Wanted: A Date with Herodotus

Abstract

Herodotus comes down to us as the father of history and his fifth-century work, the Histories, is recognized as the first in an entirely new literary genre. But mid-fifth-century historiography is missing one of the most convenient of supranational tools—a reliable dating grid, or calendar—and Herodotus simply must make do as best he can without one. Although it was first suggested by a sixth-century Scythian monk, the axis of time along the now familiar BC/AD system is of comparatively recent adoption. Partly because of bitter doctrinal disputes over when Jesus of Nazareth was born—this system is never widely accepted until a seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar suggests that Anno Domini year one is just a convenient convention and by no means an agreement. When reading Herodotus today, particularly in an annotated edition in translation providing scholarly estimates of the Julian dates for the events under discussion, it is only too easy to be blissfully unaware of the author’s extreme dating handicap