Mendelsohn explains the famous\u00a0Herodotus’ digressions as means for the history of the Persian Wars to be incorporated into a vision of a cosmic history or of the nature of cosmos (world\/existence). Mendelsohn seems quite right to me; I’d like to add only that Herodotus didn’t give birth to History out of nothing. A cosmic vision exists already from the time of Homer and then in Hesiod (in the\u00a0latter even a History of the Cosmos).<\/p>\n
Herodotus’ achievement was not something new, but on the contrary, it was the fact that he managed to found historical analysis inside the philosophical \/ poetical demand of a greater scale of thinking. This achievement was then followed by Thucydides. Thucydides may sound more ‘clinical’, but he speaks about the nature of man, he does not describe with the greatest possible accuracy\u00a0historical events, he refers essentially to the future, and in his analysis he searches for natural laws governing this history, making of his material exemplary\/characteristic\/ideal\u00a0appearances\u00a0of the laws of a history which is formed according to the nature of human beings.<\/p>\n
There is a relative decrease\u00a0in the importance of the\u00a0metaphysical element as we go from Homer, to Hesiod, to Herodotus, to Thucydides, which corresponds to the increase of the importance of the historical element. Homer already new how tragic history is, and the later generations were going to explore this tragical sense, never doing history\u00a0just for an exact description of facts. Their aim was to explore the tragical nature of history, an aim which included a metaphysical stand – even when that was not apparent.<\/p>\n
Daniel Mendelsohn: What was Herodotus trying to tell us?<\/strong> – Excerpts, selected by Ellopos (full text here<\/a>).<\/p>\n History\u2014the rational and methodical study of the human past\u2014was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago, Herodotus, known since Roman times as \u201cthe Father of History.\u201d Herodotus\u2019 Histories\u2014a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen\u2014represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.)<\/p>\n A major theme of the Histories is the way in which time can effect surprising changes in the fortunes and reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more appropriate, then, that Herodotus\u2019 reputation has once again been riding very high. In the academy, his technique, once derided as haphazard, has earned newfound respect, while his popularity among ordinary readers will likely get a boost from the publication of perhaps the most densely annotated, richly illustrated, and user-friendly edition of his Histories ever to appear: \u201cThe Landmark Herodotus<\/a>\u201d, edited by Robert B. Strassler and bristling with appendices, by a phalanx of experts, on everything from the design of Athenian warships to ancient units of liquid measure. (Readers interested in throwing a wine tasting \u00e0 la grecque will be grateful to know that one amphora was equal to a hundred and forty-four kotyles.)<\/p>\n Modern editors, attracted by the epic war story, have been as likely as not to call the work \u201cThe Persian Wars,\u201d but Herodotus himself refers to his text simply as the publication of his histori\u0113\u2014his \u201cresearch\u201d or \u201cinquiry.\u201d The (to us) familiar-looking word histori\u0113 would to Herodotus\u2019 audience have had a vaguely clinical air, coming, as it did, from the vocabulary of the newborn field of natural science. (Not coincidentally, the cradle of this scientific ferment was Ionia, a swath of Greek communities in coastal Asia Minor, just to the north of Halicarnassus, the historian\u2019s birthplace.) The word only came to mean \u201chistory\u201d in our sense because of the impact of Herodotus\u2019 text.<\/p>\n The Greek cities of Ionia were where Herodotus\u2019 war story began, too. These thriving settlements, which maintained close ties with their mother cities across the Aegean to the west, began, in the early sixth century B.C., to fall under the dominion of the rulers of the Asiatic kingdoms to the east; by the middle of the century, however, those kingdoms were themselves being swallowed up in the seemingly inexorable westward expansion of Persia, led by the charismatic empire builder Cyrus the Great. The fable-like arc of Croesus\u2019 story, from a deceptive and short-lived happiness to a tragic fall arising from smug self-confidence, admirably serves what will turn out to be Herodotus\u2019 overarching theme: the seemingly inevitable movement from imperial hubris to catastrophic retribution.