Abstract
‘The world of Herodotus’ explains how Herodotus's way of looking at things was shaped by the mixed culture of his native city, Halicarnassus. A literate mindset was beginning to contend with an oral one among the educated classes and while it was the existence of verse that had facilitated the creation of the Homeric epics, it was prose that made possible the creation of history. Speculation was rife about the connections between geography and society and the flourishing outburst of intellectual speculation that had marked the sixth century laid the groundwork for the kind of analytical inquiry found in Herodotus's work.