Histories Read online

  Herodotus

  Histories

  Translated with Notes

  by George Rawlinson

  with an Introduction

  by Tom Griffith

  WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

  OF WORLD LITERATURE

  Histories first published

  by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1996

  Published as an ePublication 2013

  ISBN 978 1 84870 483 1

  Introduction © Tom Griffith 1996

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  Introduction

  Herodotus’ life

  Very little is known about the life of Herodotus. He was born in Halicarnassus, we are told, in about 484 BC – though the date may be no more than a plausible guess. Halicarnassus was a Greek city on the south-west coast of what is now Turkey. His father was Lyxes, his mother Rhoio – or perhaps Dryo – and it is possible that his mother was partially or wholly non-Greek. Nothing at all is known of his childhood. As a young man he was exiled by Lygdamis, the ruler of Halicarnassus. This may have been for disloyalty, or merely for being a political opponent. Lygdamis was the grandson of the Queen Artemisia who plays a prominent and colourful role in Herodotus’ account of the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC. During his exile Herodotus is said to have travelled widely, but this is something we could in any case have deduced from his writings.

  When Lygdamis was deposed and expelled in a coup d’état, some time before 454 BC, Herodotus returned to Halicarnassus. But in 444 BC he left again, this time of his own free will. The Athenians were founding a city at Thuria, or Thurii, on the south coast of Italy, and Herodotus was one of the first colonists. It was probably at Thurii that he wrote most or all of his Histories, working no doubt from extensive notes taken during his travels.

  In fifth-century Greece the only way to produce books was to copy them by hand, and as a result they were extremely expensive. The first publication of the Histories was almost certainly by public recitation, and the first recitals are thought to have been held in Athens and Olympia. Indeed, Herodotus may well have lived for a time in Athens, and at some point he became a friend of the poet Sophocles. He is markedly pro-Athenian in his writing – and this at a time when the arrogance and imperialism of the Athenians had made them highly unpopular throughout the Greek world. Herodotus is well informed on Athenian sources and inscriptions, which suggests that he must have had close contacts in Athens, whether or not he lived there.

  The date of Herodotus’ death is uncertain. His history contains unmistakable references (Book vi, 91 and Book vii, 137 are the most striking) to events at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War – the war between Athens and Sparta which began in 431 BC. And Book ix, 73 describes the Spartans as ‘always’ sparing the village of Decelea, on the borders of Attica, which suggests that he may still have been alive towards the end of the war. He may well have died in Thurii, but it could also have been in Pella, the capital of Macedonia, where the king was a patron of literature and the arts, and where the playwright Euripides lived for a time.

  That is just about all that is known about Herodotus. Did he marry? Did he have a family? If he did, nothing is known about his wife or children. Of his nature, habits and personality we know only what we can deduce from his writings. He apparently wrote nothing apart from the Histories. So we know him from those, and from nowhere else.

  The Histories

  The Histories tell the story of the two Persian invasions of Greece, in 490 BC and 480 BC. They therefore contain the first act in a long drama of East-West conflict which can be seen as ending over 150 years later with the successful invasion of Persia by Alexander the Great, or possibly as continuing through the Roman wars with the Parthians, the life of Mahomet and the rise of Islam, to the rivalry between Richard I of England and Saladin. To put his story into context, Herodotus first tells the story of the rise of the kingdom of Lydia in western Turkey, and its overthrow by the Persians, and then gives a long account of the growth and extent of the Persian empire. The conflict with Greece does not begin until the revolt of the Ionian Greeks against the Persians in 510 BC.

  The work was divided in ancient times – though not by Herodotus himself – into nine books, each book being given the name of one of the Muses. This division has been observed ever since. The rise of Lydia takes up most of Book i, and the digression on the Persian empire takes up Books ii, iii, iv and the beginning of v. So the first half of the work is concerned with preliminaries. Many people, on first reading the Histories, start with the lonian Revolt, and read Books v–ix. And if you want to read the best-known stories in Herodotus – the battle of Marathon, or King Xerxes whipping the sea for its disobedience, or Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae against an army of half a million (or five million, if we are to believe Herodotus), this is the best thing to do. But as you come to know and like Herodotus, so you will come to enjoy, and perhaps prefer, Books ii to iv. It is in these books that Herodotus is most himself, and here that his strengths and weaknesses are most apparent. Above all, it is here that he is often at his most entertaining.

  Father of History, or Father of Lies?

  Herodotus has been called the Father of History. He has also been called the Father of Lies. Which judgment should we accept? Before we answer this question, we need to think a little about his aims, and the context in which he wrote. The Western tradition of history-writing was created by Herodotus and Thucydides, who lived a generation after Herodotus. When Herodotus started writing, there was no historical tradition for him to fit into or break away from. There were writers of prose narrative (logographoi), but as far as we know they did little more than rewrite traditional stories which were already familiar to readers of epic poetry.

