jazzeum
Four Star General
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- Apr 23, 2005
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As we are all fans of history, and Herodotus is the father of history, I thought the following article, which appeared in today's New York Times, would be of interest. The photo is a 19th-century photograph, included in the “The Landmark Herodotus,” of ruins of Athenian ship sheds at Piraeus.
*****
Egypt, Herodotus tells us in “The Histories,” is a land with “more marvels and monuments that defy description than any other.” Not only is the Nile unlike any other river in the world, overflowing its banks in summer not in the early spring, but Egypt’s inhabitants also have “manners and customs” that in most ways are “completely opposite to those of other peoples.” Women go to the marketplace to sell goods, while men stay home to weave cloth; men carry loads on their heads, while women bear them on their shoulders; and “women urinate standing up, men sitting down.”
Not a single aspect of life in fifth century B.C., from the most intimate to the most ceremonial, seems to have escaped Herodotus’ gaze. And since he traveled through much of the known world, he had many things to say about manners and customs, gathering oral histories and anecdotes about long-lost tribes, assessing their accuracy and accounting for varied fates.
There is good reason for Herodotus being called the father of history. Before him we have no records of any seemingly dispassionate observer doing anything similar.
But that alone would not explain why Herodotus is still so imposing a figure, or why the publication of “The Landmark Herodotus” (Pantheon) — which includes a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis, and extensive annotation by scholars — is such a worthy occasion for celebrating Herodotus’ contemporary importance.
It may even be that this book makes Herodotus seem less monumental than he appears in other editions, as mystery is stripped away from the book’s exotic allusions and geography. Maps — 127 of them — outline Herodotus’ world; even the text is clearly mapped out, with wide margins offering summaries of each paragraph and identifying the time period.
The headings, index and footnotes let you know precisely where you are in this notoriously winding narrative, providing a set of landmarks far more detailed than anything Herodotus could have found during his tours. The appendices, nonjargony bits of scholarship by various authors, come at Herodotus from as many perspectives as he brings to his inquiries: Herodotus and Athenian government, Herodotus and tyranny, Herodotus and the poets. Photographs of artifacts and statues, most as little worn by the intervening millenniums as Herodotus’ conversational prose, help make history’s abstractions concrete. And the probing introduction by Rosalind Thomas increases readers’ knowledge and curiosity.
The project also seems suited to its subject. This book, like “The Landmark Thucydides” (1996), which sold an astonishing 30,000 copies in hardcover and more than 40,000 in paper, was conceived and edited by Robert B. Strassler. Mr. Strassler made his fortune in the oil business, then joined the board of what is now Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., and returned to a passion for Greek history that he first explored as a Harvard undergraduate.
He recruited scholars to work with him on these textual “landmarks”; a volume on Xenophon is next. I defer to classicists for more elaborate judgments, but the impression is not one of grand theories but of transparency and clarity.
In his preface Mr. Strassler refers to the “omnivorous curiosity” of Herodotus, and that seems right. Herodotus’ monumental character is strangely ordinary, derived not from linguistic or intellectual fireworks but from his immersion in human voices telling multiple stories, each with its differing justifications. He offers assessments but also expects the reader to draw conclusions.
Firsthand observation mixes with hearsay, genre tales with genealogies, encyclopedic perspectives with small details. There are legends (the musician Arion saved from drowning by riding the back of a dolphin) and accounts of tyranny (a subordinate is cruelly fed the cooked carcass of his son). There are examples of military subterfuge (a slave’s head is tattooed with a secret message hidden by growing hair) and allusions to oracles (go to war against Persia, King Croesus was told, and a great empire will fall — as it did: his own).
It is not just as a collector of detail that Herodotus amazes. Those details feed into one strong current, exploring the causes of the great Persian wars (480-479 B.C.), in which Greek forces defeated Persia, ushering in the era of classical Greece. But at this moment of triumph Herodotus, with his encyclopedic tale of the rise and fall of Persia, Greece’s greatest rival, wasn’t just a Greek telling Greeks what they wanted to hear. He wasn’t like Virgil, who sang the glories of Rome’s founding to a Caesar. Herodotus, writing when the war was still recent memory, was telling Greeks about the kind of world they were inheriting, its riches and peculiarities and dangers.
