Herodotus

Herodotus shares with other Greek and Roman historians the great advantage of having left no record of his private life. The few scraps that ancient tradition records add very little to his own book and take nothing away. We know where he was born and approximately when; we know something of his travels. His personal relationships, his inner reflections, his reaction to contemporary events elude us. There is no problem of reconciling the personality revealed in his published book with the confidential revelations of diary or letters. We are left to judge him by his book, and by his book alone.

Early in the history of ancient literary criticism, he was called “the Father of History.” The title was revived with enthusiasm in the Renaissance and is still current coin; but there have been dissentients. Thucydides would have resented the tribute and claimed it for himself. To Thucydides, Herodotus was a story-teller, who pandered to popular tastes but had nothing to offer posterity; and many others, ancient and modern, have followed Thucydides’ lead. Herodotus’ reputation suffered inevitably with the exuberant growth of rational criticism in the nineteenth century; and he was sometimes regarded as little more than a romantic liar; but closer study of his work against the background of his times has redressed the balance and justified his title. Today perhaps there is more danger of overstating his claims as an historian.

Many of the influences that helped to shape his mind were ill-suited to the training of historians. When he was growing up, prose-writing and the ways of thinking that call for prose were still young. Verse had not yet been superseded as the natural language of narrative, description, and personal comment. Herodotus was brought up on the poets. It was difficult to break away from the poetic way of thinking and feeling; and there is still much of the poet in him.

The epic had run its course; but its influence was yet strong. Herodotus knew his Homer well, and the other epics now lost. He uses epic phrases, and much of his characterization falls in the epic mould; from the epic poets he learnt instinctively to weave a complex narrative. More important was tragedy, which was becoming the dominant literary form of the Aegaean world. Like the early tragedians, Herodotus was fascinated by the interplay of divine and human forces, revealed in the rise and fall of great characters. Aeschylus had written a tragedy centred on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. Herodotus echoes the language in his description of the battle of Salamis, and has caught the pervading spirit of the play—the sharp contrast between the wealth of Asia and the poverty of Greece, the overweening pride of Xerxes, who chastised even the elements, that led to the great Persian disaster.

The influence of the form and spirit of tragedy can be seen throughout his work; and many of his historical sketches, with little adaptation, could be fitted to the form of tragedy. He traces the rise of kings and tyrants. At the height of their fortunes comes the moment of doubt, when a warning is heard but remains unheeded; then comes the inevitable doom. The warning figure, who sees the future but cannot influence events, is a stock character in tragedy; he recurs again and again in Herodotus. Croesus, king of Lydia, having amassed wealth and power, and counting himself the most prosperous of men, is visited by Solon, who reminds him of the instability of human fortune. Before his ill-judged attack on the Persians, a Lydian noble tries to dissuade him. Croesus ignores the warnings and loses all. So Xerxes, too, could have been saved if he had listened to the warnings of dreams and counsellors and abandoned his plans to invade Greece. Such scenes heighten the tragic effect; but they are not history.

Herodotus also inherited the folk-tale, which is dangerous equipment for an historian. The folk-tale has left little trace in the mainstream of Greek literature. Its natural home was (and still is) in the East; and it was probably more familiar to eastern Greeks like Herodotus than to mainlanders. Stories that would fit well into the early books of the Old Testament, or into the Arabian Nights, are thickly scattered in Herodotus. These stories are vivid, picturesque and circumstantial. Dreams figure prominently; three and seven are the favourite numbers; detail is elaborated as in stories told to children, and vividness is emphasized by the use of direct speech. It is the story that counts; and the same story can be shifted to different characters without a qualm. Such stories have nothing to do with history; but they affect Herodotus’ treatment of the more strictly historical parts of his narrative.

Had this been the sum total of Herodotus’ inheritance, he could never have been a historian. It was the work of early prose-writers that made it possible for him to be more than a story-teller; and his greatest debt was to the early geographers, particularly Hecataeus of Miletus. At the end of the sixth century B.C., Hecataeus had travelled widely and written a description of the then known world. He listed in order the peoples of the coast lands and as far inland as he could secure evidence, described their customs, and explained, when he could, the origin of place names. To the geographers Herodotus owes his sense of the importance of personal observation and enquiry, which he was to extend on his travels from geography to history.

