Why should anybody not a student of Ancient History be bothered reading Herodotus? Good question, and my answer is, for fun.
This is not what I would have said back in the days when I was studying Classics at the University of Melbourne. Classical Studies was not actually my initial choice for a second major: it was more a matter of what lectures were available as evening classes. However I soon fell in love with the subject because I had some wonderful lecturers to ignite my interest – notably Professor Michael Osborne, and Denis Pryor who took us for Greek and Roman Lit. I ended up spending many happy weekends absorbed in the books and journals in the Classics Library but keen as I was, I only browsed and read the required sections of Herodotus and his successor Thucydides. (I never got to Xenophon at all).
When one reads these key texts as a student, there’s an academic agenda underlying that reading. We had no personal computers or laptops in those days, much less an iPad, but the pen was always busy taking notes for the impending essay or exam. When one reads these histories for fun, at leisure, and spread over weeks and months of reading only when the mood strikes, one can enjoy the gossipy bits, the quirky details and the observations that remind us that the Ancients were not so very different to us after all. So any student dropping by to find erudite quotables will be disappointed with my thoughts here - this post is strictly frivolous. Serious scholars who’ve stumbled here should abandon this site immediately…
The other point to note is that there’s no way I could have afforded these lovely annotated editions with their bountiful maps and illustrations, even if they’d been available back then. These are handsome investment editions, and even though they are now much cheaper than they were when first published, (and you can get them in paperback) they’re still more expensive than the Penguin versions equivalent to the edition I still have from all those years ago. (It’s just called The Histories). The Landmark Series is an indulgence.
The Introduction by Rosalind Thomas explains the caveat for the use of the title, ‘Histories’. Herodotus was a Greek who lived in Ionia in the 5th century BCE. Using ‘research’ from his extensive travels, his ‘Histories’ is a narrative explaining how the Greek city states briefly stopped arguing with each other to stave off conquest by the mighty Persian Empire. Herodotus was actually the world’s first historian, though not in the modern sense of the word. He blends facts, legends and bizarre digressions about gold-digging ants and hippos with manes like horses. And, just as the rigours of travel can muddle the details for contemporary travellers who are blessed with cameras, SmartPhones, Moleskine notebooks and travel blogs, Herodotus didn’t always get things right. He didn’t always write things down immediately; he wasn’t always discerning about the veracity of other travellers’ tales making their way into his histories; and he was a creature of his time, convinced that there were gods running about and influencing events.
His immediate successor, Thucydides, was snooty about Herodotus (without actually naming him) and in some ways with good reason: his History of the Peloponnesian War is more coherent because it’s written as a chronological narrative. Thucydides skips the gods as agents in human affairs, and (though scholars argue about this, as scholars do) his account appears to be unbiased. But he is coy about his sources, whereas (even when he thinks what they say is ‘silly’), Herodotus almost always attributes his sources, and often offers multiple accounts leaving the reader to sort it out for herself. I like this, and I also prefer Herodotus’ less dry style. Thucydides is inclined to be a little rather pompous. Herodotus is more like a bloke at a bar in a pub, getting sidetracked from the main game, but much more interesting.
Anyway, much of what Herodotus tells us is verifiable using modern scholarship, and his labours give us a marvellous picture of life among the ancients. It’s for that reason that readers will find that allusions to Herodotus crop up in all kinds of places, and so he’s worth reading much as the Bible is, or Shakespeare.
I can’t remember if Thucydides has much to say about women. But in Book One Herodotus tells us some interesting anecdotes about two queens of Babylon, Semiramis and Nitokris. These women had a practical turn of mind, Semiramis organising engineering infrastructure to prevent flooding, and Nitokris diverting the Euphrates with channels as a defensive strategy against enemies. She had a sense of humour too, for her tomb was inscribed with a tantalising offer of money inside it – along with a stern warning not to touch the tomb unless the money really was needed. And it was actually left alone until Darius the Persian King (522 -486) happened along. He quickly succumbed to temptation and the ruse was revealed: no money, just scorn for his greed.
