Author Description

Herodotus (c.484-c.425 BC) was a Greek historian, a contemporary of Thucydides, Socrates and Euripides, who is often referred to as 'the father of history', a title first conferred by Cicero. 'The Histories' is the only work he is known to have produced, a record of his investigations into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars. Whilst some of his stories are fanciful and others inaccurate (though he stated that he only reported what he had been told) a sizeable proportion of his material was later confirmed by historians and archaeologists. This English translation of the Second Book of the Histories called Euterpe, an Account of Egypt, was made by George Campbell Macaulay (1852-1915), a noted English Classical scholar.