<\/p>\n The fall of Croesus, in 547 B.C., marked the beginning of the absorption of the Ionian Greeks into the Persian empire. Half a century later, starting in 499, these Greeks began a succession of open rebellions against their Persian overlords; it was this \u201cIonian Revolt\u201d that triggered what we now call the Persian Wars, the Asian invasions of the Greek mainland in 490 and 480. Some of the rebellious cities had appealed to Athens and Sparta for military aid, and Athens, at least, had responded. Herodotus tells us that the Great King Darius was so infuriated by this that he instructed a servant to repeat to him the injunction \u201cMaster, remember the Athenians!\u201d three times whenever he sat down to dinner. Contemporary historians see a different, less personal motive at the root of the war that was to follow: the inevitable, centrifugal logic of imperialist expansion.<\/p>\n Darius\u2019 campaign against the Greeks, in 490, and, after his death, that of his son Xerxes, in 480-479, constituted the largest military undertakings in history up to that point. Herodotus\u2019 lavish descriptions of the statistic-boggling preparations\u2014he numbers Xerxes\u2019 fighting force at 2,317,610 men, a figure that includes infantry, marines, and camel-riders\u2014are among the most memorable passages of his, or any, history. Like all great storytellers, he takes his sweet time with the details, letting the dread momentum build as he ticks off each stage of the invasion: the gathering of the armies, their slow procession across continents, the rivers drunk dry, the astonishing feats of engineering\u2014bridging the Hellespont, cutting channels through whole peninsulas\u2014that more than live up to his promise, in the Preface, to describe erga th\u014dmasta, \u201cmarvellous deeds.\u201d All this, recounted in a tone of epic grandeur that self-consciously recalls Homer, suggests why most Greek cities, confronted with the approaching hordes, readily acceded to Darius\u2019 demand for symbolic tokens of submission\u2014\u201cearth and water.\u201d (In a nice twist, the defiant Athenians, a great naval power, threw the Persian emissaries into a pit, and the Spartans, a great land force, threw them down a well\u2014earth and water, indeed.)<\/p>\n And yet, for all their might, both Persian expeditions came to grief. The first, after a series of military and natural disasters, was defeated at the Battle of Marathon, where a fabulously outnumbered coalition of Athenians and Plataeans held the day, losing only a hundred and ninety-two men to the Persians\u2019 sixty-four hundred. (The achievement was such that the Greeks, breaking with their tradition of taking their dead back to their cities, buried them on the battlefield and erected a grave mound over the spot. It can still be seen today.) Ten years later, Darius\u2019 son Xerxes returned to Greece, having taken over the preparations for an even vaster invasion. Against all odds, the scrappy Greek coalition\u2014this one including ultraconservative Sparta, usually loath to get involved in Panhellenic doings\u2014managed to resist yet again.<\/p>\n It is to this second, far grander conflict that the most famous Herodotean tales of the Persian Wars belong; not for nothing do the names Thermopylae and Salamis still mean something today. In particular, the heroically suicidal stand of the three hundred Spartans\u2014who, backed by only a couple of thousand allied troops, held the pass at Thermopylae against tens of thousands of Persians, long enough for their allies to escape and regroup farther to the south\u2014has continued to resonate. Partly, this has to do with Herodotus\u2019 vivid description of the Greeks\u2019 feisty insouciance, a quality that all freedom fighters like to be able to claim. On hearing that the Persians were so numerous that their arrows would \u201cblot out the sun,\u201d one Spartan quipped that this was good news, as it meant that the Greeks would fight in the shade. (\u201cIn the shade\u201d is the motto of an armored division in the present-day Greek Army.)<\/p>\n Herodotus\u2019 remarkable accomplishment was to incorporate, in extended prose narrative, the fluid rhythms familiar from the earlier, oral culture of Homer and Hesiod. The lulling cadences and hypnotically spiralling clauses in each of his sentences\u2014which replicate, on the microcosmic level, the ambling, appetitive nature of the work as a whole\u2014suggest how hard Herodotus worked to bring literary artistry, for the first time, to prose. One twentieth-century translator of the Histories put it succinctly: \u201cHerodotus\u2019s prose has the flexibility, ease and grace of a man superbly talking.