The History of Herodotus

The period of the Persian Wars is also the beginning of written history with the work of Herodotus, the primary source for information about the wars. The Persian Wars took place in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The history of Herodotus consists of nine books, a structure created not by Herodotus but by a later editor. The work falls into three major sections, each consisting of three parts. The first section comprises the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses and the accession of Darius. The second tells of the reign of Darius. The third covers that of Xerxes. Herodotus offers an assessment of the origins of the enmity between the Greeks and the Persians and gives some insight into the question of how the wars developed, an issue that continues to be of some controversy given the fact that the reasons for the beginning of the Persian Wars remains obscure.

The history of the various wars is known and covers a period of over a century. Darius came to power in Persia by being the strongest general in the army of Cambyses, and he crushed the rebellion that followed the death of that ruler and became ruler himself. By 521 B.C., Darius had restored peace. He then undertook a program of imperial expansion, and in 516 he moved across the Hellespont in a campaign against the Scythians. He was forced to retreat, but he had established a bridgehead in Europe. A revolt in Ionia in 500 B.C. halted expansion temporarily. Athens assisted the rebels in 498 B.C. so that the Greeks

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on their leaving the shore, to escape the shame of detection and the reproaches of her parents. Which of these two accounts is true I shall not trouble to decide. Historians have considered the nature of the sources of information used by Herodotus, noting that oral information dominated quantitatively the source material available to Herodotus. K.H. Waters finds that oral sources dominated by five to one. The types of source within the main categories differ widely in the degree of authenticity of the original source, in the kind and the intensity of any bias concerned, and in the amount of unintentional corruption incurred in transmission from person to person, generation to generation, and language to language. The sources also differ in age, and considering the time lag involved in recounting details of the events of this war, it should be born in mind that the greater is the likelihood of unintentional inaccuracy or deliberate perversion of the facts. Readers of the history will note the great frequency with which phrases such as "the Persians say" or "the Egyptians told me" or, unattributed, "it is said." Waters writes, The first two seem to imply an informed authority; in the case of Egyptian priests, their status

Category: History - T