Herodotus Uses Social Media To Share Ancient History With A Modern Audience

Oct. 31, 2010 - PRLog -- Herodotus, who wrote his History of the Persian Wars in the 5th century B.C.E., is using social media to bring his story to a modern audience. He announced on his Twitter account (@iHerodotus) Friday that he would begin tweeting his History, one section per day, one tweet (he anticipates) per section. The project is expected to take almost five years: the last tweet should be posted in January of 2015.

Herodotus has already tweeted the first three sections (paragraph-sized chunks) of the first book of his History:

1.1 Herodotus here! Writing so we don't forget stuff, esp. the Persian Wars. The Persians say the Phoenicians started it by kidnapping Io.

1.2 Some Greeks then kidnapped Europa from Phoenicia & Medea from Colchis. They refused to return Medea when her father, the king, demanded.

1.3 A generation later, Alexander/Paris carried off Helen. The Greeks demanded her back but the Persians refused, citing the Medea business.

Updates posted on Twitter can be no longer than 140 characters, a limitation Herodotus regards as a challenge: "Over the years people have called me garrulous, and not always kindly. Twitter's character limitation will require that I rein in my natural tendency to digress. I'll endeavor to do my best. Still, I reserve the right to use more than one tweet a day if I feel the text requires greater amplification." Depending on the length of the section he's working on, Herodotus will sometimes need to condense whole pages of text into tweet-sized posts.

You can follow Herodotus' progress on his Twitter account at http://twitter.com/iHerodotus. For people who prefer Facebook to Twitter, Herodotus will be cross-posting his tweets on his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Herodotus/163931083629183