Herodotos the Historian (Routledge Revivals)

His Problems, Methods and Originality

K. H. Waters

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317756101
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Ancient History

The work of Herodotos of Halikarnassos, 'the father of history', differs in many ways from that of modern historians, and it poses special problems to the student.

Herodotos' history of the Persian Wars, written in the second half of the fifth century BC, was both the first attempt at a comprehensive history and the first lengthy prose narrative in the Western cultural tradition. There was an almost total lack of written historical evidence in Greece at the time, and the audiences who paid to hear Herodotos' lectures also expected historical dramatizations, and enjoyed descriptive material and anecdotes that today would be relegated to notes.

In Herodotus the Historian, first published in 1985, K.H. Waters offers a comprehensive introduction to Herodotus' background, aims, and methods. In a lively, informative style, this work offers a level-headed approach to an historian who has excited some extreme reactions and incited controversy among modern readers.

1 INTRODUCTION

Herodotos wrote the History of the Persian Wars (as we may for the moment label it) with the intentions which he expresses in his opening sentence: the double aim of preserving the renown or remarkable deeds of both Greeks and non-Greeks, and of explaining the cause of the fighting between them. The first part of this statement, incontestably justified by the contents of his work, reminds us of the epic poems with their heroic tales of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus — the ‘glories of men’ (warriors, naturally). But not, in this case, of gods or demi-gods; human achievements are specified. We should be aware that since the decline of the epic genre in the literary activity¹ of an increasingly sophisticated Hellas, no lengthy narrative had been composed in either verse or the more recently discovered literary medium of prose.² (The influence of epic poetry on form, narrative method and even mental attitudes will be discussed later.) We may expect then something approximating to a ‘prose epic’; an innovation, perhaps a revolution, and one certainly revolutionary in its approach to the past.

Part of the revolutionary approach consists in the rejection of the whole apparatus of anthropomorphic deities personally and directly interfering in the action. This is not to say that supernatural control, and evidence of the concern of the divine powers for human affairs, have been entirely excluded by Herodotos; oracles and other superhuman manifestations frequently appear, and on the cosmic level an ill-defined Fate lies in the background. But no longer do particular spears strike or miss particular targets at the whim of individual deities, as in the epic, nor are favourite warriors spirited to safety in a cloud of temporary invisibility. Such ‘explanations’ of historical events simply will not do for the critical spirit of this first of historians. Human, rational causes are to be found whenever possible, though cases will occur where the supernatural is called in to explain the miraculous or ‘heaven-sent’. Only in the next literary generation will the historian deliberately exclude, almost totally, divine control of the affairs of men (Thukydides 1.22.4); in this respect Herodotos is found in a transitional stage. Rationalism is not the most appealing of philosophies to the average person in most societies,³ and it will be seen from other features of his work that Herodotos aimed at a wide audience; in this he differs from Thukydides, whose work was addressed to the intelligentsia, as is shown by his explicit exclusion of all ‘story-book stuff’ (to muthodes). This important difference does not, however, necessarily indicate a wide chronological or intellectual gap between these two writers, who have constantly been compared and contrasted — inevitably, since despite all disparities, between them they established the art and the science of history.⁴

What then did Herodotos really intend? We cannot fairly say ‘history’ since that name has only subsequently been used to define the genre of his work, and even now there may be some who would question its aptness. The fact that he used in the proem or title the Greek word Historiē, of which ‘history’ is the formal equivalent, shows that he did not intend a work of fiction. The opening words run ‘Of Herodotos the Halikarnassian here is the setting forth of inquiry’. Nor did he propose a historical novel, fiction based on fact, though he makes use of devices that have been employed by historical novelists for centuries. Rather,, he will give us the results of his researches into the matters announced (rather vaguely perhaps) in the formal ‘Proem’, as it is usually called by scholars (separate titles were normally missing from such works — even ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ are not labels offered by Homer himself). That is, his ‘getting to know’ the facts of historical events, and provision of rational explanation where possible of their causes.⁵ (The premises on which such explanation is based belong to later discussions.) A careful rendering of Herodotos’ actual words follows:

Herodotos of Halikarnassos here shows forth his inquiry, aimed both at preventing the history of mankind becoming erased by the passage of time, and at preserving the fame of mighty and marvellous works on the part of both Hellenes and barbarians; and in particular the cause of the warfare between them.

