the "Father of History," and the earliest of the Greek historians properly so called, was a native of Halicarnassus, a Doric colony of Caria, which at the time of his birth was ruled over by Artemisia, the heroine of Salamis. The date of his birth, once a subject of much dispute, is now fixed at B.C. 484, and few other incidents of his life are so well determined. A scanty notice of him by Suidas, and occasional allusions in his own works, are the materials from which his biographers have to construct his Herodotus life. From these we learn that his family was one of noble rank in Halicarnassus, that his father's name was Cyxas, and his mother's Dryo, and that the famous epic poet Sanyasis was his uncle. On reaching manhood he found his native city enthralled by the tyrant Lygdamis, the grandson of Artemisia, and in disgust he retired to the island of Samos, where, besides learning the Ionian dialect, in which his history is written, he concerted measures for the emancipation of his birthplace. These measures were successful, but in the struggle which next ensued between the aristocratic and popular parties, Herodotus saw fit to leave his native town altogether. He is believed to have then joined a colony which the Athenians were sending out to Thurii on the Tarentine Gulf in Southern Italy, B.C. 445. Whether the historian joined the colony in that year or at a later period, as is sometimes affirmed, certain it is that he died at Thurii and was buried in the market-place of the town. The tradition of his having died at Pella in Macedonia is so ill-authenticated that it is needless to waste time refuting it. The exact date of his death is unknown, but he was alive in B.C. 408, being then in his seventy-eighth year, which it is probable that he did not long survive. Herodotus appears before posterity in the twofold character of traveller and historian; but the traveller is so subordinated to the historian as to be only called in at rare intervals to testify to the truth of some extraordinary statement. It is of course impossible from these slight hints to lay down a plan of his travels in strict chronological order. Yet modern scholarship has proved that he derived the greater part of the materials of his history from personal observation of the countries which he describes. With everything included under the general head of Hellas he was as familiar as with his native town; in many individual cities, such as Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, he is known to have spent a very considerable time. He also visited most of the Greek islands, as well as those in the Ionian as in the Ægean Sea; all the colonies in Asia Minor; the whole circumference of the Black Sea, Scythia, and Thrace. In Asia he penetrated as far as Babylon, visiting also Ecbatana and Susa, besides making a special pilgrimage to Tyre to investigate the worship of Hercules. His account of Egypt, though a mere episode, is the best that antiquity has transmitted to us. Entering that country from the Mediterranean, he penetrated as far as Elephantine, its most southerly point. He then turned his face towards the west, and it is known that in this direction he reached Cyrene, though it is not improbable that he may even have visited Carthage. His taste for travel does not seem to have left him in his old age, for after finally settling at Thurii he travelled through the southern portion of the Italian peninsula, and some parts of Sicily. The fact that he visited all these countries is sufficient proof of his having visited many more; but his admiration for Greece and its laws and liberty remained unshaken to the last.

At what period of his life his travels were undertaken, is, like most of the other facts of his life, a matter of dispute. It is most likely that they were begun soon after his voluntary exile from his native city, and that they extended over the whole interval between that date and his fixing his residence at Thurii. Equally uncertain is the period of his life in which he reduced the results of these travels and observations into a comprehensive history. A story is told by Lucian, apparently in jest, that Herodotus read his "History," in its finished form to the assembled Greeks at Olympia, B.C. 456; that among his hearers was Thucydides, then a lad of fifteen, who was melted to tears by the recitation, and that the audience were so enchanted by the whole performance, that they called the nine books, into which the work was divided, by the names of the Nine Muses. Now, in that year the historian was only thirty-two years of Herodotus, age, and the work not only bears the marks of a matured and practised writer, but actual allusions to events which only took place many years after this date. Dahlmann, however, in his *Herodot, aus seinem Buche sein Leben*, proves beyond a doubt that the story is a mere figment of Lucian, and incapable of defence. Equally preposterous is the tradition that he read his work at Athens at the Panathenaic festival, n.c. 445, and that there existed among the archives of that city a decree awarding the historian ten talents as a token of national admiration for his genius. The preservation of this story is due to Plutarch, who records it in his essay on the *Malignity of Herodotus*. The general drift of this composition is to prove that Herodotus had been bribed by the Athenians. But the real ground of the Theban essayist's dislike to the panegyristics of Athens is that he recorded with the stern severity of truth the poltroonery of the Theban policy during the Persian War. Both these stories may therefore be safely dismissed as quite unworthy of attention.

