Father of History, Father of Lies, Father of Anthropology: Herodotus

You can buy a cheap flight to Bodrum (south-west Turkey), now a popular package holiday tourist destination and in antiquity named Halicarnassus, and visit ancient Greek temples and a theatre dating back more than 2,000 years. In Bodrum’s incomparable Underwater Archaeology Museum, you can admire the extraordinary Phoenician, Carian, Cypriot, Greek and Roman artefacts rescued by divers from the ancient shipwrecks which litter the seabed of the eastern Aegean.

You can also pay homage at several statues of Herodotus (484-425 BCE), the city’s most famous native, and the man whom Cicero called ‘The Father of History’. For we owe the very name of our subject and our discipline to the opening phrase of the nearly 200,000 words, in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, constituting Herodotus’ nine-book narrative of the Persian Wars: ‘This is the publication of the investigation (historiē) by Herodotus of Halicarnassus.’