History [Christmas Summary Classics]

HERODOTUS
The "Father of History," as Herodotus has been styled, was born at Halicarnassus, the centre of a Greek colony in Asia Minor, between the years 490 and 480 B.C., and lived probably to sixty, dying about the year 425 B.C. A great part of his life was occupied with travels and investigations in those lands with which his history is mainly concerned. His work is the earliest essay in history in a European language. It is a record primarily of the causes and the course of the first great contest between East and West; and is a storehouse of curious and delightful traveller's gossip as well as a faithful record of events. The canons of evidence in his day were defective, for obvious reasons; a miscellaneous divine interposition in human affairs was taken for granted, and science had not yet reduced incredible marvels to ordinary natural phenomena. Nevertheless, Herodotus was a shrewd and careful critic, honest, and by no means remarkably credulous. If he had not acquired the conception of history as an exact science, he made it a particularly attractive form of literature, to which his simplicity of style gives a slight but pleasant archaic flavour. This epitome has been specially prepared far THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS from the Greek text.