Hecataeus had also written about early Greek myths. Homer and the other epic poets were full of strange stories and ancient legends. From these an attempt was made to build up a history of Greece in the Heroic Age and earlier. Hecataeus’ aim was to reduce these stories to consistency and rationalize them. Herodotus follows in his steps. Helen could not have been in Troy throughout the long siege, as Homer relates, because Priam would surely have surrendered her to save Troy: she was left by Paris in Egypt and found there later by Menelaus. There was a story, told by the Greeks, that when Heracles in Egypt was being led out to be sacrificed, he turned and slew all the Egyptians. This is nonsense, declares Herodotus. The Egyptians, who do not sacrifice even animals, would certainly not sacrifice a man. And how could one man slay many ten thousands? Such rationalization of myths does not produce history; but it helped to sharpen the critical faculty.

Another tendency of his time was more fruitful. Men were beginning to become interested in historical records; and, by relating temple dedications and public memorials to historical events, local antiquaries were building up skeleton histories of their states. Several such local chronicles were written in Herodotus’s lifetime, and some of them he may have used. He certainly used their methods and, whenever he could, confirmed his statements by reference to monuments he could examine; but he advanced far beyond the chronicle in the scale of his theme and in the form in which he presented it.

Herodotus was still a boy when Xerxes led the Persian forces to add Greece to his Empire; and their dramatic defeat must have made a deep impression in his home. It was followed by a counter-offensive, led by Athens, to liberate the eastern Greeks from Persia and to take revenge for Xerxes’ invasion. Herodotus’ early life was dominated by the clash between East and West. At some point he decided to write the story of the great war.

This he was well fitted to do. Born on the periphery of the Greek world at Halicarnassus, he was less deeply committed than an Athenian would have been, and better able to take a detached view. His objectivity is one of his main virtues as an historian. Later Greeks pointed the contrast between East and West too sharply. Herodotus knew better, and shows his intentions in his preface: “This is the record of the enquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that what men have done may not be blotted out by time, and that the great and marvellous deeds performed by both Greeks and barbarians may not be without fame; and I include the reason why they went to war with one another.”

Persians as well as Greeks must have their due; and among the Persians he describes there are many sympathetic portraits. He depicts their customs and emphasizes their respect for bravery, strength and, above all, truth: not many Greeks of his day would have been so broad-minded about the national enemy. Even Greeks who found refuge with the Persians are not irretrievably damned. Demaratus, the Spartan king, came into conflict with his colleague Cleomenes and was unscrupulously deposed. He crossed over to the Persians and accompanied Xerxes in his invasion. But in Herodotus he remains a dignified figure. His deposition was unjust; and both Cleomenes, who was responsible, and Leotychidas, who replaced him, paid the penalty under divine providence.

Similarly, his hatred of tyranny as a form of government does not distort his picture of individual tyrants. Polycrates, who built up Samian power and earned a reputation for magnificence, is sympathetically treated. Peisistratus ruled Athens well and maintained the existing laws. Artemisia, tyrant of his own city Halicarnassus, with whose descendant he had personally clashed, is clearly admired. She followed Xerxes and fought against Greeks; but she was a woman of character.

In compiling his history, Herodotus had very little written material to help him. He was obliged to travel, when and as he could in merchantmen, to find his sources. To trace the rise of Persia, he visited the countries that Persia had absorbed and made such contacts as he could with those who knew most about the Persian kingdom. Nor could he rely on reading for the Greek part of his story. To build up his picture of the Greek States before the Persian invasion, he travelled to the cities themselves. In search of material and to satisfy his curiosity, he voyaged to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyrene and Scythia, to most of the leading states of Greece and to the main battlefields. The result is a travel-book as well as a work of history.

In the second half of the history, from the time when Xerxes musters his forces, the narrative moves swiftly on and keeps closely to its central theme. In the first half, the rise of Persia and the early stages of the clash between Greeks and Persians seem to provide no more than a thread on which digressions are hung. The story of Persian conquests involves descriptions of the countries conquered or attacked; and the length of these descriptions depends not on their importance to the main theme but on their intrinsic interest. “I am going to lengthen my story about Egypt because it has so many marvellous things and works that defy description: no other country can compare with it.” And the reason he gives for dwelling on Samian history is that the three greatest works in Greece are to be found in the island; the aqueduct-tunnel cut through a mountain, the harbour mole, and the great temple of Hera.

