Robin Lane Fox teaches ancient history at Oxford University. A couple of months ago he published a very informative and entertaining book, entitled The Classical World (Basic Books, 2006), in which he chronicled the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, from Homer to the reign of Hadrian. One learns that a new type of ‘enquiry’ (historie) began sometime in the fourth century BC. Unlike writers about the past in Near Eastern societies (including the Hebrew Scriptures), Herodotus wrote in the first person, weighed evidence and expressed his own opinions. He was an ‘eastern’ Greek, born in South West Asia, at Halicarnassus, where Greek and non-Greek cultures coexisted under the wavering control of the Persian Empire.
 
A quotation from a passage on Herodotus, written by Robin Lane Fox in his chapter 12, p.130:

“Herodotus brought strong, personal interpretations to the complex sources he interrelated. The great themes of freedom, justice and luxury** are very pronounced in his ‘enquiry’: he shared the Greek view of the battles of 480/79 between Greeks and Persians as battles for freedom and for a life under the impersonal, just rule of law, and it is his history, above all, which has immortalized them in that light. The final speech in his ‘enquiry’ dwells on the contrasts between the hardy, impoverished Persians who had embarked on an age of conquest and the ‘soft’ luxury of peoples who live in the ‘soft’ plains and become others’ subjects.  Particular themes were evident to him in human life: that ‘pride goes before a fall’ and that extreme good fortune leads to a debacle, that truly outrageous behavior often gets its deserts, or retribution, that human affairs are very unstable, that the customs of different societies differ and that some, but not all, of our cherished behaviour is therefore relative to the society in which we happen to live. These beliefs are still valid in our own world.      

Indeed, these beliefs are still valid in our own world.
 
** A difficult concept around which histories of cultural change have been written (mainly about laws against material ‘excesses’ considered socially subversive).