Sources that study Antiquity: study perspectives on Herodotus’ Histories, or how have the historians interpreted the father of History

Abstract

The study of Antiquity presents theoretical and practical challenges to the researcher in every investigation. Studying, however, a source that not only contains potential information about the Past, but that also produces an historical investigation, confronts the researcher with a whole different kind of challenge, one that necessarily calls into question the understanding of the discipline and its praxis. This article aims to analyse this subject by considering the case of the Histories.
Not long after Herodotus wrote it (around the 5th century BC), the Histories generated much debate, either about the way in which the narrative was constructed, the subjects the author took closer attention to, or the methods used throughout the research. This article provides some study perspectives on both content and form of this source, in order to understand how have historians approached and interpreted Herodotus’ work since then.