The great work of Herodotus, which is divided into nine books, called by the names of the Nine Muses, is a history of the Greeks and their relations towards each other, and towards the foreign powers with which they came in contact, from the fall of Sardes before the victorious arms of Persia, B.C. 546, to the taking of Sestos, B.C. 478. To weld into one harmonious whole the different parts of so complex a subject, to order the march of events so that the story advances from a beginning to an end with the precision of a well-planned drama, to manœuvre the episodes and minute details so as to make them tell on the general result without impeding or interfering with it—such seems to have been the author's aim, and he has hit his mark so truly that Colonel Mure pronounces the *History of Herodotus* to be, next to the *Iliad* and *Odyssey*, the greatest effort of Greek literary genius. "The one," he says, "is the perfection of epic poetry, the other the perfection of epic prose. Were it not for the influence which the prior existence of so noble a model, even in a different branch of composition, has evidently exercised on the historian, his title to the palm of original invention might rival that of his poetical predecessor. In the complexity of the plan of his history, as compared with the simplicity of the execution; in the multiplicity and heterogeneous nature of its materials, and in the harmony of their combination; in the grandeur of its historical masses, and the minuteness, often triviality, of its illustrative details, it remains not only without equal, but without rival or parallel in the literature of Greece or of Europe." So great, indeed, is the entire work, that it has been left to posterity fully to appreciate it, and assign to its author his place among historians. It quite transcended the sphere of the small wits of Herodotus' day, who called his marvellous stories the tales of a traveller, little anticipating that after-ages as they rolled on would only confirm the truth and accuracy of the narrative in which they only found subject for laughter, and would acknowledge with one accord that without the history of Herodotus the annals of Greece would be an unintelligible blank.

The history of Herodotus having been written at a period when poetry had ceased to be the common vehicle of thought, and the art of writing prose had not yet been perfected, bears marks of this transition epoch. The logic of composition is not always observed, and many ill-compacted sentences might easily be pointed out. But there are few writers in any tongue in whom such slips are so easily pardoned or so thoroughly redeemed. Both in his style and his vein of sentiment there is a freshness which never fails, and which often rises to the poetical. Whatever the subject under treatment may be, it is sure to be invested with an interest which prevents the most fastidious of readers from feeling ennui. No chronicle of Froissart, or romance of Sir Walter Scott, was ever more interesting than the history of Herodotus. No traveller ever possessed in a higher degree than he the power of sifting what he observed, of preserving what was valuable, and rejecting what was silly or useless. This power he shows even in what many regarded as his weak point—his superstition. He always bows the head before what seems to him the saving element in the religious observances of the various peoples whom he describes. But though he is careful never to laugh at the monstrous absurdities with which these rites were sometimes accompanied, he always makes it plain that he saw through them. "The charm of Herodotus," says Dahlmann, "lies in that child-like simplicity of heart, which is ever the companion of an incorruptible love of truth, and that happy and winning style which cannot be attained by any art or pathetic excitement, and is found only where manners are true to nature; for while other pleasing discourses of men roll on like torrents, and noisily hurry through their short existence, the silver stream of his words flows on without concern, sure of its immortal source, everywhere pure and transparent, whether it be shallow or deep; and the fear of ridicule, which sways the whole world, affects not the sublime simplicity of his mind."

The literature of Herodotus is very extensive and important. The first edition of the Greek text was published by Aldus, Venice, 1502. A great advance on this was the edition of Henry Stephens, Paris, 1570. The next of any considerable value was that of Gronovius, Leyden, 1715; which was in its turn eclipsed by that of Wesseling and Walckenaer, Anst., 1763. Perhaps the best edition of this class, however, is that of Schweighäuser (Strasbourg, 1816), who has also published a very correct but rather meagre Lexicon Herodoteum. Next comes the edition of Gaisford, Oxford, 1824; a very careful work, but making comparatively little advance on its last German predecessor. The last edition is that of Bähr, Leipzig, 4 vols. 8vo, 1830. The best school editions are those of Matthiæ, Bekker, and George Long. On the geography of Herodotus valuable treatises have been written by Rennell, B. G. Niebuhr, Dahlmann, and Heyse. The best translations of Herodotus into modern tongues are those L'Archer, and Lange—the former into French, and the latter into German. There are several English translations, such as those of Beloc, Taylor, Cary, and others, but none which do any justice either to the spirit or the form of the original.