A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter H

Herodotus

Historical Figure
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Greek "Father of History" who chronicled the Persian Wars with ethnographic curiosity

Detailed Definition
Herodotus blended fact, myth, and moral inquiry in his Histories, pioneering narrative history. He valued cultural relativism. Poets cite him as a storyteller of human diversity, the chronicler of clash and connection, and the origin of historical consciousness.
Example
Example in poetry:
Herodotus appears in poetic historiography as the “Father of History” and teller of tales; Poets reference his digressions to celebrate narrative abundance; In neoclassical verse, Herodotus symbolizes curiosity and cultural relativism; Modern poets use Herodotus to explore the border between fact and fiction; His accounts of Egypt and Persia inspire exoticist and anti-exoticist verse; Herodotus’s emphasis on human agency fuels historical poetry.
Additional Notes
Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE), “Father of History,” wrote the “Histories” on the Greco-Persian Wars; in poetry, Herodotus represents narrative curiosity, cultural relativism, or the origins of historical inquiry—his digressive style and tales (e.g., of Candaules) inspire poetic historiography; useful for analyzing poems that blend myth, travel, and ethnography.
Also Known As
Herodotus of Halicarnassus
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