for inaccuracies.
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However, modern evidence has actually explained
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some of his apparently extreme claims.
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For instance, there's a species of marmot in the Himalayas
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that spreads gold dust while digging.
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The ancient Persian word for marmot is quite close to the word for ant,
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so Herodotus may have just fallen prey to a translation error.
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All in all, for someone who was writing in an entirely new style,
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Herodotus did remarkably well.
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History, right down to the present day, has always suffered from the partiality
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and mistakes of historians.
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Herodotus’s method and creativity earned him the title
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that the Roman author Cicero gave him several hundred years later:
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"The Father of History."
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