Herodotus and his brother Theodore belonged to a well-educated privilege class that could afford leisure and extensive travel. He spent much of his adult life traveling the Mediterranean world.
In his travels, Herodotus venture as far as Sicily, north to the Ukraine south to the Nile River, and east to the Black Sea rim as far as the Dnieper River in southwestern Russia.
He is one of the most important historical writers of antiquity. Herodotus' name is inseparable from that of his one surviving work, the Histories, an account of the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), fought between the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes and the cities of Greece and - very broadly defined - of the background to those wars.
This lengthy history described how the Persian expansion westward after the mid-500 BC was eventually defeated by the Greek’s defense of their homeland in 480 – 479 BC.
His writings are an amalgam of geography and history, framed from firsthand observation as well as secondhand accounts, a mixture of sober historical fact as well as reports of the exotic and miraculous.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485–425 BC)
