Taking Herodotus Personally

Herodotus was the modern-that is, fifth-century B.C.E. -Odysseus. His pioneering investigative "odyssey" of research and travel among the cities of men and peoples, both Greek and non-Greek, is the primary focus of this article. The past couple of decades has seen an extraordinary flowering of scholarship and other kinds of study, both on Herodotus' work and on the wars, the history of which he wrote up and in a sense invented. The article aims to mark the major signposts, decade by decade, using as an Ariadne's thread the author's own life trajectory from the 1960s to the present day.