This made him not just the father of history, as Cicero called him, but the father of a particular kind of history, which tries to reconcile and examine, embodying in its elaborate storytelling, assessments and judgments that anticipate the Western tradition of scientific inquiry. The book’s multiple perspectives offer an early incarnation of multicultural sensibilities. Herodotus, after all, was born not in the heart of ancient Greece, but in Halicarnassus, which Ms. Thomas’s introduction says was “on the edge of both Athenian and Persian empires,” inspiring a double vision.
Herodotus hits his Greek readers at the heart of their convictions from the start, when he looks at how abductions of women have led to wars, effectively shrinking the mythically momentous Trojan War into a skirmish. And he mocks the supposedly savvy Athenians for their “silliness” in falling for a tyrant who dressed a six-foot-tall woman like the goddess Athena to herald his ascendancy. This may be one reason that Herodotus was also called the father of lies: He often hit too close to home. Even 500 years after Herodotus’ death Plutarch was disgusted by how Herodotus seemed to give the barbarians equal sway with the Greeks.
But Herodotus’ track record has been hailed by historians. And this year his much derided suggestion that the ancient Etruscans (who lived in what is now Italy) actually migrated from the Near East was confirmed by DNA analysis.
In any case his anecdotes reveal again and again the uncertainties of human life. That must have helped him preserve that double vision. Nothing stays the same; no triumph is eternal, he warns.
But by the time you reach the accounts of the Persian war, the accumulated effect is not of arbitrary events, in which the Greeks and Persians are forces clashing in darkness. Instead two world views collide: the Western and Eastern. They may not represent absolute virtue and absolute evil; Herodotus is too savvy about the peculiarities of each realm. But Persia’s heritage of tyranny — untempered by reflection — means that its huge army and empire composed of scores of differing cultures are never really bound together by anything but fear. Tyranny has its frailties.
In Greece, though another diverse world was taking shape under the force of a set of ideas that would set the course of the West for millenniums. In that sense Herodotus’ book, with its celebration of humanity, its curiosity about difference, its ambitious pursuit of the truth and its homage to imagination and reason, is not just chronicling Greece’s triumph. It is a demonstration of it.
*****
Egypt, Herodotus tells us in “The Histories,” is a land with “more marvels and monuments that defy description than any other.” Not only is the Nile unlike any other river in the world, overflowing its banks in summer not in the early spring, but Egypt’s inhabitants also have “manners and customs” that in most ways are “completely opposite to those of other peoples.” Women go to the marketplace to sell goods, while men stay home to weave cloth; men carry loads on their heads, while women bear them on their shoulders; and “women urinate standing up, men sitting down.”
Not a single aspect of life in fifth century B.C., from the most intimate to the most ceremonial, seems to have escaped Herodotus’ gaze. And since he traveled through much of the known world, he had many things to say about manners and customs, gathering oral histories and anecdotes about long-lost tribes, assessing their accuracy and accounting for varied fates.
There is good reason for Herodotus being called the father of history. Before him we have no records of any seemingly dispassionate observer doing anything similar.
But that alone would not explain why Herodotus is still so imposing a figure, or why the publication of “The Landmark Herodotus” (Pantheon) — which includes a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis, and extensive annotation by scholars — is such a worthy occasion for celebrating Herodotus’ contemporary importance.
It may even be that this book makes Herodotus seem less monumental than he appears in other editions, as mystery is stripped away from the book’s exotic allusions and geography. Maps — 127 of them — outline Herodotus’ world; even the text is clearly mapped out, with wide margins offering summaries of each paragraph and identifying the time period.
The headings, index and footnotes let you know precisely where you are in this notoriously winding narrative, providing a set of landmarks far more detailed than anything Herodotus could have found during his tours. The appendices, nonjargony bits of scholarship by various authors, come at Herodotus from as many perspectives as he brings to his inquiries: Herodotus and Athenian government, Herodotus and tyranny, Herodotus and the poets. Photographs of artifacts and statues, most as little worn by the intervening millenniums as Herodotus’ conversational prose, help make history’s abstractions concrete. And the probing introduction by Rosalind Thomas increases readers’ knowledge and curiosity.
