Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

A gift of Hera.

It's a very common thing with Greek proper names that they are what's called theophoric, so they carry the name of a divinity.

You have lots of names that are essentially just adaptations of Demetrius being an adaptation of Demeter or something like that.

And the very particular one that they use very often is either Doros or Dotos at the end of a divine name, which means gift of, essentially.

Or that's how we interpret it anyway.

So you have people called Apollodorus or Diodorus and Herodotus is another version of that.

He certainly is.

I mean, this is where we get his autobiographical detail talking about the things that he saw, or even just sort of looking at his account and seeing which things he is able to describe in more detail.

You get this sense of like, okay, there are things you saw and there are things you just heard about.

And so we get a sense because he's clearly from a wealthy background, despite the fact that he was in exile, he lived a life of the leisure gentleman.

So he was traveling around the Greek world quite a bit.

There's always a suspicion that he spent a lot of time in Athens, which is widely assumed because he knows so much about it.

But he traveled very far around the Greek world.

He's involved later in life in the foundation of Thurii, which is in southern Italy.

So it's a new Greek settlement, new Greek community is being established there.

And it's considered to be one of his great works to be part of that undertaking in the 440s BC.

Right.

It's almost certain that he went to Scythia, so what is now Ukraine.

That he travelled into the east, he went to Egypt.

He also travelled into Mesopotamia.