Herodotus

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Herodotus has been called both the "Father of History" and the father of lies. His Histories, written in the second half of the fifth century BCE, is one of our earliest fully-surviving Greek prose texts and our most important source for the Greco-Persian Wars. But Herodotus offers so much more than political and military narrative: ethnography, geography, religious history, political theory, rhetoric, and a welter of short stories, all delivered by a master storyteller. In this advanced Greek course, we will read a selected book of the Histories in Greek, as well as the entire work in English and a selection of modern scholarship. We will consider the historical and intellectual context, questions of genre and prose style, and the tradition of historical writing begun by Herodotus and his work.