Search for a command to run...
The question whether the Histories, as we have it, ends at the point where Herodotus intended it to end has been debated for more than a century, even now seems to be no firm consensus as to the answer. Although over the past few decades the majority of students seem to have inclined to the affirmative for various reasons, a respected authority on Herodotus could still conclude, in 1985, that there is in fact no proper ending to the work, though I have accepted the capture of Sestos as a logically reasonable endpoint, other material could well have followed some kind of 'epic' conclusion might well have been expected.1 The present article reconsiders the question in the hope that, at least, a greater measure of certainty is attainable than that. On one factor in the problem only seems to be general agreement, this may be discussed fairly briefly: As a historical narrative of the wars between the Greeks Persians, the Histories is clearly unfinished. Many scholars, especially in the nineteenth early twentieth centuries, observed (perfectly correctly) that as a matter of history those wars did not end with the capture of Sestos; from this they concluded that Herodotus did not live, or perhaps did not care, to complete his project.2 The conclusion seemed to be reinforced by the observation of Lipsius that the last sentence in Herodotus' actual narrative of the war (9. 121), and during this year