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

by Edith Hall

singlehandedly took writing, without the aid of meter, from plodding strings of simple phrases to high art; his genius at word order and variation in sentence length has never been surpassed. He was immersed in poetry and seems to have realized that prose was a medium of equivalent potential. There are sentences in Herodotus of heart-stopping beauty, created by surprising word order (hyperbaton), the mirroring of the content in the aural effect (as when the Nile rises), and the use of abstract nouns to denote the onset of an emotion, as in “fear falling” on someone. There are narratives so colorful that they have allowed the ancient Persians and Greeks to remain living presences in our culture—Xerxes ordering the waters of the Hellespont to be flogged, or the Spartans’ last stand at Thermopylae. Herodotus himself moved from Halicarnassus to Athens and also traveled in the Black Sea region and probably Egypt before joining the project at Thurii. His outlook allows us unique access to the “great and marvellous works produced by both Greeks and barbarians.” For anyone interested in classical Greece, Herodotus, the consummation of the whole Ionian intellectual revolution, is the ideal escort.