Herodotus’ own immediate family indeed bore Carian or Carian-inflected names. Halicarnassus was itself originally a foreign implant, settled by Greeks from the Peloponnese at the turn of the last millennium BC, among the non-Greek, ‘barbarian-voiced’ Carians, as Homer had called them in the second book of the Iliad. The Greek city of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) was then a subject of the mighty Persian empire, which had been founded some two to three generations earlier by Cyrus II and by now stretched from the Punjab to the Aegean.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus was born in or about 484 BC. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodotus is in four volumes.In the beginning was the word – historiê, ‘enquiry’ or ‘research’: the word used by the West’s first historian in order to describe both his method and his achievement, his ergon (‘deed’). After personal inquiry and study of hearsay and other evidence, Herodotus gives us a not uncritical estimate of the best that he could find. All is most entertaining and produces a grand unity. Even in the later books on the attacks of the Persians against Greece there are digressions. It includes the rise of the Persian power and an account of the Persian empire a description and history of Egypt and a long digression on the geography and customs of Scythia.
Herodotus’s famous history of warfare between the Greeks and the Persians has an epic dignity which enhances his delightful style. He was “the prose correlative of the bard, a narrator of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign places” (Murray).
He lived, it seems, for some time in Athens, and in 443 went with other colonists to the new city Thurii (in South Italy), where he died about 430.
He travelled widely in most of Asia Minor, Egypt (as far as Assuan), North Africa, Syria, the country north of the Black Sea, and many parts of the Aegean Sea and the mainland of Greece. Herodotus, the great Greek historian, was born about 484 BCE at Halicarnassus in Caria, Asia Minor, when it was subject to the Persians. The digital Loeb Classical Library extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.
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