Leo von Klenze, The Acropolis at Athens, 1846. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Anchor
The Histories
The first history, with the maps and notes it always needed.
$30.00
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s notePenguin Classics (de Sélincourt) is the default; Landmark edition is the best available
- Author
- Herodotus; ed. Robert B. Strassler
- Publisher
- Anchor
- Published
- January 2009
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
History Began as Inquiry
Herodotus of Halicarnassus set out in the fifth century before Christ to record why Greeks and Persians came to war, and his word for the project, historia, meant inquiry. He travelled, questioned and compared, and he put in everything worth knowing, Egyptian embalming, Scythian burials, the gold-digging ants of India, always distinguishing what he saw from what he was told. Cicero called him the father of history; disappointed literalists have called him the father of lies; both titles honour the same appetite.
The Landmark edition, directed by Robert Strassler with Andrea Purvis's translation, fits the book with the apparatus it always needed, maps on nearly every spread, marginal summaries and appendices by specialists. Thus equipped, the first history reads as the traveller's entertainment it was written to be.
In the Collections
