Herodotus

At Thermopylae, Leonidas sent away most of the Greek army when he knew the pass was betrayed, keeping only the Spartans and a few others. A local man told him the Persian arrows would be so many they would blot out the sun. A Spartan said: then we shall fight in the shade. Three hundred held the pass for two days. What they bought with their deaths was...

I set down my inquiry so that the deeds of men may not be erased by time, and that great and marvellous actions, whether Greek or barbarian, may not lose their glory. I begin not with certainty, but with investigation. The historian's first duty is to ask how memory became war.

If every people were invited to choose the best customs from all the world, each would choose its own. Pindar was right: custom is king of all. Travel teaches this before argument does. Men laugh at another nation's burial rites while defending their own as sacred, which is why the historian must learn to listen before judging.

Solon told Croesus: call no man happy until he is dead. Croesus was the richest king in the world when Solon said this. He dismissed it. Later, watching his son die, watching his city burn, watching Cyrus prepare his execution on the pyre, he remembered. He called out Solon's name three times. Cyrus, curious, asked. When Croesus explained, Cyrus ordered...

Egypt is the gift of the Nile. Nowhere else does a river transform a land so completely or a civilisation grow so directly from one source of water. The Egyptians keep more religious observances than any other nation and have a memory that stretches further back than I can follow. I wrote down what I saw and what I was told, distinguishing between them...

Why did Persia invade Greece? Not simply for conquest. Xerxes was persuaded, manipulated, shamed into it by a dream he may have manufactured for political purposes, and pushed forward by advisors with their own ambitions. The Histories is not a story of Persian evil against Greek virtue. It is a story about how great powers make terrible decisions and how...

It is my obligation to report what is said, though not always to believe it. I have held to this rule throughout my inquiry. Some things I saw myself; some I was told by those who witnessed them; some are things men tell each other without any witness at all. I try to say which is which. The historian who presents all sources as equal is not more complete...

The inscription on this bust identifies me, but the identification is not certain. It may not be my face at all. I am not troubled by this. My Histories are full of stories that I could not verify, that I recorded because they were told, because the act of transmission is itself part of the truth.

I was the first to write the word historia — inquiry. Not...