I HAVE translated the Oxford Classical Text of C. Hude (3rd edn., Oxford, 1927), except at the places marked in the translation with an obelus (†), which refer the interested reader to a note in the Textual Notes. Specialist readers will be able to see that as well as the Oxford Classical Text, I have also profited from the Teubner (both the old edition and the new one, of which at present only the first volume exists), the Budé, and Loeb texts. Among the various textual notes that appear in academic journals, I still find much to commend in the articles by J. Enoch Powell in theClassical Quarterly for 1935 and 1938. His suggestions and conjectures are also implicit in his absolutely indispensable Lexicon to Herodotus (Cambridge, 1938; repr. Hildesheim, 1966).
Where the translation is concerned, my policy, guided at every stage by the expert advice of my co-author, Carolyn Dewald, has been to achieve as much fluency as possible, while not disguising the fact that Herodotus was an early prose writer—which is to say that he was writing before many of the ‘tricks of the trade’ had been introduced by, initially, the orators later in the fifth century. It seems to me that other recent translations have not achieved this balance of fluency and fidelity to the original: they have either tended to go too far in the direction of modern English fluency, or have adopted a stilted and awkward style to get across Herodotus’ lack of rhetorical flair. But to say that Herodotus was an early writer is not to say that he was an awkward writer. Far from it—he is immensely readable and enjoyable. I can only hope that I have done him some justice.
After considerable agonizing, rather than transliterating names in their original Greek forms, I chose to adopt the familiar Latinized-English forms of proper names, in order to keep the work as accessible as possible to modern English readers. So, for instance, I have ‘Pisistratus’ rather than ‘Peisistratos’, ‘Thrace’ rather than the disyllabic ‘Thrake’, ‘Aeschylus’ rather than ‘Aiskhylos’, and so on. It is to be hoped that what the reader gains in accessibility will more than offset what he or she loses in authenticity.