![]() ![]() ![]() Cicero was not the first to call him "the father of lies." The German scholar Detlev Fehling (see "For Further Reading") actually avers that he never left Greece or perhaps even his Anatolian study, copying others' lies and travelers' tales, inventing claims of visits to exotic places and familiar monuments, and fabricating hundreds of alleged sources. He has been equally criticized and damned by professional historians, ethnographers, and geographers for errors of fact and method, and even for his Greek. Casual and serious readers alike have loved the first historian, the inventor of history, for his narrative genius and tragi-comic view of human events, great and small. ![]() "Herodotus sometimes writes for children and sometimes for philosophers," said the greatest of modern historians, Edward Gibbon ( The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-1788, chapter 24, note 54). From Donald Lateiner's Introduction to The Histories ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |