For centuries, men of letters and plenty of his fellow historians took great pleasure in reducing the prototypical chronicler, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the status of a mere wonder-monger, the garrulous and credulous counter-weight to the austere objectivity of his younger contemporary and immediate successor, Thucydides. In fact, it was a thinly veiled slight in Thucydides’s great work on the Peloponnesian War that got the tradition of Herodotus-bashing started; after that, a bitterly moralizing essay by Plutarch kept it going, it flourished in the Renaissance, and it persisted into modern times. Even fifty years ago, the great classicist Peter Green was gently mocking the standard reduction of “The Father of History”:
Here is Herodotus: a garrulous, credulous collector of sailors’ stories and Oriental novelle, ahistorical in method, factually inaccurate, superstitious and pietistic, politically innocent, his guiding motto cherchez la femme et n’oubliez pas le Dieu
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