ABSTRACT
Herodotos believed in letting the facts speak for themselves; there is a conspicuous absence of highly-coloured and emotive language in the narrative. Herodotos not only realised the childhood of Greek society and culture in relation to the age-old civilisations of the Orient, but strove to bring historical events into a reasoned relationship with one another. In anthropology and ethnology Herodotos' information is on the whole to be accepted as reasonably correct, exception being made for occasional rather perverse interpretations such as the Egyptian origin of the Colchians, based on evidently misconstrued oral information and unscientific reasoning. The Persian dream of a world-empire extending to Europe was destroyed, and in the long run of course even their Asiatic Greek subjects were lost to them, to say nothing of Alexander's 'revenge'. The Persian Wars, however, also had a positive result, the great surge of confidence leading to the manifold achievements of the fifth century BC.
