Herodotus

Herodotus by John Gould is a non-fiction treatise and analysis of the Greek author's account of the Persian Wars. Gould, a scholar and professor of Classics at a number of distinguished British universities, argues that Herodotus was not just reciting history; he was a distinguished oral historian whose aim was to record the larger social history of his generation. Essentially, he argues that though Herodotus is considered by many to be the first historian, he was also a distinguished storyteller. Herodotus's method of telling history requires us to reconsider our modern historiographical values – i.e. truth, facts, and lack of bias – in order to embrace Herodotus's project. Published in 1989, Gould's book is widely acclaimed by scholars in the field.

Gould begins by giving a basic understanding of Herodotus as a writer and a historian. Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who created The Histories, a record of the origins of the Greco-Persian War. Most scholars consider Herodotus to be the “Father of History” because he was the first author to think about historical record as an “inquiry,” and to gather evidence that he then crafted into a narrative. Later Greek and Roman historians, however, criticized Herodotus, claiming that he made up entire swaths of The Histories for the sake of entertainment. One such critic was Thucydides, the author of The History of the Peloponnesian War. Despite this criticism, Herodotus believed that he was reporting what he was told about events, historical characters, culture, and geography – in the many centuries since his death, much of what Herodotus wrote in The Histories has been confirmed by archaeologists and other experts.

In Herodotus, Gould takes on many criticisms of The Histories, particularly the criticism that Herodotus frequently digressed from his subject in ways that sometimes seem overwhelming to readers. To better understand Herodotus, Gould studied the ways that Herodotus gathered information, how he used his sources, and the logic behind his overarching narrative. Gould then makes a series of interesting claims based on then ground-breaking studies in the value and validity of oral storytelling about how Herodotus's text could serve two primary functions – both that of a story and that of a history.



Gould's primary criticism of historical thinking is that storytelling, or the art of crafting narrative, is inherently separate from understanding “history.” This was Thucydides argument when he claimed that Herodotus was making things up for the sake of entertainment. However, Gould argues that Herodotus made the decision to frequently digress from accounts of the Greco-Persian war in order to create a narrative of his generation and the world as he knew it. Even his subject, Gould suggests, is one that is up for interpretation. Because of the nature of documentation during that period, Herodotus was basing much of his understanding of the Greco-Persian war on the stories of past generations, other cultures, family, and local traditions. In this way, his history necessarily reflects his positionality – something that many historians frown upon, and which Gould argues is important given the work that he was trying to achieve.

At the heart of his book, Gould argues for the idea of a construction of social memory through history. What this means, essentially, is that despite more patriarchal and Westernized views of what history is, there is in inherent value in the cataloging of belief systems, practices, cultures, stories, and experiences that are typically left out of historical narratives. Ultimately, though Gould focuses his attention on Herodotus and legitimizing his work, Herodotus is about our understanding and values around historiographical accounts.

John Gould was a professor of Greek at Bristol University before his death in 2001. He was an admirable teacher and scholar and wrote a number of papers and books about ancient Greece, particularly the ideas that Greek religion was a kind of language, and analyzing the role of women in the creation and development of ancient Athens. Gould was a dedicated educator who was interested in studying language by studying culture – he believed that it was impossible to properly speak a language if one didn't have an understanding of how the people who spoke that language viewed the world. As such, he taught not only the Greek language but also literature and culture. This ideology fundamentally changed the teaching of classics in the Western world. Gould won a Runciman Award for Herodotus and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy upon his retirement in 1991.