SOURCE: An introduction to The History: Herodotus, translated by David Grene, University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp.1-32.

In the following essay, Grene focuses on the dramatic and literary artistry in the History. Contrasting Herodotus with Thucydides, he contends that Herodotus's genius lies in his imaginative interpretation of past events.

Herodotus' only slightly younger contemporary, Thucydides, rejects the historical account of remote events in very telling terms; he does so at about the date of Herodotus' probable death. Thucydides says that even such a careful (and barely sketched) account as he is forced to give of an earlier Greece, as background for his own times, is only moderately satisfactory. "For," he says, "most of the events of the past, through lapse of time, have fought their way, past credence, into the country of myth" (perhaps the Greek epi to muthōdes eknenikēkota in Thucydides 1.21.8 is fairly translated as...