If we insist on strict standards of historical relevance, we shall be disappointed; but if we accept his book as he designed it, we enjoy and respect him. Throughout his travels he has a wide-ranging curiosity and a vivid interest in all he sees and hears. He particularly enjoys the spectacular in nature and building; but geography, agriculture, trade and industry, social and religious customs all come within his field. All are relevant to the understanding of a people.

As a geographer, he has a keen eye and a critical mind. “It is clear even to one who has not been told but has seen it, provided, of course, that he has intelligence, that the part of Egypt to which the Greeks sail (the Delta) is recovered land and the gift of the river.” Hecataeus had, in fact, already called the Delta “the gift of the river Herodotus is annoyed at having been anticipated; but he adds the evidence of his own eyes. You can see shells on the hills and salt gushing up which damages even the Pyramids; and the soil is quite different from that of neighbouring Arabia or Libya. He compares the silting up of the Delta with the action of other rivers that he has seen in Asia Minor and in Greece.

He is quick to note the nature of soils, the character of the crops and the general formation of the land. He has other geographical accounts to follow and uses them, but checks, adds and corrects. When he has no personal evidence and no reliable witnesses, he is usually cautious. Maps cannot be made schematically, arguing from the unknown to the known:

“Whoever connects the Nile with Oceanus involves the story in obscurity and has no proof. For I at any rate know of no river Oceanus. I believe that Homer or one of the earlier poets invented the name.”

“I laugh when I see many men having drawn maps of the world showing Oceanus encircling the earth, which they make round as if it were turned on the lathe.”

Europe had not been fully explored. “I have no secure information (he admits) to give about the furthest parts of Europe towards the west. For I do not believe in a river Eridanus flowing into the northern sea, from which they say that the Amber comes, nor have I any knowledge of any Kassiterides Islands from which tin comes to us. I have not been able to learn from any eye-witness, though I have tried hard, that there is sea beyond Europe.” He knows that much gold comes from the north of Europe; but he cannot believe the common story that the Arimaspi, one-eyed men, steal it from griffins. “I do not believe there are men born with one eye, in other respects like other men.” The Thracians say that the land beyond the Danube swarms with bees which prevent men’s further passage. “This seems to me unlikely, for these creatures appear to hate the cold.”

In his treatment of geographical problems Herodotus argues rationally; and the same alertness is shown in his description of customs, religious and social. In Egypt, he is puzzled when he is told of the introduction of Heracles among the twelve gods 17,000 years before the time of Amasis. How does this square with the Greek Heracles, a living Hero less than a thousand years before his own time? To find the answer, he makes a special visit to Tyre, where he knows that there is an ancient temple of Heracles, and finds that his cult, too, was established long before the Greeks; and, for further confirmation, he visits another temple of Heracles, on the island of Thasos.

Wherever he can he relates what he hears to his own experience. In Egypt he is told of the conquests in Asia Minor of the Egyptian king, Sesostris. He recalls pillars that he has seen, supposed to commemorate these conquests; and with this expedition he connects the Egyptian origin of the Colchians which he had noted in his travels. “I noticed this (he proudly remarks) before I heard it from others,” and proceeds to give reasons that would do credit to an anthropologist. Both peoples have black skin and curly hair; but this, he admits, is not significent: it is an attribute shared by many others. More important, the Colchians, Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only people who have practised circumcision from the beginning. Colchians and Egyptians both work linen in the same way; and in their language and their whole way of life they resemble one another. In dealing with such topics Herodotus could be critical and shrewd. He asked the right kind of questions and used his eyes intelligently.

Not all he has to tell us about the countries he visited is up to this level. Knowing no language but Greek, he was easily led astray by the natives. He makes a sharp distinction in his account of Egypt between what he has derived from his own personal observation, enquiries and judgment, and what he owes to Egyptian sources. He brings to life the agriculture of Mesopotamia and gives a vivid description of Mesopotamian river boats; but his guided tour round the buildings of Babylon has left both him and the modernarchaeologist exceedingly bewildered. For his history of Babylon, he had to rely on the priests; and they had good reason to suppress the truth.

