whom did cicero call the father of history?
Answers
Answered by
0
Herodotus, the first Greek and thereby the first Western historian, had bad press long before there was anything resembling a press. Aristotle referred to him as a “story-teller,” which was no honorific. What he meant was that Herodotus made things up, another word for which is “liar.” Thucydides had little good to say about Herodotus and thought his attempt to recapture the long-gone past foolhardy. History, for Thucydides, meant contemporary, or near-contemporary, history, with an emphasis on politics and warfare. In his Histories, Herodotus went well outside these bounds, writing about Egypt, Scythia, Persia, and other countries; he took up the study of customs and moeurs among them, as might a modern anthropologist.
More than 400 years later, the attacks on Herodotus’ reputation continued. In an essay titled “The Malice of Herodotus,” Plutarch criticized him for undue sympathy for the Persians and other barbarians, a want of respect for facts coupled with a lack of balanced judgment, and a partiality for Athens. Worse attacks were to come from other commentators over the succeeding centuries, some of whom held that Herodotus relied too heavily on oral evidence, others that he was plain dishonest.
Similar questions