Herodotus in Context

Herodotus called his work an enquiry and wrote before ''history'' was a separate discipline. Coming from Halicarnassus at the crossroads between the Persian and Athenian spheres of influence he combined the culture of Athens with that of the more pluralistic and less ethnocentric cities of east Greece. Alive to the implications of this cultural background for Herodotus'' thought this study explores the much neglected contemporary connotations and context of the Histories looking at them as part of the intellectual climate of his time. Concentrating on Herodotus'' ethnography geography and accounts of natural wonders and examining his methods of argument and persuasion it sees the Histories which appear virtually without antecedents as a product of the late fifth-century world of the natural scientists medical writers and sophists - a world of controversy and debate.