Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

As I said, that is explicit from the start.

He's saying, you know, both Greeks and non-Greeks have done great things.

And I'm going to talk to you about all of them.

And so he isn't interested in saying like, oh, but the Greeks have obviously achieved more.

He's actually trying to give everyone their due.

It's actually an interesting question.

Obviously, the word history comes from, again, that first paragraph of the histories where he says, these are the histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus.

I mean, that's how he introduces the work.

But the word he uses there is historia, which means investigations.

So this is a Greek word, which is the origin of what we call history, but which at the time essentially means, you know, I went around and looked some things up and found some things out.

And that's what this is.

And so we can obviously call it the histories because that's what it calls itself.

But at the same time, what that means is a little bit different from what we might say history is.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, so there's a lot of different things that his work has been characterized as.

Obviously, there is a lot of history there, some narrative history.

There's also a lot of ethnography.

There's a lot of interest in foreign lands and peoples and customs.

And there is also this political dimension of trying to give peoples their due, trying to give different states and communities their due, trying to assess the contribution of certain individuals and their character.

So there's a lot of interesting things in there that are perhaps more literary in their intention or perhaps more political as well.