You’d think, if you read History at university, that you might come across the man who invented it. These days, that would be a quaint hope. During my stint at Cambridge in the early Nineties, I encountered witches and deviants, demography and Dickens, consumer revolutions and the medieval kingdom of Aragon. I came across beggars and Bedlam, early Christian thought and the English Civil War. We had social and economic history, psycho-history, feminist history, oral history and micro-history. There was a brief stab at Rome from Augustus, but that was as ancient as we got. Of Herodotus, the Father of History, there was no sign.
I didn’t think much about it at the time. To be honest, I had barely heard of the man and was in any case new to History. I had gone up to read Arabic and French but quickly revolted, dillied with English, dallied with Social and Political Science and worked my way methodically if unsuccessfully around the entire corpus of the humanities until, after dire warnings of immediate expulsion, History was all that was left.
Had I read Carr and Elton, those feuding giants of English history, more closely, I might have understood why Herodotus was nowhere to be found. In Carr’s vituperative classic What Is History? Herodotus receives only a passing mention: ‘Herodotus as the father of history had few children.’ In his superbly vitriolic The Practice of History, Elton observes: ‘Herodotus may have been the father of history, but for a good many centuries the child he begot was to enjoy but a restricted and intermittent life.’ He continues: ‘History had barely begun when Thucydides attacked the methods and purposes of Herodotus.’ And that was that. For me, thereafter, his name had an inexplicably forbidding ring about it, never quite as menacing as that dreadful windbag Thucydides, but hardly a bundle of laughs either.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. When at last I did pick up the
You’d think, if you read History at university, that you might come across the man who invented it. These days, that would be a quaint hope. During my stint at Cambridge in the early Nineties, I encountered witches and deviants, demography and Dickens, consumer revolutions and the medieval kingdom of Aragon. I came across beggars and Bedlam, early Christian thought and the English Civil War. We had social and economic history, psycho-history, feminist history, oral history and micro-history. There was a brief stab at Rome from Augustus, but that was as ancient as we got. Of Herodotus, the Father of History, there was no sign.
I didn’t think much about it at the time. To be honest, I had barely heard of the man and was in any case new to History. I had gone up to read Arabic and French but quickly revolted, dillied with English, dallied with Social and Political Science and worked my way methodically if unsuccessfully around the entire corpus of the humanities until, after dire warnings of immediate expulsion, History was all that was left. Had I read Carr and Elton, those feuding giants of English history, more closely, I might have understood why Herodotus was nowhere to be found. In Carr’s vituperative classic
What Is History? Herodotus receives only a passing mention: ‘Herodotus as the father of history had few children.’ In his superbly vitriolic
The Practice of History, Elton observes: ‘Herodotus may have been the father of history, but for a good many centuries the child he begot was to enjoy but a restricted and intermittent life.’ He continues: ‘History had barely begun when Thucydides attacked the methods and purposes of Herodotus.’ And that was that. For me, thereafter, his name had an inexplicably forbidding ring about it, never quite as menacing as that dreadful windbag Thucydides, but hardly a bundle of laughs either. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When at last I did pick up the
Histories, I was hooked. The thing is, Herodotus is huge fun. I know that sounds like a mathematician saying Topological Quantum Field Theories in Low Dimensions are a hoot, but suspend your disbelief for a moment. Herodotus is not just the world’s first historian, he’s also its first foreign correspondent, investigative journalist, anthropologist, travel writer, occasionally even something of a tabloid hack. He’s an aspiring geographer, a budding moralist, a skilful dramatist and a high-spirited explorer. Think scholarship meets (occasionally bawdy) tales from the tavern. The Herodotus biography is necessarily sketchy. We know he was born in Halicarnassus on the Aegean (now the Turkish resort of Bodrum) around 490 BC, and was therefore fortunate to witness at first hand the golden age of Greece, numbering among his contemporaries some of the greatest minds the Greeks ever produced, from Pericles, Aristophanes and Euripides to Pythagoras, Thucydides and Xenophon. Apparently sent into exile for plotting to remove Lygdamis, tyrant ruler of Halicarnassus, he seems to have spent time on the island of Samos before making pioneering journeys through much of Asia Minor, Babylon, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine and Greece, venturing as far north as the Black Sea. He may have been one of the first settlers to found the Greek colony of Thurii in the heel of Italy in about 443 bc, where it is possible he spent the remainder of his days writing the
Histories, his only work and a one-volume literary revolution. He probably died between 425 and 420 BC, while the ruinous Peloponnesian Wars were under way. Herodotus is an irrepressible storyteller and he writes with a novelist’s flair for suspense. The narrative is easy, conversational and rarely less than elegant. This is how it begins:
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other.
