history of the persian wars by herodotus

The Milesian school, took as one of the object of its inquiry, the basic underlying cause that is, that some kind of substance that forms the substrate or the foundation for all of the visual phenomena, that we see, or the physical phenomena, I should say, that we have in our world,Thales speculated that the prime substance of the cosmos, was water.

What we didn't talk about so much at that time was the fact that, Thales was also a natural philosopher, speculating about the nature of the cosmos and this is the part that I'd like to emphasize. You might remember that he was one of the seven sages. There was, what was called the, not just Ionian, but the Milesian school and the earliest member of this school of philosophy, was Thales, whom we've already met.

And, it is centered in the town of Miletus, here in the central coast. But for our purposes, in this lecture, what I'd like to do is, to talk with you very briefly, about what's called the Ionian School of Philosophy. As we'll see again and again, they also were, par, sort of objects of contention, between the west and the east. Culturally and intellectually, between west and east. The Ionian city states, the Polis, were an intellectual, were a site of constant exchange, let me put it that way. Long ago you might remember, we talked about the Ionian expansion, back at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when Greeks made their way from the mainland, over to this coast, and set up communities there. As I said a moment ago, Herodotus was from Ionia Halikarnassos is way down here, in the south. What I'd like to do, before we start talking about Herodotus himself, is to talk a little bit about some of the intellectual influences that we can trace, in his work. What we do know is that, he lived among the firsthand participants, in the great war between the Greeks and the Persians, and he talked with a lot of them. And as a result, there grew up a set of legends and stories about him, which are not terribly useful. And that's all useful enough, but it doesn't really give us much of an outline, for his life. He does keep popping up in his own text, talking about places he's been, things that he has seen, sometimes even people he has spoken with. We actually don't know much about his biography. And we think, he was born around 484 BCE. A polis, a Greek community at the south end of Ionia, that is that western coast of modern day Turkey, the modern name of the town is Boldron. He came, as he tells us, from Halicarnassus. And today, in this lecture that is, we're going to meet the man who invented the genre of historical writing, at least in the west and that's Herodotus.

History of the persian wars by herodotus