Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

The extraordinary experiment being conducted at the new model city of Thurii also attracted no less a figure than Herodotus, the father of a revolutionary form of inquiry—history. Indeed, the very word derives from the Greek word for “inquiry,” historie. The form of super-inquiry that Herodotus invented sought for the first time to explain how the entirety of the contemporary world resulted from past circumstances and real events, in his case the events of the Persian Wars, which he felt passionately deserved to be written down and remembered by future generations. We have to thank Herodotus for creating the idea that to understand the present we need to understand our past and that of all the other nations in the world as well. He set out his path-breaking manifesto in his opening sentence: He has conducted his inquiry (historie) “to prevent the deeds of mankind being forgotten over the course of time, and the great and marvellous works produced by both Greeks and barbarians losing their renown, especially the reason why they waged war on one another.” He influenced every historian whom antiquity subsequently produced. Since he first began to be read again in the mid-fifteenth century, he has been the world’s main source for classical Greek and Persian history and for much information about the