YMMV / The Histories

• Common Knowledge: That Herodotus should be called the "Father of Lies" because he reported countless fantastical stories in The Histories as if they were fact. In reality, while there are fantastical stories in the work, Herodotus often prefaces them by stating his own skepticism and encourages readers to make their own conclusions. Several of the questioned stories have in fact been determined to refer to reality, even though garbled by Gossip Evolution. If anything Herodotus deserves to be praised as a honest, fair reporter of stories told to him by other people, who are the ones that may be inaccurate.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • Herodotus notes an old Babylonian custom of betrothal — the prettiest girls were auctioned off to rich men for a lot of cash. The money then went towards subsidizing ugly and crippled girls, so that humble men would get paid for marrying them. There was also a quick and efficient mechanism for divorce, in case a couple did not get along. This was considered by Herodotus to be better than the alternatives — prostitution, crippled girls being unmarried, etc.
  • Crowdsourced medical diagnosis, rather than relying solely on some specific profession of people — totally novel to Herodotus, but now we live in the age of Wikipedia, WebMD, etc.
• Magnificent Bastard: In "King Rhampsinitos and the Thief", the Thief is a daring rogue who, together with his brother, steals from the royal treasury. Eventually, his brother is caught in a trap and convinces him to give him a Mercy Kill. King Rhampsinitos hangs the dead body on the wall, but the Thief, implored by his mother, tricks and souses the royal guards and brings the body home for burial. When the king sends his daughter into the city to find the Thief, the latter figures out that scheme. His chief wish now being to outmaneuver the king, he meets with the princess and confesses everything to her –- only to escape via yet another prearranged trick when she tries to seize him. Now impressed by such resourcefulness, Rhampsinitos vows to pardon and reward the Thief, so the Thief comes to the palace, tells the king his entire story, and is given the princess's hand in marriage. Cunning and quick-thinking, the Thief is never brought to justice for his stealing and becomes the king's son-in-law by sheer Refuge in Audacity.
• Misblamed: Herodotus often catches heat for reporting fantastical stories as if they were fact, especially by the disciples and/or proponents of Thucydides. In fact, Herodotus is often quite skeptical of many such stories for which he cannot find corroborating evidence, and rarely fails to note such in The Histories; he simply believes that it is the historian's role to report his findings regardless of what they might be and then apply critical thinking to them rather than only to report what he can conclusively call the truth.
• Tearjerker: The Histories is full of tragedies, but Adrastus deserves special mention. After the Accidental Murder of Croesus' son, he's so wracked with guilt that even the king explicitly absolving him of any blame isn't enough to save him. He waits until Atys' funeral is over and he's left alone, and kills himself before Atys' tomb.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Quite apart from the numerous ways the ancient cultures' ideas of morality and proper conduct differ from our own, they often differ from one another. In fact, in many ways, Herodotus is an early proponent of the modern anthropological idea of judging cultures by their own traditions of right and wrong rather than one's own.
  • Herodotus's idea of the role of an historian differs from the modern role in a few key and important ways, and this can cause many to give him less credit than he deserves simply because he reports some obviously fantastical stories along with the actual history, despite him openly asking the reader not to take his writing as gospel truth.
• Vindicated by History:
  • The Histories has always been considered a classic, but it was more for its literary merit than historical. Herodotus was called "Liar" in his own time and widely accused of making the whole thing up. Modern archaeologists and historians, however, have corroborated many of his stories. Today it's believed he was accurately retelling stories that the locals he spoke to believed to be actual history, and he prefaces the entire thing by encouraging the readers to keep an open mind and only consider this his findings.
  • One alleged "lie" was that Herodotus claimed to visit Babylon, but didn't mention its famous Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, even once. Today, many historians believe that the Gardens either never existed, or were an exaggeration of a much more modest structure that may not even be in Babylon but in some other city, like Nineveh.
  • The Phoenician sailors that claimed to have sailed around Africa, if they existed. Herodotus didn't believe them, but their claim that they had the sun on their right while rounding the southern tip of Africa is accurate per modern geographical knowledge.

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