Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

We're not quite sure how far he got.

But there's huge parts of the Greek Mediterranean world and beyond that he saw for himself.

Yeah, so on the one hand, we don't really know what that looks like, right?

So we don't know if he traveled with a large entourage or with a bodyguard or if he had someone with him to guide him.

The impression you get from these travelers is basically you just have your personal servants and somebody presumably to carry around your stuff.

But fundamentally, it is on the one hand, a dangerous world that it can be quite lawless in places, especially in the areas that are not under any kind of central control or supervision.

But it's also a world that's relatively open, right?

So it's not like anybody's checking him at the border and saying, hold on, you can't come here.

So there's quite a lot of opportunity to travel as long as you're willing to undertake those risks.

So it's not certain where he dies, actually.

I think most people think that he died in Athens because some of the details that he gives towards the furthest forward in time in his work all relate to Athenian matters and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

And so it's suspected that even though he was involved in this great foundation settlement, he then travelled back to mainland Greece, where he spent the last potentially decade of his life.

It's really hard to know, actually.

I mean, the most common approximation is that he was born somewhere in the 480s BC.

So basically between the Battle of Marathon and Xerxes' invasion of Greece, he was a small child when there's this great scene that, I don't remember which scholar wrote this down, but there's this great scene imagining what it was like for Herodotus as a four or five-year-old boy to watch Artemisia and the remains of her tattered detachment that had fought at Salamis sail back into the harbour at Halicarnassus.

Exactly.

And so seeing that detachment return home after its defeat and wondering what happened to it, what was this story, what was this about?

Which I think is a really nice image to imagine, but he would have been a little boy at the time, so who knows if he had any interest yet.

But that's when he was born.

And then when he died, again, not entirely sure.