The subject-matter is to include, if not centre upon, the war(s) of the Greeks and Persians, as is made clear by the last two words of the opening sentence, in a subordinate clause but an emphatic position: ‘they warred with one another’. That means the so-called Persian Wars, not Greek Wars, since Western society, the claimant heir to the intellectual patrimony of Hellenism, has invariably looked at these events from the Greek standpoint. The reason for this does not however lie entirely in prejudice. For an account of them we now have the Greek account by Herodotos and very little besides, certainly nothing of equal value. Persian kings did not trumpet their military defeats as they did their victories, nor did Persia produce its own Herodotos. The Persian Empire was by far the greatest foreign, and therefore ‘barbarian’, power encountered by the Greeks, and their escape from subjection to it dominated their patriotic thinking for generations. Only centuries later did they, in decline, pass within the orbit and then the control of the rising Western barbarian power of Rome.

But Herodotos did not work from a purely Hellenic standpoint; indeed he was accused by the patriotic but somewhat imperceptive Plutarch of being philobarbaros, a pro-barbarian or pro-foreigner, hence unpatriotic.⁶ For the ‘great and remarkable’ works of the barbarians, Persians, Egyptians and others, are not excluded, and we can be sure from the start that the promised account of Herodotos’ research will be multifaceted; kaleidoscopic is not too colourful a term for the diverse subject-matter and the almost encyclopaedic scope of this History.

Two very large questions suggest themselves at this point: first, what is to be included and what left out — for after all, it is not an encyclopaedia and there are limits to human endurance. Herodotos provides no definition of content more precise than that of the Proem; at one point he admits that his work does tend to run into digressions, and at another that he feels bound to admit matter of common report even though he distrusts its authenticity. Such intellectual examples do not provide a sound reason for exclusion in Herodotos’ eyes, for reasons which will appear in Chapter 4. Second, how will all this disparate material be structured? Since there is surprisingly little agreement amongst recent scholars as to how it is structured, or even as to whether it is deliberately shaped at all, full discussion of this point too will be reserved for a later stage. However, we may note that there were available two obviously basic forms of narrative, requiring a choice, or an adaptation, a marriage between them; namely, following the advice of the King of Hearts, to begin at the beginning, go on until you get to the end, then stop; or to take example from Homer and plunge bravely into the deep end — as the Iliad begins in the last year of the siege of Troy, and the opening of the Odyssey finds the hero has been trying to make his way home to Ithaca for ten years, and we are to hear his account of his experiences narrated by himself to those he encounters. In fact the latter poem consists almost entirely of ‘flashbacks’, to borrow a term from modern media; a device that has been popular and at times used to excess in a variety of narrative genres.

A difficulty for Herodotos in making such a choice was the problem of deciding what was the beginning, the starting-point or first ‘cause’, of the wars between Greeks and Persians. Since he had bound himself to set forth ‘the cause’ (or casus belli, according to one’s interpretation of the much disputed aitia), he could not merely take up his account at the point when open hostilities began, or even with the planning of the invasion. His choice was to begin, by way of prologue, with the legendary accounts of ‘wrongs’ perpetrated by Asiatics or Europeans upon one another;⁷ for example, Paris’s abduction of the Asiatic Helen, or the kidnapping of the king of Argos’s daughter by Phoenician traders. But he introduced these ancient tales merely in order to discredit them as history;⁸ accounts varied according to the source, European or Asiatic, so no certainty could be reached — and in any case, absconding with young women is no serious crime; the girls would not have gone had they not been willing! Yet it was advisable to include these tales implying long-standing hostility between Europe and Asia because his audience, well aware of them, might argue that he was missing the point of age-long enmity as a cause for recent clashes. But his standpoint becomes clear — and one would love to know the initial reaction of his auditors to this progression — when we read (1.5) that Kroisos of Lydia was ‘the first of whom we know’ that he forcibly subjected Greeks to foreign rule.⁹ The old tales then are irrelevant, as well as lacking authenticity; what is important and well authenticated is that an Asian power made war on Greeks (though Greeks living in Asia!) and made them tributary.

In history as in everyday life one thing leads to another, and it was not so many years later that this expansionist monarch met his match in the yet more aggressively imperialist ‘King of Kings’, Kyros the Persian, who had brought the empire of the Medes under his control, thus acquiring a common frontier with Lydia. Therefore, potentially hostile contact between Ionian Greeks and the Persians was now direct, and the subjection of the former duly followed.

