Roderick Beaton: Herodotus and the Birth of Written History (447 BCE)

This week we are going back to witness the birth of history
as a written discipline.

Our guide on this long journey into the ancient world has spent his life
studying and teaching Greek language and culture, but it was when he retired from academia that Professor Roderick Beaton found the time to write the book he had been dreaming about since he first visited Greece as a teenager. The Greeks, A Global History is a masterful, sweeping journey through 3500 years of history that tells the stories of Greek people, their language and their culture.

In this episode, Roderick takes us back to the year 447BCE and the moment when Herodotus of Halicarnassus, newly arrived in Athens, sat down and began to write his Histories and in doing so, laid the foundations of the discipline of History itself.

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Click here to order Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks: A Global History from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.

Show Notes

Scene One: Herodotus of Halicarnassus arrives in Athens and begins writing his monumental Histories.

Scene Two: Pericles, the many-times elected statesman of the Athenian democracy, persuades his fellow-citizens to embark on a huge and
controversial building programme on the Acropolis of Athens.

Scene Three: Outside the small town of Coronea, an Athenian expeditionary force is defeated by the city’s neighbours, the Boeotians. The defeat marks the beginning of division of the ancient Greek world into blocs led by Athens and Sparta, and is the harbinger of the Peloponnesian War in which the Greek city-states fought themselves to exhaustion and stalemate.

Memento: One of the rolled scrolls on which Herodotus wrote his Histories.

People/Social

Presenter: Violet Moller

Guest: Roderick Beaton

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

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