History

Description: The rousing story of the Greeks and Persians, their war and their world, by the man Cicero called "the father of history" In this edition of Herodotus's monumental account of the ancient world, David Grene, one of the best known translators of the Greek classics, splendidly captures the peculiar quality of the book and the writer that founded the entire field of history writing.

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard, and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past. In his History, the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama.

In Grene's remarkable translation and commentary, we see the historian as a storyteller, combining through his own narration the skeletal "historical" facts and the imaginative reality toward which his story reaches. Herodotus emerges in all his charm and complexity as a writer and the first historian in the Western tradition, perhaps unique in the way he has seen the interrelation of fact and fantasy.

Brief description: David Grene (1913-2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought.

Review Quotes:

"Reading Herodotus in English has never been so much fun. . . . Herodotus crowds his fresco-like pages with all shades of humanity. Whether Herodotus's view is 'tragic, ' mythical, or merely common sense, it provided him with a moral salt with which the diversity of mankind could be savored. And savor it we do in David Grene's translation."