Histories

In the opening sentence, Herodotus introduces himself as a native of Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the western coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), announces his theme, and describes his purpose in writing the Histories. Herodotus’ subject is the conflict between the Greeks and their Asiatic neighbors, whom he calls “barbarians” (a non-judgmental term meaning the non-Greek-speaking ethnic groups that inhabited the region comprising the modern states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and north-western and central Asia). This conflict culminates in the wars fought between the Greek city-states and the Persian empire in the early fifth century BCE, within living memory of many of Herodotus’ contemporaries.

Herodotus begins by tracing the antagonism between Europe and Asia back to a series of abductions of women, involving Io of Argos, Medea of Colchis, and Helen of Sparta. The kidnappings of foreign women inaugurated a succession of grievances and retribution that set the Greeks against their barbarian neighbors to the East, eventually resulting in the Trojan War. Herodotus, however, dismisses this legendary explanation, which he ascribes to the Persians, for the enmity that led to the conflict of civilizations. Preferring to rely on his “own knowledge,” he announces he will reveal “who it was in actual fact that first injured the Greeks,” referring to the Hellenic settlements that dotted the coastline of Western Asia Minor (5).