Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

He's talking about somebody who is seeing his history not as a sort of didactic work that everybody should sort of digest and preserve, but rather as something that he can present, you know, as a form of entertainment.

And so it's quite likely that like famous rhapsodes, like famous sort of performers in that period, that he might have drawn quite an audience.

So helpfully, he's very explicit about that.

He says exactly at the beginning why he's doing this.

He says that he wants to preserve the great deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks.

That is the overall thing.

He thinks that there are things worth commemorating, things worth seeing and admiring, and his job is just to record it, to make sure that it isn't lost, isn't forgotten.

That's what he sets out to do.

Then he narrows it down and says, okay, these are all the kind of things that I'm interested in, but specifically why the Greeks and non-Greeks, the Greeks and barbarians as he calls them, went to war with each other.

That's where he's talking about the Persian Wars.

Early on in Greek culture and Greek literature, barbarian doesn't have those negative connotations that it has now.

That emerges later on.

And so when he's talking about barbarians, I mean, the obvious sort of etymology that we're always told is like, it's just referring to foreign speech, foreign language.

It's not negative.

It's not pejorative.

These are just foreigners.

And so different translators will choose different ways of translating that.

Barbarians, they might not use the English word barbarian.

They might just say non-Greeks or they might say foreigners.

Herodotus is very, very happy to acknowledge the great deeds of foreigners.