  The first critic of Herodotus was Thucydides, who criticises Herodotus (though not by name) on two grounds (Thucydides i, 22). He begins by apologising, with evident insincerity, for the fact that he does not himself pander to popular taste by offering his readers what he calls a ‘mythical’ element – by which he seems to mean a mixture of myth, fantasy and entertainment. When he says this, he is generally taken to be implicitly criticising Herodotus for including all sorts of material which was inappropriate to a history. And he further accuses Herodotus – once again by implication rather than directly – of inaccuracy, and of not bothering to check his facts.

  The first of these charges is certainly unfair, and can be quickly dismissed. Since Herodotus was writing for recitation, rather than to be read, it was important for him
to entertain. This is one reason why we find much in his Histories that nowadays would be regarded as unhistorical. Another is that Herodotus had a very wide range of interests. His curiosity extended itself to all manner of things beyond the mere narrative of events. To almost everything but the narrative of events, it sometimes seems. Sexual mores, religious beliefs, natural history, funeral rites, art, geography, ethnography. On what grounds can we now insist that he should have omitted these things? It was Thucydides who decided that history should consist of diplomacy, war, politics, economics – and not much else. We cannot criticise Herodotus for not complying with a definition of history which had not yet been formulated.

  The charge of inaccuracy is harder to deal with. In Herodotus’ defence we can point out that Thucydides, for all his criticisms, pays Herodotus the tribute of beginning his own history in earnest at the point where Herodotus leaves off; that much of what Herodotus had to say about royal burials in Scythia has been confirmed by recent archaeological findings; that Xerxes’ cutting of a canal through the Athos peninsula – a story received with incredulity for about 2,500 years – has recently been confirmed by aerial photography. Nevertheless, when we compare him with Thucydides, Herodotus certainly does on occasions strike us as being uncritical. Some of his informants do seem, in the modern idiom, to have seen him coming. It was clearly someone with a sense of humour, for example, who told him about the plains in India where gold dust lay about in heaps for anyone brave enough to pick it up. Why brave enough? Because of the man-eating ants – bigger than a fox, but smaller than a dog – which inhabit the same plains, making it all but impossible for any human being to escape alive.

  Herodotus knows this story to be true, because his informant had seen some of these ants at the court of the king of Persia (Book iii, 102). He is equally confident about the recommended way to avoid the ants. Go in the heat of the day (the ants don’t like the heat). Take three camels, one of which must be a female which has just given birth. Load this camel with as much gold dust as you dare, then leg it for home. When the ants start to catch up with you, cut loose the other two camels. The ants will eat those, while your female camel’s eagerness to return to her offspring will get you safely home. With luck.

  It is tales of this kind which underlie Thucydides’ charge of inaccuracy – and which led Cicero, at a later date, to describe Herodotus as fabulosus (fond of tall stories). Yet this description too is in many ways unfair. Herodotus is very clear about his aims and methods. He states at the outset that his aim is to preserve the memory of the past by recording the remarkable achievements of the Greeks and other peoples. His method is to record what he was told, without passing judgment on it. ‘My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means bound to believe it.’ (Book vii, 152)

  There are times when his willingness to record things uncritically is greatly to our benefit. He tells us (Book iv, 42) of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco who, after abandoning plans for a canal linking the Nile with the Arabian gulf, sent out a Phoenician fleet with orders to sail round Libya (as Africa was then known). This they did, though it took them more than two years to accomplish, stopping in the autumn to sow a crop, then waiting for the harvest before sailing on.

  Can we believe this? Or is it another tall story? The answer is that we have to believe it, because of one detail which Herodotus mentions in order to cast doubt on the story. The Phoenicians claimed that as they sailed westwards round the southern end of Libya (i.e. Africa) they had the sun on their right – to the north of them. This is indeed where the sun appears, if you sail westwards round the Cape of Good Hope, and the only way the Phoenician sailors could have known that it was so was if they had actually done it. Thucydides would not have told us this story at all. He would have exercised his (undoubtedly acute) historical judgment, decided the story was false, and suppressed it. And we would then never have known that the Phoenicians did circumnavigate Africa, in open boats, more than 2,500 years ago.

  Why is the Histories a great book?

  Herodotus was the first Western historian, and in his respect for evidence he remains a model of what a historian ought to be. He first presents us with the evidence, and then tells us what conclusions he draws from it. So if we do not accept his conclusions, we still have the evidence. Thucydides, by contrast, gives us only his conclusions – take them or leave them. If we distrust his conclusions, as we occasionally have good reason to do, we have no idea what the evidence was on which those conclusions were based. So while Thucydides may perhaps have had the better analytical intelligence, Herodotus was more modern – and to us more useful – in his handling of evidence.

