Episode Details

Herodotus wrote the first work of narrative history in the Western tradition, an account of the Greco-Persian Wars that mixed battlefield reporting with ethnography, gossip, and tall tales. The ancients called him both the father of history and the father of lies.

This episode examines how Herodotus invented a genre while testing the limits of what counts as truth, and why modern archaeology keeps vindicating stories his critics dismissed as fiction.

• How his Histories created the template for Western historical writing
• The stories his ancient critics refused to believe that turned out to be true
• His method of recording multiple versions and letting readers judge
• Why Thucydides rejected his approach and what was lost in the process