Author Description

John Lemprière, the English classical scholar, produced the first volume of his proposed translation of Herodotus in 1792, with a second to follow if its reception merited it. Unfortunately it did not; but the first volume, containing the first three books along with a life of the author composed by the translator, is reproduced here in facsimile form, and remains a monument of Gibbonian English prose, admired immensely by Herodotus scholar J. Enoch Powell."The dignified rank which Herodotus holds among the historians of antiquity, while it stamps his character of excellence and superiority, renders his pages interesting, and his authority indisputable; but if clothed in the partial obscurity of a learned language, he is accessible only to the critic, and the more classical members of society. It is the unavoidable lot of many, whom accident or laborious employments have deprived of the pleasures and the improvements of study, not to be able to taste of the original spring, or to discover the various beauties of the natural landscape which he has painted with so masterly a hand. Translation, indeed, lends her useful and well-directed assistance; and it is no unpleasing task to attempt to give entertainment to those who court information, and more universally to diffuse the name, and to publish the merits of an historian, whose works are not only the admiration of the learned, but prove a splendid pattern for others to imitate, and for posterity to applaud."