Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

He's never done telling you about things that might happen later that are irrelevant to the story that show the kind of aftermath or the consequences of these actions.

There are some stretches of the story that are more straightforward, especially in the later books.

So especially from book 789, when he's narrating Xerxes' invasion, a lot of that is more straightforward.

But even then, if you're looking for that one bit of Herodotus where you're like, I remember he talked about this one thing at one point, good luck finding it by just looking for it in the chronologically obvious position because it very likely isn't there.

He's the main source for the Spartans in this period, really.

You have the Spartan poets in the Archaic period, which tell us quite a lot, and you have quite a bit of archaeology in the sixth century in particular.

But then that kind of dries up around the time of the Persian Wars.

There's not a huge amount of stuff from Sparta during the classical period, so the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

And so you really need these people who give you this sort of moment, this little beacon in the fog of saying like, okay, this is a time at which I actually investigated the Spartans and this is what I found out.

And obviously these are still outsiders talking about them, but they are still capable of finding out quite a bit.

And so it's Herodotus talking about Sparta in this period, early fifth century.

And then we kind of have to wait for maybe not even Thucydides, who doesn't know all that much about Sparta, but for instance, Xenophon in the fourth century, who tells us a lot more in detail.

And so Herodotus is one of those great beacons when we were interested in Sparta.

And he shows us what it was like in the fifth century, for which we have very little else.

So it's actually really, really helpful, not least because of his ethnographic interest, because he takes an interest in Sparta that goes beyond just what they did.

And he tries to find out something about the story of how they got to being the leaders of the Greek world around the time of the Persian Wars, which is invaluable.

Yeah, so it's very interesting.

He's very interested in Spartan kingship in particular, because that is something the Spartans have that most other Greek communities don't.

I mean, you get some kings in Cyrene, for instance, in Libya, and you get kings in, or maybe they're tyrants, maybe they're kings in the Greeks of the Bosporan kingdom, so Crimea.

But in mainland Greece, kings have gone out of style.