Herodotos records the process, a pendant to the conquest of Lydia, not without lengthy digressions; but then in order to reach a war in which the protagonists were respectively Greek and Persian he takes a most circuitous route. It is circuitous both in space and time, arriving at the actual outbreak of the Ionian revolt against the Persians nearly halfway through the total work in Book 5. How this vast detour is mapped will be examined in Chapter 5. Thereafter he proceeds rather more directly to the several Persian attempts to invade and conquer mainland Greece. We shall here consider only briefly the chronological point at which he chose to end his narrative. (The implications of the fact that the concluding paragraph consists of a moralising anecdote constitute a separate topic.) This chronological term is the end of the campaigning season of the year 479 BC, when the third and last great Persian expeditionary force invading Greece has been driven back after defeat and massive destruction. The victorious Greek fleet has sailed to the Dardanelles to seize the pontoon-bridges by which Xerxes’ army had crossed into Europe; and thereafter to remove the grip which Persian strongpoints were still maintaining on this vital avenue of communication with the Black Sea, its Greek settlements and its food supplies. The Spartans, who as the leading military power commanded the allied forces, had suffered heavy losses in two land battles — the defeat at Thermopylai and the victory of Plataia — were anxious to cry ‘Hold! Enough’ and return home. Accordingly the command, probably later than the initiative, passed to the Athenians, providers of the largest naval contingent. The subsequent anti-Persian activity, which continued somewhat spasmodically for three decades, is not recounted by Herodotos. Perhaps it should have been included in an overall account of ‘the war they warred with one another’. However, Herodotos it seems deliberately avoided digressions into later history (see Chapter 4).

But Herodotos was clearly aware (though he does not say so) that a new phase in Greek history had begun. This was the period in which the Athenian Empire was created, controlling many Greek states some of which were members of the original alliance formed to continue hostilities against Persia by liberating those Greeks of Asia and the islands not yet freed from her domination. Others had no choice but to join, as Athens and her allies made them an offer they could not refuse. The unfortunate fact that by accident or design the Athenians inherited or acquired control of the islands, the west coast of what is now Turkey and a good deal besides, led to lengthy internecine warfare as ‘the leading states quarrelled about hegemony’ (6.98). That is all our author says, explicitly, about the period following his closing date, comparing the reciprocal destruction of those years with the havoc wrought by the Persian invaders. In so far as there ever is a real break between one historical period and another, the end of united Hellenic activity against the Persians proved to be one, and to have perceived this is a credit to Herodotos’ historical insight, in choosing to end his narrative at that point. He lived on to see at least the early years of the great struggle, some half a century from the stirring days of the Persian Wars, which eventually brought down the power of Athens.¹⁰

Within the comparatively brief temporal span of about seventy years, from the fall of Lydia to the repulse of Xerxes — but sometimes extending backwards beyond it for many generations, and just occasionally forward to the time of writing — the narrative is expanded, illustrated and interrupted by innumerable digressions. These contain a great mass of information, much of which cannot on any criterion be considered either historical or relevant to the historical topic. One type however which must be counted as generally relevant to any serious historical investigation is geographical. Modern readers may be surprised by the relative inexactitude of some of Herodotos’ information, but four points must be borne in mind. One, the science of geography was in its earliest infancy. The first map had been made by Anaximander a generation or two before Herodotos’ birth. Secondly, Herodotos had neither compass nor sextant, nor any adequate measuring instrument for longer distances; when these were not mere guesses, they were based on the highly inconsistent measure of days of travel-time. Nor did he conceive of the earth as a globe; it was to be 200 years before the Alexandrian scholar, Eratosthenes, calculated the circumference of the earth. Lastly, his interest in all sorts of information had been particularly stimulated in the geographical area by the work of Hekataios, whose statements (as no doubt those of others) he sometimes blindly followed. A further stimulus was provided by his own travels (see Chapter 3), which however did not enable him to verify every statement, and may at times, with the written authorities, have been responsible for the inclusion of certain non-essential information.

Anthropology and its daughter-science, ethnology — infant disciplines at the time — fascin...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• 'Life' of Herodotos
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Intellectual Background
• 3. The Education of a Historian
• 4. Selection of Subject-Matter
• 5. Structure of the History
• 6. The Herodotean Narrative
• 7. Sources of Information
• 8. Religious and Moral Attitudes
• 9. Herodotean Prejudices
• 10. The Importance of Individuals: Characterisation
• 11. Strengths and Weaknesses
• 12. The Writer and the Historian
• Select Bibliography
• Index