"These are the researches of
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby
preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing
the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losing their
due meed of glory."
The Histories of Herodotus (c. 484 – 425
BC), the first properly so-called, are divided into two parts. The first is a
“grand tour” of the ancient world as it seemed to a cosmopolitan Greek in the
age of Pericles, Socrates, Euripides, and in short the “Golden Age” (Hesiod
again) of Greek culture. This cannot detain us - suffice it to say he heard
many fantastic stories, which he greeted with varying degrees of credulity. “I
am under obligation to tell what is reported,” he said, “but I am not obliged
to believe it.” (A maxim that holds for our series as well.)
The second part is the tale of tiny Greece
and it’s heroic resistance to mighty Persia – a war, in his telling, of freedom
against despotism, modesty against pride, and the West against the East, which
was crucial to Greece’s (and our own) identity. Herodotus tells how, long
before the war, the Athenians overthrew their kings, repulsed would-be tyrants,
and established a democracy under the rule of elected Archons. The story of the
Persians, however, is the military campaigns of Cyrus the Great and his son
Cambyses, who conquered everything from the Indus to the Nile and the Aegean. It
was the largest empire the world had yet seen, and the King of Kings was very
pleased with it. The Greeks, by contrast, lived in fiercely-independent,
quarrelsome cities, many of them democracies, and were beholden to no one. What
pleased them was not the extent of their power, but their freedom from foreign
rule. The contrast between the two sides is, in other words, implicit from the
beginning – where the Greeks fight for freedom, the Persians fight for power.
The occasion for the war was the revolt of
the Ionian Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, which Darius the Great defeated.
During the revolt, the Athenians and Spartans sent aid to their countrymen.
Darius noticed, and determined to teach them a lesson. Accordingly after he had
subdued the Ionians he sent emissaries to all the Greek cities of the mainland to
demand earth and water as tokens of submission. Some of the most important – Argos,
Thebes, Aegina – were terrified into submission, and to their shame played no
part in the conflict. The Spartans, however, threw his ambassadors down a well,
telling him “there was plenty of earth and water down there.” The Athenians were
no kinder to theirs. Darius crossed the Bosporus shortly there-after, but the
Athenians and Spartans met his army at Marathon (490), and defeated it. Darius swore
to return, and commanded a slave to repeat to him three times before every
meal, “sire, remember the Athenians.” He was absorbed in other campaigns for
the rest of his life, however, and never returned.
His heir, Xerxes, resolved to finish his
father’s work, for he was determined to add to the size and power of his Empire
just as his illustrious ancestors had done before him, and it offended him that
the Greeks had defied the Persians and lived to tell the tale. Accordingly, he
massed the largest army the world had yet seen – according to Herodotus an
incredible five million men, transported by over a thousand ships, drawn from
every corner of his vast empire. Again most of the Greek cities submitted, and
even the priestess of Apollo at Delphi prophesied certain defeat. However,
Athens and Sparta, along with a few other allies, once again stood fast.
When Xerxes made landfall, the Greek
armies were still scattered. Knowing that they needed more time, the Spartan
King Leonidas led an elite formation called The Three Hundred to the narrow
pass at Thermopylae, through which Xerxes’ army had to pass. “Tonight we dine
in hell,” he is supposed to have said on the morning of the battle, while one
of his men, told that the Persian arrows would block out the sun, remarked “how
pleasant, then, to fight in the shade!” After three days of heroic resistance,
a Greek traitor showed the Persians another route through the mountains – they
then attacked the Three Hundred from behind and wiped them out to the last man.
However, those three days were precious, for they allowed the Greek armies to
assemble, and they shortly afterwards defeated the much larger Persian force at
Plataea (479.) The Greek navy also triumphed at Salamis, and the Persian
invasion ended in total failure.
When Xerxes realized all was lost he
cursed his pride, and blamed the gods for driving him to madness. “No one who
is in their right mind will trade peace for war,” he said, “for in peace sons
bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.” Not once, but twice,
tiny Greece had resisted mighty Persia, had humbled the proud, and had proven
how much better freedom was to slavery. It was their finest hour.
…
Herodotus’ work continues to shape the
Western identity to this day, for it is in him that we first hear the
oft-repeated and still widely-believed story of how the tough, virtuous,
freedom-loving West lives in perpetual enmity to the effeminate, decadent,
despotic East. Perhaps his notion of individuality has also shaped our
identity, for unlike Homer’s heroes or Hesiod’s humble folk, who are ruled by
fate, Herodotus’ heroes and villains make their own destiny. The gods battle
down the proud, to be sure, but no one forces Xerxes to provoke them by
building up his empire beyond the limits of reason, or the Greeks to resist him
when he does.
Herodotus is also justly called “the
father of history,” for his work is the first we know of that attempts an
explanation of the present in terms of continuity and change over time, and
looks for patterns in both. The Greeks once lived under kings, but now they are
free. Similarly, the Persians were once horse nomads from the Asian steppes,
but now they rule over a vast empire. In both cases, it is the individual
choices of rulers – in the former case the Athenians as a group, and in the
latter the campaigns of a series of warrior-kings – that makes all the
difference.
Much of the change we see between Homer
and Hesiod on the one hand, and Herodotus on the other, is explicable in terms
of the changed audience for which they wrote. Where Homer’s aristocrats tended
to travel for little besides plunder or war, and Hesiod’s farmers tended to
live and die in the same town they grew up in, in Herodotus’ time the Greeks
were a commercial people, and had travelled everywhere from the north coast of
the Black Sea to the “Pillars of Heracles” at the far side of the
Mediterranean. Many had visited Egypt, Lydia, and Phoenicia, and had heard of
the strange customs of distant peoples, such as the Scythians, the Gauls, and
the Persians. Unlike in Homer and Hesiod, foreigners are not the same as Greeks
– they have their own sense of identity, just as the Greeks have, and their own
rituals and customs, which are all very different. Perhaps he spent so much
time explaining these differences because he knew these would both fascinate
and repel his audience. “Everyone without exception,” he chided them, “believes
his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best”
– so early do we find that relativism bred of commerce and foreign travel.
Perhaps for a similar reason, he was the first to express that characteristic
anxiety of historians – to get their sources right –, for he wrote for worldly
people who liked to think they knew nonsense when they heard it.
Herodotus message, to them and to us, is
the characteristic moral of the Greek literary tradition. “You know, my lord,”
Xerxes advisor warns him before he crosses into Greece, “that amongst living
creatures it is the great ones that God smites with his thunder, out of envy
for their pride. The little ones do not vex him.” But Xerxes does not want to
accept that he is a mortal man, or that the gods have set limits to his power.
The lust for glory and power beyond reason is what brings him low, just as
bravery and love of freedom is what exalts the Greeks. It was a lesson, as we will
see in Thucydides, the Athenians did not learn.
Full Text:
Summary:
(Part of a Series on Philosophy of History
IV of XXXV)
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