Herodotus was no feminist, though. He strongly approves of the Babylonian system of auctioning off its women so that the high prices paid for the beautiful could subsidise the dowries of the plain who would otherwise not had husbands at all. On the other hand he describes another of their customs as disgusting, and I’m inclined to agree. These unfortunate women, rich or poor, once a year had to ‘sit down in the sanctuary of Aphrodite and have intercourse with a stranger’… receiving silver tossed into their laps as recompense. (And the silver, being sacred property, can’t be spent either). Curious how often it is that religious rites involve sexual abuse of women, isn’t it?
But that was not the only case of cruel practices in those days. There was a fellow called Harpagos who plotted revenge for many years against his rival Astyages and it was this that led to a revolt by Cyrus who went on to become king of the Persians. Astyages (who was in power in Media) suffered from that all too common omen that his son would usurp him, so he had sent Harpagos to kill the boy. When he eventually discovered that Harpagos hadn’t done it, he had the son of Harpagos killed and served him up to the unsuspecting father on a platter. And then he had the nerve to criticise Harpagos for helping the Persians! He ended up being enslaved himself in the end, which seems a mild enough punishment to me, though a bit rough on his subjects (the rest of the Medeans) who’d already had to put up with his cruelty for 35 years.
By the time we get to Book Two, Herodotus seems like an old friend. I was fascinated to see that more than two millenia ago, the Persians were interested in the origins of life. They wanted to know where the earliest people on earth emerged. And how to find out? With another example of extreme cruelty. Two infants were selected from among the ‘ordinary people’ and raised in a ‘secluded hut by themselves’, with no human contact and fed only by goats. This was because Psammetichos (the Egyptian king) thought that the first sounds uttered by these poor children would reveal the answer. It turned out to be ‘bekos’ (bread) in the Phrygian language so, lo! proof incontrovertible that the Phrygians were first, yeah! (Too bad about the children’s psychological development, eh?)
Sometimes, of course, Herodotus trips himself up with an opinionated observation where he comes off badly. There’s a sequence which is rather droll for a modern reader who enjoys the benefit of modern astronomy: Herodotus pours scorn on various theories about the origins of the Nile and when it floods. ‘A man could at least think logically about such things’ he pompously says, and then shares his own complicated little pet theory about the sun being driven off its usual course by storms …
Other observations are just funny. He records that Egyptian women had only one garment while the men had two – but fails to tell us what the women wore on laundry day – their birthday suits? On the other hand he goes into more detail than you really want to know about how they care for, butcher and sacrifice various animals. As well as the description of the hippo (which proves he never saw one), there’s also a lovely one about a pet crocodile with golden ear-rings and bangles on its front feet. You can also learn all you ever wanted to know about embalming, and the ‘true’ story of Helen of Troy.
I’m working my way through Herodotus during commercial breaks of the current Masterchef season on TV. There are soooo many ads I’ve read up to the end of Book 2 and we’re only up to Week 3! I’ll come back to this post when I’ve read some more as and when the mood takes me but I’m not reading this with any timetable in mind – that’s the pleasure of reading it when there’s no exam to pass…
Editor: Robert B Strassler, Introduction by Rosalind Thomas, Translation by Andrea L. Purvis
Title: The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Publisher: Quercus 2008
ISBN: 9781847246868 (Hardback) 1024 pages
Availability:
Fishpond: The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Other titles for your classics shelf in this series:
(These are available as paperbacks, but they are big heavy books of 1000+ pages and will almost certainly fall apart with reading so I recommend the hardbacks. However, if you wish to find them at Fishpond, follow the hardback links above, and then click the link on Robert Strassler’s name. eBooks are currently unavailable, but you may also be able to make enquiries from there. (But I wouldn’t want an eBook version: the maps would not be big enough to see the details, and their value is in being able to see all three of the overlapping maps that show the locator map, the main map and the inset map.)
Recent Comments