  Apart from that, the Histories give us a wonderful picture of what we might call the Greek tragic world-view. All tragedy consists, according to Aristotle, in a reversal of fortune. Such reversals, according to Herodotus and most Greeks, are likely to occur when the natural order of things is disturbed by excess of some kind. This is the idea of hubris and its counterpart, nemesis. Hubris is the disturbance of the natural order. The reversal of fortune which restores the natural order is nemesis. In modern usage we tend to treat hubris as human arrogance, and certainly it can take this form. During the second Persian invasion Xerxes bridges the Hellespont – a sacrilegious act, given that the sea was a god. Then, following a storm, he punishes the sea by giving it 300 lashes, throwing fetters into it, and branding it with red-hot irons (Book vii, 35). This is hubris, and human arrogance, on the grand scale. Nemesis, in the shape of the destruction of the bridge and the defeat of the expedition, inevitably follows.

  There are other manifestations of hubris, however, which do not involve the arrogance of humans. Polycrates the tyrant of Samos is warned by his friend Amasis to throw away his most treasured possession (Book iii, 40). Polycrates recognises the danger of being too successful, and throws his favourite ring into the sea. There it is swallowed by an enormous fish – a fish so enormous that the fisherman who catches it offers it up to the tyrant’s household in the hope of a reward. So Polycrates gets his ring back, and Amasis breaks off his friendship with him. Not because Polycrates is arrogant – he is not – but because any human being who has that kind of luck is bound to come to a disastrous end. And sure enough, Polycrates grows careless, and does come to a disastrous end.

  In the Greek view, people may contribute to their own downfall, like Xerxes. Or they may come to grief without any contribution of their own, like Polycrates. Or they may be lured to their doom by misleading messages from the gods, like Croesus. ‘Attack the Persians,’ the oracle at Delphi told Croesus (Book i, 53), ‘and you will destroy a great empire.’ So he attacked the Persians, and did indeed destroy a great empire – the Lydian empire, his own.

  It is this ever-present possibility of a dramatic reversal in human fortunes which underlies the Greek respect for moderation. Meden agan (nothing in excess) is one expression of it. And Solon’s remarks to Croesus are another. ‘Until he is dead, no man can be called happy – only lucky’ was what Solon had told Croesus, when Croesus was at the height of his power. At the time Croesus was highly indignant, but years later, after the downfall of his empire, as he stood in chains on the funeral pyre prepared for him and the twenty-four Lydian boys condemned to die with him, he remembered Solon’s words, and acknowledged their truth.

  The third reason why the Histories is a great book is that it is at all times highly entertaining. Not all Herodotus’ stories have a moral dimension. The exploits of Artemisia, for example – ramming and sinking a friendly vessel in order to escape from a pursuing Athenian trireme (Book viii, 87). Or Darius, in his determination to punish the Athenians, shooting an arrow into the air and ordering his slave to say to him three times, before he sat down to dinner each day, the words: ‘Master, remember the Athenians’ (Book v, 105). Or Rhampsinitus and the thief (Book ii, 121) – a story which has passed into the Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights and every self-respecting anthology of
stories since.

  Other stories again catch our fancy – as they obviously caught his – for no other reason than that they are bizarre. The best way to catch crocodiles, for example (Book ii, 70). Or the experience of Babylonian women in the temple of Aphrodite (Book i, 199). Every Babylonian woman, he tells us, must go once in her life to the temple of Aphrodite, and sit there until a man throws a gold coin into her lap. Then she must sleep with the man who throws the coin (there being no right of refusal), after which she can go home. Tall, good-looking women get home soon enough, he tells us drily, but ugly women can be there for as long as three or four years.

  It is this kind of sympathetic and imaginative touch which endears Herodotus to us. Thucydides has a wonderfully clear and analytical mind, and he writes with magisterial authority, but he can also strike us, at times, as being cold, sceptical and didactic. These are in many ways admirable qualities in a historian, but it is hard to feel a strong affection for them. You can imagine being friends with Herodotus where you cannot imagine being friends with Thucydides. Herodotus is inquisitive, tolerant, good-humoured, imaginative – the ideal companion to take with you on holiday. Provided you’re not in a hurry, that is.

  Tom Griffith

  formerly Head of Classics

  Marlborough College

  Further Reading

  Other ancient writers

  Arrian, Life of Alexander. Describes the Greek attack on Persia 150 years after the events described by Herodotus

  Lucian, True Histories. Believed to be a parody of (among others) Herodotus

  Plutarch, Life of Themistocles and Life of Aristides *

  Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Continues Greek history from the point where Herodotus leaves off *