I had a lot of fun writing a piece for Saturday's Review about Herodotus, quite possibly my second-favourite ancient Greek writer after Homer. His nine-book history of the Persian wars is gossipy, discursive, outrageous, frequently inaccurate and always brilliantly entertaining. His achievement was extraordinary – he was one of the wave of Ionian Greek intellectuals (from the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey) to present a rationalising view of the world that removed the gods from the limelight and put human actions centre-stage. In particular, he was the first to write an account of the historical causation of a set of world-changing events: the Persian wars of the 480s, in which, quite astonishingly, a frequently disunited, jittery coalition of Greek cities fended off conquest by what was then the most impressive world empire in existence. From more or less a standing start, then (not forgetting important but largely lost predecessors such as Hecataeus) he invented the genre that we know today as history.
Despite that brilliant coup, Herodotus has often been dismissed. His younger contemporary, Thucydides, who wrote a detailed, stern and ultra-serious account (unfinished at his death) of the Peloponnesian wars between Athens and Sparta, has usually been taken much more seriously. No gossip in Thucydides: no women, children, religion. No bearded priestesses, gold-harvesting giant ants, no savage Scythians who wear coats made from human scalps.
Of course, it is all these hilarious details that make Herodotus such a good read – and if you haven't already taken the plunge, I urge you to do so. The best current translation is by Robin Waterfield, with a fantastically illuminating introduction by Caroline Dewald. There's a fair bit about Herodotus in my book It's All Greek To Me; and a wonderful review/essay in the New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn here. Further reading should also include Ryszard Kapuscinski's lovely book Travels With Herodotus.
What runs through Herodotus' Histories is an acute sense of the vicissitudes of fortune, the possibility of dramatic reversals in a person's life. One day Croesus, king of Lydia, is showing off his vast fortune to Solon of Athens (the great reformer and lawcode writer). The next (more or less) he has lost his entire empire, his throne and his dignity to the rising Persian powerhouse. Nothing, suggests Herodotus, is secure. In these times of uncertainty and anxiety, he has much to teach us.