The emphasis on the need for personal observation and enquiry, which recurs throughout the geographical and sociological side of his work, is extended to his collection of historical evidence. Whenever he could, he related what he was told to monuments that he could personally examine. His description of the colonization of Cyrene introduces the story of the Samian Colaeus’ lucking trading venture to Tartessus near Cadiz; and he recalls a dedication in the Samian Heraeum recording the gift of a tithe of the profits. He copies the Greek epitaphs at Thermophylae and notes the bronze chariot and fetters on the Acropolis, which commemorated an Athenian victory over the Boeotians and Chalcidians. Knowing that all states consulted the Delphic Oracle, he makes careful use of the Delphic monuments and traditions.

But, in piecing together his history, he was mainly dependent on what he was told. His greatest merits are the extensiveness of his enquiries and the honesty of his reporting. He prefers two witnesses to one, and normally— but not always—leaves a conflict of traditions unresolved. He insists that it is his duty to repeat what he is told, even though he may not personally believe it; but he is not merely an uncritical retailer of stories. Even though he sometimes fails to detect it, he is fully aware of the danger of prejudice. Every Greek state had its own self-centred account of what happened in the Persian war; later feuds distorted the truth. The Athenians said that the Corinthians fled before the battle of Salamis; but Herodotus knows another version that they fought bravely. He could have pieced together the Greek part of his story without moving from Athens; but he preferred to learn about Sparta in Sparta.

It has often been said that Herodotus was dazzled by Pericles, and that his history of Athens is Athenian history as the Alcmaeonides, from whom Pericles stemmed, like to tell it. This, however, is a superficial judgment. In Herodotus, the Alcmaeonides are by no means the consistent heroes of the piece. He knows that they made their pact with the tyrant Peisistratus; the founder of the family fortune, Alcmaeon, is treated in a very lighthearted style. Invited by Croesus to take away as much gold as he liked, he had dressed for the part, stuffed his boots, dress and hair with gold dust and emerged from Croesus’ treasury “resembling anything rather than a man.” One of the family’s greatest claims to fame were the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes, based on the change from racial to local tribes. Herodotus’ comment is by no means flattering: “In changing the Ionic tribes he was, I think, imitating his mother’s father Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon.”

The main credit for the Greek victory over Persia Herodotus boldly ascribes to Athens: “Here I am compelled to declare a judgment which most men will dislike. Nevertheless I shall not withhold what seems to me the truth. ... If anyone said that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece, he would not miss the truth.” This judgment is not due to Athenian patronage or pressure. It is Herodotus’ own view; and he has good reason for it. Without the large Athenian fleet, he argues, the Greeks could not have resisted by sea, and without a protecting fleet the land forces would have been helpless and would have disintegrated.

Yet, as a historical writer, Herodotus has many serious weaknesses. He had had no experience of military command and the movements of large armies. Though he had visited the battlefields in his descriptions of the fighting, he is closer to the poet than to the military historian. How many different battles of Salamis have been reconstructed from his account? Nor can he be trusted with numbers. He has a passion for figures and loves calculations. Even in the moral discourse of Solon with Croesus, he yields to this weakness.

Solon’s simple message was that prosperity is unstable. But the lesson is presented statistically. “I set the span of a man’s life at 70 years. These 70 years give 25,200 days; but if alternate years are longer by a month, that the seasons may fall right, then there are 35 intercalary months to be added to the 70 years, and these months give 1500 days. Of all these days in 70 years, 26,250 in all, no two days bring anything alike.” In common with many other Greek and Roman historians he has no realistic grasp of large numbers. The size of Xerxes’ force is wildly exaggerated.

Living, as he still did, in a world that saw the hand of God in everything, it was all the more difficult for Herodotus to apply the critical approach he showed when confronted with physical problems to human events and historical causes. He had inherited the contemporary belief in dreams, oracles and portents. For him there is a divine power that works in human history; and this divine power is not expressed by the Olympic gods, acting with separate departmental responsibilities, but in a strange controlling force behind the scenes.

“Great wrong-doings (he announces) bring great punishment from the gods and most of the villains of his history come to a bad end. But God is also a jealous god and a disturbing factor, who strikes down the mighty but is not troubled by the lowly. Great prosperity may lead to pride, to arrogance and sin and so to disaster; but it is itself dangerous. The idea of the instability of material strength and prosperity obsessed Herodotus. “As I go forward in my story I will make notes of cities great and small, for those that were once great, most of them have become small, and those that were great in my day were formerly small.

