Herodotus was the world’s first known performance artists. He didn’t write his Histories to be read but to be told. He sat in agoras throughout the Hellenic world and enacted his stories for drachmas.

He explained that the conflict between the East and West all started because of the rape and kidnap of Io, Europa, and Medea. You can throw in Helen if you wish but on this point Herodotus dissed Homer. According to the Father of Western History, Helen was never in Troy! Herodotus reasoned that if Paris, Priam’s second son, had brought Helen home with him from Sparta, the Trojan king would have given her back as soon as Agamemnon and his boys landed in the Hellespont.

The most powerful person in the whole of the Mediterranean was the Oracle of Delphi, known as the Pythonese. When Croesus, king of the Lydians, asked her what would happen if he attacked the Persians, she replied, “A great kingdom will fall.” She was right—his. According to Herodotus the Lemnian women murdered their husbands when they brought home Thracian girls as war brides; Libyan woman urinated standing, while their husbands squat to relieve themselves; and the continent of Africa was circumnavigated by Phoenicians under the patronage of Pharaoh Nechos in 610 B.C., two thousand years before Vasco de Gama!

The problem with Herodotus’s stories for the modern listener are the translations: They are boring! Herodotus didn’t see himself as a scholar but a raconteur.