An ancient Greek in a traveling cloak stood on the plain at Giza, in the shadow of the pyramids, and had many questions. He wanted to know how the great stones had been raised, how many men had labored on them and for how long, what the workers had eaten, and what the marks carved into the casing recorded. Egyptian priests gave him answers, an interpreter turned their words into Greek, and the traveler wrote everything down, the plausible and the fantastic side by side, because he had come a very long way to learn it. He had no intention of leaving anything out.

His name was Herodotus, and he had come all the way from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, a harbor city on the coast of what is now southwestern Turkey. He lived in the mid-5th century B.C., decades after a coalition of Greek city-states had repulsed two invasions by the largest empire the world had yet produced, and he gave himself the task of explaining how those wars had come about. The book he made out of that task, the work now known as Histories, is the oldest history book that survives in the Western tradition. Almost everyone who studies the ancient world knows of Herodotus’s work, and almost no one knows anything about his life.

That is the odd truth at the heart of any biography of Herodotus. He preserved the memory of kings, armies, and whole nations so that the passage of time might not blot them out, and the passage of time very nearly blotted him out instead. He is universally known as the “Father of History,” but what can be stated about his life with real confidence fills only a handful of sentences. He was born at Halicarnassus around 484 B.C. to a wealthy family that was probably aristocratic. A tyrant drove him into exile, so he spent years abroad, eventually traveling farther than almost any Greek of his generation. He lived for a time in Athens, joined a new colony in the west called Thurii, and died sometime around 425 B.C.