The Man who Invented History, by Justin Marozzi
When Kristin Scott Thomas told a saucy tale out of Herodotus in the film of The English Patient, sales of The Histories shot up 450 per cent, according to Justin Marozzi, who has taken the seemingly inevitable step of travelling around the Herodotean world in the footsteps of the Father of History. Marozzi bubbles with enthusiasm for the man who was, he says, also the first travel writer, the first prose stylist, the first anthropologist, foreign correspondent, ‘an aspiring geographer, a budding moralist, a skilful dramatist, a high-spirited explorer and an inveterate storyteller’. It’s not an easy act to follow, but Marozzi writes with great vigour and his own observations are always sharp.
After its victory over Xerxes, 5th- century Athens became the most interesting place in the world. Marozzi points out that Herodotus could have known, among others, Hippocrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Pericles, Aristophanes and Thucydides.
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