Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

Yeah, yeah.

He's just so fascinated by it.

And so a lot of reading it is actually, it's a very nice experience in a way, because you can see his enthusiasm just dripping from the page.

It's absolutely just like, oh, and I know this one too.

And these other people have told me this, and you got to know this because it's great.

And it really lives up to this idea, this initial intention to say, if there is anything worth mentioning, anything worth admiring, I will tell you about it.

And I'm not going to hold back.

The problem is if you're interested in a sort of steady sort of narrative history that explains why things happened, it can be very frustrating because he does not just stick with his story.

He does not just tell you the facts or the events one after the other.

This is an episodic narrative full of digression because each of those could have been one of those presentation pieces.

Each one of those could have been like the story he told when he went to a different town and said, okay, you want to hear the story of what you guys did during the Persian Wars or how you guys got your constitution or, you know, things like that.

That's obviously part of how it came together, but it's still there as a testament to the breadth of his fascination with the world.

Yeah, so he does this actually quite a lot in the sense that Herodotus is much more explicit than Thucydides, who is supposed to be like the better, more scientific historian, according to many modern commentators.

Herodotus is much more explicit about what he's doing when he's telling you a story.

He will often say where he got it.

And often this is very vague.

You know, the Corinthians told me, okay, that's not very specific, but at least he's trying to tell you like there are different versions that come from different places.

Often he's comparing them explicitly.

So this is what they say, and this is what these other people say.

And often he will butt in to kind of add little comments saying like, you know, but I'm not sure I can believe this.