Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

And then there are some later sort of biographical accounts.

We're always very shy to accept uncritically what they tell us because they're much later.

We don't know if they derive from any kind of factual information or if they're just kind of projecting onto these figures what they want us to know.

And so, you know, for earlier poets like Homer, for instance, there are quite substantial biographies that survive and we don't believe any of that.

Because these figures themselves were not the subject of history, the details of their lives were lost.

He did not come, strictly speaking, from the Greek world.

He came from the Persian Empire, but a Greek part of it, or a Greek and Carian part of it.

He opens his histories by introducing himself.

He says, I'm Herodotus of Halicarnassus.

Right.

Halicarnassus is in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey.

That's Caria, right.

But on the coast, you get sort of more and more Hellenized communities.

And so Herodotus, while his name is obviously very Greek, sort of gift of Hera, quite a lot of people suspect that at least one of his parents was Carian.

So this is the local population that has sort of interacted with the Greeks for centuries by this point.

It's a community that is ruled by the Persians, but it is locally autonomous.

So there are local rulers that govern this area who are themselves sort of Carian, but Hellenized Carian people.

And so Herodotus is from this community, but it seems as though his father was involved potentially in a coup in Halicarnassus or in some kind of political upheaval.

So he was driven out, which means that Herodotus actually grew up in Samos, which is very much part of the Aegean Greek world.

That's right.