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The Histories

Herodotus · Translated by G. C. Macaulay, 1890

Herodotus

The Histories

Translated by G. C. Macaulay, 1890

What this is

The first work of history in the European tradition, and the reason the word means what it means: Herodotus called it his historia, his enquiry. It sets out to explain why the Greeks and the Persians went to war and digresses, gloriously, into Egypt, Scythia, Libya and Babylon on the way. The Alexandrian editors divided it into nine books and named each for a Muse.

How it is set

One leaf per book, with the sections numbered inside it as Long numbers them. A section of Marcus is often three lines, and a page holding three lines is not a page.

What is not here

Notes. These books have the text and nothing else at present — no map, no lives, no commentary. The Gospel of St Luke shows what an annotated book looks like on this shelf, and these will follow it. An empty heading is better than invented filler.

The two parts

  1. I Book 1 — Clio 209 sections
  2. II Book 2 — Euterpe 173 sections
  3. III Book 3 — Thaleia 155 sections
  4. IV Book 4 — Melpomene 199 sections
  5. V Book 5 — Terpsichore 125 sections
  6. VI Book 6 — Erato 136 sections
  7. VII Book 7 — Polymnia 230 sections
  8. VIII Book 8 — Urania 137 sections
  9. IX Book 9 — Calliope 119 sections
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Text: Herodotus, The Histories — G. C. Macaulay’s translation, Macmillan, 1890, public domain, from Project Gutenberg ebooks 2707 and 2456, set unaltered. Macaulay’s footnote markers are removed; nothing else is altered. Of the 1,534 numbered sections, 1,483 are separately marked here; the remaining 51 have no marker in the transcription and run on inside the section before them. The text is complete either way.