The project also seems suited to its subject. This book, like “The Landmark Thucydides” (1996), which sold an astonishing 30,000 copies in hardcover and more than 40,000 in paper, was conceived and edited by Robert B. Strassler. Mr. Strassler made his fortune in the oil business, then joined the board of what is now Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass., and returned to a passion for Greek history that he first explored as a Harvard undergraduate.
He recruited scholars to work with him on these textual “landmarks”; a volume on Xenophon is next. I defer to classicists for more elaborate judgments, but the impression is not one of grand theories but of transparency and clarity.
In his preface Mr. Strassler refers to the “omnivorous curiosity” of Herodotus, and that seems right. Herodotus’ monumental character is strangely ordinary, derived not from linguistic or intellectual fireworks but from his immersion in human voices telling multiple stories, each with its differing justifications. He offers assessments but also expects the reader to draw conclusions.
Firsthand observation mixes with hearsay, genre tales with genealogies, encyclopedic perspectives with small details. There are legends (the musician Arion saved from drowning by riding the back of a dolphin) and accounts of tyranny (a subordinate is cruelly fed the cooked carcass of his son). There are examples of military subterfuge (a slave’s head is tattooed with a secret message hidden by growing hair) and allusions to oracles (go to war against Persia, King Croesus was told, and a great empire will fall — as it did: his own).
It is not just as a collector of detail that Herodotus amazes. Those details feed into one strong current, exploring the causes of the great Persian wars (480-479 B.C.), in which Greek forces defeated Persia, ushering in the era of classical Greece. But at this moment of triumph Herodotus, with his encyclopedic tale of the rise and fall of Persia, Greece’s greatest rival, wasn’t just a Greek telling Greeks what they wanted to hear. He wasn’t like Virgil, who sang the glories of Rome’s founding to a Caesar. Herodotus, writing when the war was still recent memory, was telling Greeks about the kind of world they were inheriting, its riches and peculiarities and dangers.
This made him not just the father of history, as Cicero called him, but the father of a particular kind of history, which tries to reconcile and examine, embodying in its elaborate storytelling, assessments and judgments that anticipate the Western tradition of scientific inquiry. The book’s multiple perspectives offer an early incarnation of multicultural sensibilities. Herodotus, after all, was born not in the heart of ancient Greece, but in Halicarnassus, which Ms. Thomas’s introduction says was “on the edge of both Athenian and Persian empires,” inspiring a double vision.
Herodotus hits his Greek readers at the heart of their convictions from the start, when he looks at how abductions of women have led to wars, effectively shrinking the mythically momentous Trojan War into a skirmish. And he mocks the supposedly savvy Athenians for their “silliness” in falling for a tyrant who dressed a six-foot-tall woman like the goddess Athena to herald his ascendancy. This may be one reason that Herodotus was also called the father of lies: He often hit too close to home. Even 500 years after Herodotus’ death Plutarch was disgusted by how Herodotus seemed to give the barbarians equal sway with the Greeks.
But Herodotus’ track record has been hailed by historians. And this year his much derided suggestion that the ancient Etruscans (who lived in what is now Italy) actually migrated from the Near East was confirmed by DNA analysis.
In any case his anecdotes reveal again and again the uncertainties of human life. That must have helped him preserve that double vision. Nothing stays the same; no triumph is eternal, he warns.
But by the time you reach the accounts of the Persian war, the accumulated effect is not of arbitrary events, in which the Greeks and Persians are forces clashing in darkness. Instead two world views collide: the Western and Eastern. They may not represent absolute virtue and absolute evil; Herodotus is too savvy about the peculiarities of each realm. But Persia’s heritage of tyranny — untempered by reflection — means that its huge army and empire composed of scores of differing cultures are never really bound together by anything but fear. Tyranny has its frailties.
In Greece, though another diverse world was taking shape under the force of a set of ideas that would set the course of the West for millenniums. In that sense Herodotus’ book, with its celebration of humanity, its curiosity about difference, its ambitious pursuit of the truth and its homage to imagination and reason, is not just chronicling Greece’s triumph. It is a demonstration of it.