The
Histories is the story of the cataclysmic Persian Wars, a sweeping chronological survey of four Persian emperors and their foreign adventures, from Great Kings Cyrus and Cambyses to the regicide Darius and megalomaniac Xerxes, whose hubristic invasions of Greece beginning in 490 BC are rewarded with the inevitable – to ancient Greeks – nemesis. It is to Herodotus that we owe our understanding of this epic encounter between embryonic East and West. The history of the world, as Hegel wrote twenty-four centuries later, ‘hung trembling in the balance’ as the mighty Persian empire sought to squash a ragtag band of Greek city-states and islands into submission. Herodotus guides us through these landmark battles, whose names echo across the millennia because he has ensured that they are not forgotten: Marathon in 490; the glorious defeat of King Leonidas’ 300 Spartans at Thermopylae a decade later; then Salamis, followed, in 479, by the rousing triumphs of Plataea and Mycale. Though rightly fascinated as to why Greeks and Persians came to fight each other in the first place and how – extraordinarily – the underdog Greeks emerged victorious, Herodotus never gets carried away by the whiff of glamour and excitement that conflict brings. Wise, sensitive and humane, he is no advocate of war: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’ Throughout his story wise advisers counsel their kings, invariably in vain, against war. Yet the
Histories is much more than a masterly account of the Persian Wars. Its pages bristle with illicit eroticism, sex, love, violence, crime, bizarre customs, imagined scenes in royal bedrooms, flashbacks, dream sequences, political theory, philosophical debate, encounters with oracles, geographical speculation, natural history and Greek myths. It is an epic about empires, the frailty of the human condition, fortune’s ebb and flow, freedom versus tyranny, history with a piercing moral message. It tells of the immutability of fate, the vanity of power, religion, love, the importance of custom and the capriciousness of the gods. ‘Often enough God gives man a glimpse of happiness then utterly ruins him,’ Herodotus’s wise man Solon warns the prodigiously rich Croesus shortly before his catastrophic fall. Through the stories of powerful but reckless men, above all the Persian kings, it offers sobering lessons about hubris and nemesis, an eloquent caution against overstretching one’s natural limits. It explores the human motives of greed and lust and overweening pride without ever sounding worthy. An interest in foreign cultures rings out clearly on every page. Tolerance and respect are the order of the day. In an age when most Greeks took their superiority over the barbarian world for granted, Herodotus was also the world’s first multiculturalist. With a spirit of wonder he takes us into the peculiar world of Libyans and Lydians, Egyptians and Ethiopians, the Massagetae and the Scythians, Thracians, Persians, Babylonians and Indians. Who are these people, he asks, what are they like, where did they come from, what makes them tick? How do their customs and traditions – political, social, sexual, architectural, religious – differ from our own? Like all good storytellers (and precious few academics), he appreciates he has to keep his audience interested. It’s thought that the
Histories was written to be performed aloud in symposia across the Greek world, the fifth-century BC equivalent of a talk and book-signing, perhaps, or a high-minded but lively series of Reith lectures. So the prose rattles joyously on, Herodotus’s effervescent personality bubbling through in 1,086 first-person interventions. There are gossipy asides, numerous digressions, nudges and winks scattered pell-mell throughout the text. He embraces the weird and the wonderful – as he embraces life – with a zest you can still feel across the divide of two and a half millennia: dog-headed men who live in mountains, the gold-digging ants of India, bigger than a fox, smaller than a dog, and the fabulous flying snakes of Arabia. It was these sorts of tall stories that landed Herodotus in the soup with Plutarch, who took Cicero’s Father of History moniker and spitefully renamed the Greek historian the Father of Lies. Never mind that Herodotus was, more often than not, scrupulous in sourcing his stories. ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them,’ he explains. He’s keen on sex, too, particularly the sexual customs of foreign cultures. Why? Because he’s genuinely interested and knows his audience will be too. He writes of men and women in India who ‘copulate in the open like cattle’. He records how Babylonian husbands and wives take care to fumigate their genitals with incense after love-making and – wonderful, typically Herodotean detail, this – won’t touch any ‘household utensils’ until they have cleaned themselves. In Egypt, he tells of the ‘most surprising incident’ of a woman having sex with a goat in public. Then there are the Massagetae tribe of the Caspian Sea where ‘all wives are used promiscuously . . . If a man wants a woman, all he does is to hang up his quiver in front of her wagon and then enjoy her without misgiving.’ How is it that Herodotus is still in print almost 2,500 years after he wrote his book? I suspect it’s because in addition to being the world’s first history book (and prose epic), it is also the first ever page-turner. Herodotus remains relevant because he is profoundly human. Reading him now, you realize his voice is nothing if not modern. If you’re looking for sensible foreign policy prescriptions, you could do a lot worse than read the
Histories. Know your limits, Herodotus cautions, and stay within them. Don’t go invading other people’s countries and expect everything to turn out all right. Respect other religions, because only a fool would do otherwise. I have had the good fortune to spend much of the past five years in Herodotus’ world. I have travelled with him to Turkey, exploring his homeland along the Aegean coast. In 2004, I took him to war in Iraq and rediscovered, in the maelstrom of Baghdad, the wisdom of his morally charged history. Later, we returned to retrace his remarkable journey in Egypt, sailing along the Nile and delving into the wonders of this country that so enthralled him, from religious discussions with the Grand Mufti to tales of fellating women in veils and the boom in hymen repair surgery. Finally, we went to Greece, to the cradle of Athens, sun-kissed Samos and Delphi, Corinth, Sparta, Olympia and onwards to the Peloponnese for a delightful digression – and retsina-fuelled lunch – with Patrick Leigh Fermor. Now that our travels are over, I’ll miss him enormously. He has been a splendid companion.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Justin Marozzi 2008