\u201d<\/p>\n All the more unfortunate, then, that this and pretty much every other sign of Herodotus\u2019 prose style is absent from \u201cThe Landmark Herodotus,\u201d whose new translation, by Andrea L. Purvis, is both naked and pedestrian. A revealing example is her translation of the Preface, which, as many scholars have observed, cannily appropriates the high-flown language of Homeric epic to a revolutionary new project: to record the deeds of real men in real historical time. In the original, the entire Preface is one long, winding, quasi-poetic sentence, a nice taste of what\u2019s to come; Purvis chops it into three flat-footed sections. Readers who want a real taste of Herodotean style can do a lot worse than the 1858 translation of George Rawlinson<\/a>, which beautifully captures the text\u2019s rich Homeric flavor and dense syntax; more recently, the 1998 translation by Robin Waterfield<\/a> loses the archaic richness but, particularly in the opening, gives off a whiff of the scientific milieu out of which the Histories arose.<\/p>\n But in almost every other way \u201cThe Landmark Herodotus\u201d is an ideal package for this multifaceted work. Much thought has been given to easing the reader\u2019s journey through the narrative: running heads along the top of each page provide the number of the book, the year and geographical location of the action described, and a brief description of that action. (\u201cA few Athenians remain in the Acropolis.\u201d) Particularly helpful are notes running down the side of each page, each one comprising a short gloss on the small \u201cchapters\u201d into which Herodotus\u2019 text is traditionally divided. And \u201cThe Landmark Herodotus\u201d not only provides the most thorough array of maps of any edition but is also dense with illustrations and (sometimes rather amateurish) photographs\u2014a lovely thing to have in a work so rich in vivid descriptions of strange lands, objects, and customs. In this edition, Herodotus\u2019 description of the Egyptians\u2019 fondness for pet cats is paired with a photograph of a neatly embalmed feline.<\/p>\n For all the ostensible detours, then, the first four and a half books of the Histories lay a crucial foundation for the reader\u2019s experience of the war between Persia and Greece. The latter is not the \u201creal\u201d story that Herodotus has to tell, saddled with a ponderous, if amusing, preamble, but, rather, the carefully prepared culmination of a tale that grows organically from the distant origins of Persia\u2019s expansionism to its unimaginable defeat. In the light of this structure, it is increasingly evident that Herodotus\u2019 real subject is not so much the improbable Greek victory as the foreordained Persian defeat. But why foreordained? What, exactly, did the Persian empire do wrong?<\/p>\n For Herodotus, the Persian empire was, literally, \u201cunnatural.\u201d He was writing at a moment of great intellectual interest in the difference between what we today (referring to a similarly fraught cultural debate) call \u201cnature vs. nurture,\u201d and what the Greeks thought of as the tension between physis, \u201cnature,\u201d and nomos, \u201ccustom\u201d or \u201claw\u201d or \u201cconvention.\u201d Like other thinkers of his time, he was particularly interested in the ways in which natural habitat determined cultural conventions: hence the many so-called \u201cethnographic\u201d digressions.<\/p>\n This is why, with certain exceptions, he seems, perhaps surprisingly to us, to view the growth of the Persian empire as more or less organic, more or less \u201cnatural\u201d\u2014at least, until it tries to exceed the natural boundaries of the Asian continent. A fact well known to Greek Civ students is that the word barbaros, \u201cbarbarian,\u201d did not necessarily have the pejorative connotations that it does for us: barbaroi were simply people who didn\u2019t speak Greek and whose speech sounded, to Greek ears, like bar-bar-bar. So it\u2019s suggestive that one of the very few times in the Histories that Herodotus uses \u201cbarbarian\u201d in our sense is when he\u2019s describing Xerxes\u2019 behavior at the Hellespont. As the classicist James Romm argues, in his lively short study \u201cHerodotus<\/a>\u201d, for this historian there is something inherently wrong and bad with the idea of trying to bleed over the boundaries of one continent into another. It\u2019s no accident that the account of the career of Cyrus, the empire\u2019s founder, is filled with pointed references to his heedless treatment of rivers, the most natural of boundaries. (Cyrus dies, in fact, after ill-advisedly crossing the river Araxes, considered a boundary between Asia and Europe.)