A native of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, Herodotus lived approximately from 484 BCE to 425 BCE. He traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions to compile his “inquiries” into the wars between Greece and Persia in 490 BC and 480–479 BCE. Subsequently referred to as The Histories, this record of what he saw and heard has become a touchstone in global ethics, much the way that Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars served as a classic statement of global realpolitik in the second half of the twentieth century.
Like Thucydides, Herodotus believed that the study of past wars could provide a cautionary tale for relatively just and democratic societies facing external threats and internal pressures. However, he was less of a partisan than Thucydides and less concerned with the personalities of leaders. For Thucydides, Athens’ growth as an imperial power and its decline could be traced to the statesmanlike leadership of Pericles and the subsequent...
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Esquith, S.L. (2011). Herodotus. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_678
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