A man from Halicarnassus asks everyone he meets what happened and why, and writes it all down: kings and queens, oracles, a poet saved by a dolphin, a king on a burning pyre. The first book of history, told as stories, in the Greek Herodotus wrote.
Beta: the opening sentence (1.0) and Gyges and the queen of Lydia (1.8–1.12), in Ionic Greek, word by word, with transliteration, in-context gloss, flowing English, the LSJ lexicon and the paintings. Book 1 grows story by story. Citation ID: urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.
❦ Read Herodotus in GreekA taste of the format. Open the reader above to read all of The Histories word by word.
Herodotus's Histories in the Ionic Greek he wrote, one section at a time: the Greek line, its pronunciation, the reading in bold, the literal sense beneath it, the fluent English, and a lexicon on every word.
Cicero called Herodotus the father of history. Others called him the father of lies: Plutarch wrote a whole essay, On the Malice of Herodotus, against him, and readers still argue about his flying snakes and his gold-digging ants. Both names fit. He tells you what the Persians say, then what the Phoenicians say, then which of them he believes, and sometimes that he believes neither. He was the first to write down his questions along with his answers, and his word for that, historiē, inquiry, became our word history.
The first story is a bedroom farce that turns into a murder. King Candaules of Lydia is so in love with his wife that he makes his bodyguard Gyges hide behind the bedroom door to watch her undress. She sees him. The next morning she gives Gyges a choice: kill the king and take his place, or die. In the Greek you can watch the same words come back with their meanings reversed. The king promises she will not learn she was seen, and she learns. He hides Gyges behind a door to look, and she hides him behind the same door with a dagger.
In English the stories move fast and read like anecdotes. Word by word you hear how Herodotus builds them: the aside that says it had to go badly for a man before anything has happened, the switch into the present tense at the moment the queen sees, and the Ionic forms that mark this as the Greek of the eastern Aegean rather than of Athens.
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