Herodotus. The History, David Grene

Title: Herodotus, The History 

Author/s:  Translated by David Grene 

From the cover:  

David Grene, one of the best known translators of the Greek classics, captures for the first time the peculiar quality of Herodotus, the father of history. 

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past.  In his History, the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama. His personality, formalized as witness, reader, and commentator, is integrated into the report which attends on all the events and through which they live for future times.  

In Grene’s remarkable translation and commentary, we see the historian as storyteller, combining through his own narration the skeletal ‘historical’ facts and the imaginative reality toward which his story reaches.  Herodotus emerges in all his charm and complexity as a writer as the first historian in the Western tradition, perhaps unique in the way he has seen the interrelation of fact and fantasy