<\/p>\n The debt owed by Herodotus to Athenian tragedy, with its implacable trajectories from grandeur to abjection, has been much commented on by classicists, some of whom even attribute his evolution from a mere note-taker to a grand moralist of human affairs to the years spent in Athens, when he is said to have been a friend of Sophocles. (As one scholar has put it, \u201cAthens was his Damascus.\u201d)<\/p>\n Athens itself, of course, was to become the protagonist of one such tragico-historical \u201cplot\u201d: during Herodotus\u2019 lifetime, the pre\u00ebminent Greek city-state travelled a Sophoclean road from the heady triumph of the Persian Wars to the onset of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict during which it lost both its political and its moral authority. This is why it\u2019s tempting to think, with certain classical historians, that the Histories were composed as a kind of friendly warning about the perils of imperial ambition. If the fate of the Persians could be intended as an object lesson for the Athenians, Herodotus\u2019 ethical point is much larger than the superiority of the West to the East.<\/p>\n Only a sense of the cosmic scale of Herodotus\u2019 moral vision, of the way it grafts the political onto the natural schema, can make sense of his distinctive style, of all the seemingly random detours and diversions\u2014the narrative equivalents of the gimcrack souvenirs and brightly colored guidebooks and the flowered shirts. If you wonder, at the beginning of the story of Persia\u2019s rise, whether you really need twenty chapters about the distant origins of the dynasty to which Croesus belongs, think again: that famous story of how Croesus\u2019 ancestor Gyges assassinated the rightful king and took the throne (to say nothing of the beautiful queen) provides information that allows you to fit Croesus\u2019 miserable ending into the natural scheme of things. His fall, it turns out, is the cosmic payback for his ancestor\u2019s crime: \u201cRetribution would come,\u201d Herodotus says, quoting the Delphic oracle, \u201cto the fourth descendant of Gyges.\u201d<\/p>\n These neat symmetries, you begin to realize, turn up everywhere, as a well-known passage from Book 3 makes clear:<\/p>\n Divine providence in its wisdom created all creatures that are cowardly and that serve as food for others to reproduce in great numbers so as to assure that some would be left despite the constant consumption of them, while it has made sure that those animals which are brutal and aggressive predators reproduce very few offspring. The hare, for example, is hunted by every kind of beast, bird, and man, and so reproduces prolifically. Of all animals, she is the only one that conceives while she is already pregnant. . . . But the lioness, since she is the strongest and boldest of animals, gives birth to only one offspring in her entire life, for when she gives birth she expels her womb along with her young. . . . Likewise, if vipers and the Arabian winged serpents were to live out their natural life spans, humans could not survive at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For Herodotus, virtually everything can be assimilated into a kind of natural cycle of checks and balances. (In the case of the vipers and snakes he refers to, the male is killed by the female during copulation, but the male is \u201cavenged\u201d by the fact that the female is killed by her young.) Because his moral theme is universal, and because his historical \u201cplot\u201d involves a world war, Herodotus is trying to give you a picture of the world entire, of how everything in it is, essentially, linked.<\/p>\n Cf.\u00a0 Herodotus Bilingual (Greek English) Anthology<\/a>\u00a0 * Herodotus Resources<\/a>\u00a0 * Thucydides<\/a>\u00a0 * A History of Ancient Greece<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mendelsohn explains the famous\u00a0Herodotus’ digressions as means for the history of the Persian Wars to be incorporated into a vision of a cosmic history or of the nature of cosmos (world\/existence). Mendelsohn seems quite right to me; I’d like to add only that Herodotus didn’t give birth to History out of nothing. A cosmic vision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[1811,1818,1803,1804,1813,1805,1812,83,59,1816,20,72,1808,1809,1815,1806,1819,1810,1817,81,1807,1814],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek-history","tag-andrea-l-purvis","tag-athenians","tag-cosmic-history","tag-cosmic-vision","tag-darius","tag-doing-history","tag-george-rawlinson","tag-herodotus","tag-hesiod","tag-histories","tag-history","tag-homer","tag-nature-of-human-beings","tag-nature-of-man","tag-persia","tag-persian-wars","tag-persians","tag-robin-waterfield","tag-spartans","tag-thucydides","tag-tragic-history","tag-xerxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}