The Twitter Herodotus
— Thucydides
About the book
Between October 29, 2010, and January 12, 2015—when the world and Twitter were young—I assisted Herodotus, the Father of History, in tweeting an abbreviated version of his History of the Persian Wars, a "Twitter Herodotus" for the modern age. The rule was, one tweet per day (140 characters or less), one tweet per section of the History. After more than four years, it was finished, and I made the collected tweets available in paperback and for Kindle.
There are 1534 sections in the History (plus a proem), divided as follows among the books:
Book 1: 216
Book 2: 182
Book 3: 160
Book 4: 205
Book 5: 126
Book 6: 140
Book 7: 239
Book 8: 144
Book 9: 122
Here's how the first bit appeared on my associated website, back before I had to move my digital life to this current space. And lo! Look at that major theme of the History sitting smack dab at the end of section 1.5!
I've preserved the tweets on this site. They're listed in reverse order, so reading them through may be inconvenient—although the ancient Egyptians might have preferred this approach (see 2.35)—but you can jump to the book you're interested in:
Book 4 | Book 3 | Book 2 | Book 1 |
Herodotus' foray into internet publishing, by the way, inspired his younger colleague Thucydides to tweet his own abbreviated history. See this page for details.