The Life and Times of Herodotus
 

As is the case for most ancient authors of classical antiquity, the biographical details on Herodotus are scant and leave many unanswered questions. We know little, for example, of his parentage and nothing of any spouse or children. The father's name, Lyxes, however, appears to be Carian, that is, non-Greek, and there has been some speculation that Herodotus may have been the product of a mixed Carian-Greek marriage. Fascinating as the idea is, it cannot rise above the level of conjecture (Herodotus' own name and that of his brother, Theodorus, are purely Greek). Although the biographical material on our author doesn't amount to very much, there is enough to know something of the man's life. These biographical details (though they must be used with caution) are important for providing a context within which we can interpret Herodotus' historical work.

Herodotus probably was born in 483 BCE in the Greek city-state of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, south of Miletus and close to the island of Cos. The ancient site is along the southwestern coast of present-day Turkey. The citizen body of Halicarnassus was composed of Greek and non-Greek (Carian) elements, and this cultural and ethnic mixture is a salient bit of the historical background of Herodotus' work; it may provide important insights into Herodotus' treatment of non-Greek peoples. Halicarnassus itself was a subject of the Persian king at the time of the Persian Wars, and a Halicarnassian naval contingent, led by queen Artemisia, was part of Xerxes' military force directed against the mainland Greeks in 480 BCE. This also may provide some insights into Herodotus' treatment of non-Greek peoples.

Herodotus' family apparently was well-off and important enough to be a political force in the affairs of Halicarnassus. We can surmise this much from the fact that his uncle Panyassis was the author of a well-regarded epic poem on Heracles, and from the fact that Herodotus himself had trouble with the Halicarnassian tyrant Lygdamis, grandson of the great Artemisia, and went into exile from his native Halicarnassus. This exile was forced on Herodotus after Lygdamis put Herodotus' uncle, Panyassis, to death. Herodotus therefore was in the unenviable position of being a man without a polis. This is yet another important fact in the scant biographical tradition on Herodotus. One only needs to think of the importance of the communal life of the polis in the self-identity of the Greek citizen in order to realize the impact expatriation must have had on Herodotus. Tradition states that Herodotus returned from his exile in Samos sometime around 455 BCE and somehow succeeded in bringing about the overthrow of the tyrant Lygdamis. Rather than enjoy his repatriation, however, Herodotus now traveled the known world--Egypt, Tyre, Babylon, Scythia, and south Italy--and he collected material for his historical writings.

Herodotus was a toddler when the second great Persian invasion of 480 came upon the Greek world. Although Herodotus himself could not remember events of the war, he was able to interrogate in his researches on the Persian wars old men who were eyewitnesses to the invasion and/or participants in the war, whether as part of Xerxes' forces or as part of the Greek resistance. An example of such first hand accounts may be the story of what was said at a Persian dinner party before the battle at Plataea in 479 BCE (Histories, 9.16).

We can be fairly sure that Herodotus spent time in Athens. By the mid-fifth century BCE, when Herodotus was in the prime of life, Athens had become a great imperial city which was the cultural capital of the Greek world. Herodotus demonstrates a keen interest in and knowledge of local Athenian history. Tradition states that Herodotus gave public recitations of parts of his Histories, and one source records that the Athenians rewarded him with ten talents, an enormous sum of money, for these readings (Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotus, 26). Herodotus may have been motivated by the desire to attain Athenian citizenship. Internal clues from his own text seem to support such a reconstruction. Athens was led at this time by the great statesman Pericles, of the clan of the Alcmaeonidae, and Herodotus goes to great lengths to deny charges that the Alcmaeonidae had attempted to betray Athens to the Persians at the time of the Marathon campaign (6.121-124), and Herodotus also includes the following panegyric of Athens in his historical account:

"At this point I am forced to declare an opinion that most people will find offensive; yet, because I think it is true, I will not hold back. If the Athenians had taken fright at the approaching danger and had left their own country, or even if they had not left it but had remained and surrendered to Xerxes, no one would have tried to oppose the king at sea. If there had been no opposition to Xerxes at sea, what happened on land would have been this: even if the Peloponnesians had drawn many walls around the Isthmus for their defense, the Spartans would have been betrayed by their allies, not because the allies chose to do so but out of necessity as they were taken, city by city, by the fleet of the barbarian; thus the Spartans would have been isolated and, though isolated, would have done deeds of the greatest valor and would have died nobly. That would have been what happened; or else they would, before this end, have seen that all the other Greeks had Medized and so themselves would have come to an agreement with Xerxes. In both these cases, all of Greece would have been subdued by the Persians.... So, as it stands now, a man who declares that the Athenians were the saviors of Greece would hit the very truth. For to whichever side they inclined, that was where the scale would come down".
(7.139, Grene translation with slight modifications)

It is likely that such statements are for the benefit of Athenian audiences, and they may well reflect an attempt on Herodotus' part to gain the franchise of Athenian citizenship. In any event, Herodotus did not become an Athenian citizen and moved on.

Probably after having failed in his bid for Athenian citizenship in the 440s, Herodotus migrated to the Athenian colony of Thurii , a colony of Athenians and other Greeks on the instep of the Italian peninsula which was founded in 444-443 BCE. This part of Herodotus' life is reflected in some ancient texts of his Histories which refer to Herodotus as "Herodotus the Thuriian", not as "Herodotus the Halicarnassian" (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.9.1409 a 29; Julian the Apostate, Epistle 22).

The latest reference in Herodotus' work is to an event in the year 430 BCE (7.137). Herodotus probably lived on to witness the early stages of the life-or-death struggle between Athens and Sparta known as the Peloponnesian war (431-404 BCE), in which just about the entire Greek world became embroiled. This war largely was caused by the Greek resentment brought about by the Athenians' heavy-handed imperialism at the expense of smaller, weaker Greek states. The Athenians justified their imperialism and their exploitation of other Greek states by pointing back to their heroics at the time of the Persian invasions. In Herodotus, it is the established and wealthy power, enervated by luxury and power, which routinely meets disaster for its transgressions at the hands of a new, raw, and unspoilt adversary. An important sub-text of Herodotus' Histories may well be an implicit criticism of mighty Athens, which, as a tyrant state, had begun to show itself to be little different from the aggressor state of Darius' or Xerxes' Persia.