The Project Gutenberg EBook of The History Of Herodotus, by Herodotus

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Title: The History Of Herodotus
Volume 1(of 2)

Author: Herodotus

Translator: G. C. Macaulay

Release Date: July, 2001 [Etext #2707]
Posting Dare: December 21, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS ***

Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and David Widger

THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS

By Herodotus

Translated into English by G. C. Macaulay

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I.

{e Herodotou diathesis en apasin epieikes, kai tois men agathois
sunedomene, tois de kakois sunalgousa}.--Dion. Halic.

{monos 'Erodotos 'Omerikhotatos egeneto}.--Longinus.

PREPARER'S NOTE

This text was prepared from an edition dated 1890, published by
MacMillan and Co., London and New York.

Greek text has been transliterated and marked with brackets, as in
the opening citation above.

PREFACE

If a new translation of Herodotus does not justify itself, it will
hardly be justified in a preface; therefore the question whether it was
needed may be left here without discussion. The aim of the translator
has been above all things faithfulness--faithfulness to the manner of
expression and to the structure of sentences, as well as to the meaning
of the Author. At the same time it is conceived that the freedom and
variety of Herodotus is not always best reproduced by such severe
consistency of rendering as is perhaps desirable in the case of the Epic
writers before and the philosophical writers after his time: nor again
must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced
in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the
affectation of an archaic style would necessarily be offensive to the
reader, but also because in language Herodotus is not archaic. His style
is the "best canon of the Ionic speech," marked, however, not so much
by primitive purity as by eclectic variety. At the same time it is
characterised largely by the poetic diction of the Epic and Tragic
writers; and while the translator is free to employ all the resources of
modern English, so far as