The ancient historian Herodotus, the Father of History, is also considered a great anthropologist. In his account of the Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century BC, he searches for the forces that transformed Persians from an underprivileged nation into the rulers of the largest empire of antiquity. In his Histories , he explores the non-Hellenic peoples that were either conquered by the Persians or managed to resist or elude their aggression,
such as the Lydians, Egyptians, Libyans, Scythians, and Thracians, and describes the lands they inhabit, their resources, customs, religious rituals, and cultural predisposition. This
second volume of the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies on Herodotus focuses on the principles of Herodotus' research concerning the physical world in the light of traditional myth and the science of his times, and deal with the connections between travelling and storytelling, culture and gender, Hellenic and barbarian religions, and memory and ethnicity.