Gold-Digging Giant Ants, One-Eyed Monsters, and the Bizarre History Herodotus Gifted the Greco-Romans
The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (circa 484 – circa 425 BC) is often referred to as “The Father of History” because he is credited with writing the first great historical narrative of the ancient world. He traveled widely, or at least claimed to have done so – some glaring errors in describing places he supposedly visited have cast those claims in doubt. Herodotus collected the stories he gathered from his own travels, or from the hearsay of other travelers, into The Histories, a record of ancient politics, geography, and cultures, deemed Western literature’s founding work of history.
However, Herodotus is also known to critics as “The Father of Lies“, because his writings included not only some wrong details but some jaw-dropping whoppers, as well. Not only modern scholars, but even some of Herodotus’ contemporaries, scoffed at his claims. Today, many questions whether Herodotus had ever traveled beyond Greece, and had instead simply penned The Histories by collecting stories from people he encountered at home.
A typical Herodotus whopper was his narrative about the struggle between giant one-eyed Cyclopes and half-eagle, half-lion, griffins, who inhabited northern Europe. According to him, the griffins roosted over and guarded stockpiles of gold, which were frequently raided by the one-eyed giants. Herodotus did not narrate this story as the retelling of a myth, but as something, he believed to be gospel truth.
Another Herodotus tall tale was about giant, gold-digging ants. As he told it, ants the size of foxes lived in the Persian Empire’s eastern provinces, in deserts whose sands abounded with gold dust. As they dug their anthills, mounds, and tunnels, they unearthed the gold dust, and the locals grew wealthy sifting through the giant ants’ excavations. Few if any Greeks had ever been to the faraway lands described by Herodotus, so for centuries, the Greeks, and later the Romans, treated Herodotus’ tales of weirdness in distant lands as literal truths.