Knowing therefore that human prosperity never abides in the same place I shall write of both alike.” He had traced the rise and fall of many empires. He had sketched the beginning of Athenian power. He must have wondered what would come of the Athenian empire; but on the subject of Athenian imperialism he remains deliberately silent.

Destiny hangs over individual characters as well as over kingdoms. “When it was fated that disaster should come to him” is one of the historian’s favourite refrains. But his belief in an external control of events does not preclude the search for human causes. Though Apollo’s oracle, which had prophesied that vengeance would fall on the fifth descendant of the usurper Gyges, looms large in the story of Croesus’ fall, Herodotus sees that Croeses, when he attacked Cyrus, was attempting a land-grab before Persian power could be consolidated. And, in tracing the origin of the great war, he shows a sound historical grasp of the relevant issues.

He first pays lip service to the mythologists, relating the old legends to the feud between East and West, the story of rape and counterrape, the seizure of Io, Helen, and Medea; but he quickly passes on to knowledge that he can personally control. “I begin with the man who first to my knowledge dealt unjustly with the Greeks”; and so the story begins with Croesus. It was a good starting point; for Croesus was the first to bring the eastern Greeks securely into his empire; and the conquest of Croesus by Cyrus brought them within the Persian empire. The revolt of these Greeks was supported by Athens and Eretria; and the attacks on mainland Greece followed as a logical consequence.

But, though the main lines are securely drawn, the critical historian is always overshadowed by the story-teller. Herodotus’ history remains very personal. Cambyses’ invasion of Egypt, a logical stage in the extension of the Persian Empire, derives from the trickery of a disgruntled Egyptian doctor. Amasis, King of Egypt, breaks off his alliance with Polycrates of Samos, not for any political reason but because he knows that such great prosperity will come to no good end. The Ionian revolt is the desperate bid of a Milesian adventurer; there is no examination of the underlying causes that led the eastern Greeks to make their bid for freedom.

Not all his digressions are carefully weighed. It is impossible to make a completely consistent picture of his sixth-century chronology; and it is dangerous to press individual passages too hard. He knows from the poets that Alcaeus threw away his shield in a war between Athens and Mytilene from Sigeum. From an Athenian source, he has learned that Peisistratus captured Sigeum. He did not ask himself whether there were two wars or one, whether Alcaeus was, in fact, contemporary with Peisistratus.

From what we know of Solon’s dates it is highly probable that he did not visit Croesus; but the scene between Solon and Croesus is of the type that in Herodotus we should always suspect. The contrast between the wise man’s sense of true values and the rich man’s confidence in material things is a general theme, to which names are lightly attached. The story has originated in a poetic fancy.

But, when all his limitations have been emphasized, the achievement of Herodotus as a historian remains impressive. Very few Greek and Roman historians were so conscientious in collecting their material. His sources were of varying value; but some of them were remarkably good. His description of Persian organization is based on Persian records. His successors could add little to his account of Athenian history in the sixth century. He grasped the main essence of Spartan institutions. He understood the importance to the historian of monuments and appreciated the influence of geography on history.

Though individual episodes are wrongly placed, especially in minor digressions, he attached due weight to his chronological framework. On the basis of King-lists, he built up a coherent and remarkably accurate outline of eastern history; and he was able to correlate eastern and western events. As he approaches the climax of his history, his chronology becomes more precise. He should not be blamed for lacking the critical penetration in analysing human actions and state policies that Thucydides owed to a very different intellectual background.

The form, as well as the content, of his history compels respect. His style is fluent, picturesque and individual. His composition, though at first it may seem haphazard, is worked out with great care. He has covered an enormous span in time and space, but has reduced it to order. He may deliberately withhold material, to use it in a more telling context; he wanders from his main theme without losing himself.

In the opening books he is primarily concerned with the rise of Persia; but, by carefully planned digressions, he at the same time introduces the leading states of the Greek mainland. Each digression is relevant to its context; but they are so planned that together they give a continuous history of Athens and Sparta from the time of Croesus to the invasion of Xerxes, and provide sufficient material to establish the character and importance of the other leading states. By whatever stages Herodotus’ book reached its present form, there is no reason to believe that he would have wished to revise the main structure.