Herodotus Histories: why read it?
Some weeks ago, I travelled for the first time to Athens. Since I like to read local literature on my travels abroad, I decided to take with me a book that has been on my wish list for a long time: Herodotus Histories . It may seem an odd choice to pick a 2500 year old book with around 700 pages of dense text (in the Penguin classics edition), but this book has been mentioned in so many of my previous readings, so I felt that now was the time to engage this beast. And since I was travelling alone and had plenty of time to burn, why not? In this post I will try to answer the following question: - what is this book and what is it about? - why read it? - which kind or reader would (probably) enjoy this book? - what is my impression of it? - recommendations for further reading. What is Histories and what is its subject? Histories was written by the Greek writer and traveller Herodotus ( Ἡρόδοτος , c. 484-425 BC) from Halicarnassus (nowadays Bodrum on the w...