<span>Caption: "Herodotus read his immortal <i>History</i> in Athens about 477 B.C. It had won such popular approval from the Athenians that two years later, by a decree, the author was awarded a literary prize of ten talents ($120,000 to $150,000). As a youth, Herodotus apparently had sufficient means to travel for almost twenty years. His insatiable curiosity led him to converse with priests, merchants, farmers in the field, and even women in their spinning wheels. His easy graceful style, together with his delightful stories, won for him the titles of "prince of story-tellers" and "the first great prose writer." The lt;i>Historylt;/i> of Herodotus deals with a Persian wars of invasion. It is divided into nine books. The first six of these are filled with the migration, commerce, arts, and religious beliefs of the Greeks. It is told as a fascinating narrative and is </span><span>filed with human sympathy, so that there is, even to this day, no complaint of this method of writing, nor of the long introduction. This edition, the first printed in Greek, uses the famous Greek type of Aldus. The characters, with the numerous ligatures and contractions, were based, it is said, on the handwriting of Aldus' friend, the great scholar Musurus. This <i>History</i> was issued as "the book of the month" for September, 1502, by the Aldine Academy, "Neacademia." This was founded in 1500 by Aldus and his many scholar friends. Their ambition was to edit and print one classic every month, in an edition of one thousand copies. George Haven Putman states, "This list of undertakings (by the Academy) is in my judgment by far the greatest and most honorable in the whole history of publishing." (Ege, Otto F.)Original Leaves from Famous BooksOtto F. Ege Collection</span>