Answer by Paul Cartledge
Let’s first clear the doubting Thomases out of the way. Astonishing as it may seem to most of us, including me, there have been those, scholars included, who have doubted whether Herodotus, a possibly mixed-descent Greek of Halicarnassus and Thouria (will explain below), ever left the (relative) comfort of his native place on the western coast of Anatolia, today’s Turkey.
Or, less extravagantly, it has been claimed – on the basis of his undoubted errors of both commission and omission – that he certainly never went to Egypt (so much for most of Book 2) or Babylon (end of Book 1: chapters 192-200) and probably not to the area north of the Black Sea, either (bye bye Book 4).
However – deep breath – those of us who prefer to take Herodotus more or less at his word believe not only that he did he travel but also that he travelled far and wide, almost to the ends of the world as it was known during his lifetime, putatively c. 484 to c. 425.
Readers will note that ‘putatively’. Biography was not yet a thing let alone a genre in the 5th century BC(E): those two ‘circa’s’ signal that his lifespan can only be guessed not known for sure, the guesswork being based on a combination of internal references in the Histories and later, often much later, ancient chronographic guesses.
Tentative itinerary
- c. 460 Samos (island – in exile from Halicarnassus).
- [Some add that he at some point visited some or all of these other Greek islands: Rhodes, Cyprus, Delos, Paros, Thasos, Samothrace, Crete, Cythera, and Aegina.]
- c. later 450s Egypt at least as far south as Elephantine (Aswan) [some argue that Egypt was as it were Herodotus’ doctoral research project, the basis of the rest of the Histories] and Libya (Cyrenaica, including the Siwah Oasis).
- His other travels will have fallen between c. 450 and c. 430 [he knows that what we call the Atheno-Peloponnesian War had begun – in what we call 431 BC/E] but can’t be precisely dated.
What follows is merely geographical, not chronological:
- Mainland Greece [for islands, see above]: (at least) Athens and Sparta; Macedonia and Thrace.
- Hellespont (Dardanelles) and further north: Byzantion (Istanbul), beyond the Danube mouth; Scythia (northern hinterland of Black Sea) as far as the River Borysthenes (Don).
- Asia: Phrygia (western Anatolia), Palestine, Syria, Babylon [??], Susa in Elam. NB: during his lifetime all those places/regions were part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, enemy territory, of which Susa (in today’s Iran) was one of its principal capital cities.
- Italy, Thouria/Thourioi: at some time in or after 443, when the new city was founded (under Athenian auspices) in the instep of Italy on the site of what had formerly been Sybaris, Herodotus – an exile since his 20s – became a citizen of Thouria a.k.a. Thourioi.
And, finally, here’s a modern update, by my friend and former student, Herodotus redivivus, Justin Marozzi, author of the excellent The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History, which has, alas, to be qualified by adding that some of those areas today are, if not no-go, at any rate seriously unsafe for even the most intrepid traveller.
Herodotus Helpline 