ABSTRACT
Herodotus of Halikarnassos was the world's first practitioner of the Historian's craft. The Chinese generally manage to do things first, but Herodotus' history of the Persian invasions of Greece was written in the fifth century BC, some three centuries before Ssuma Ch'ien, the Chinese ‘father of history’, was born. Unlike the other Greek writers from whom we derive our information about ancient slavery, Herodotus travelled widely: to Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Egypt, south Russia, south Italy and Sicily, as well as all over the Greek world. His observations on slavery therefore constitute an important and unusual contribution to the historiography of the subject.
