Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#21: Herodotus (484BC-425BC)

Herodotus was a Greek who essentially created the discipline of history.

Prior to the Greeks, and Herodotus in particular, what passed for history was largely a collection of myths and legends which were thought to be true. Herodotus transformed history into the systematic analysis of past events, which is how we view the subject today.

Herodotus has rightly been called the “father of history” since his History of the Persian Wars is the first real account of history. Indeed, Herodotus was the first to use the word "historia" (from which we derive our word history).

Thanks largely to Herodotus and his enduring influence, mankind has a significant and fairly accurate record of the past and, consequently, the ability to learn from his successes and failures. In fact, without the ability to learn from the past, the achieving of an advanced civilization would not be possible.



Go to #22: Petrarch

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