I discovered Herodotus’s Histories in a 1970s Penguin edition with a cover picture that looked like the ancient Greek equivalent of a panhandler—a statue with a needy look and an upraised palm. There is indeed something of the wino about Herodotus, with his six-hundred-plus pages of nonstop stories and seemingly random digressions, but his is not a book to judge by its cover. The statue was a seated Greek philosopher, anyhow, not the historian, and Herodotus is no rambler. He is simply one of the greatest storytellers who ever wrote. His narrative ability is one of the reasons that his critics sneered at him as the father of lies, a jab at those who call Herodotus the father of history. Now that title is one that he richly deserves. A Greek who lived in the fifth century BC, Herodotus was a pathfinder. He traveled the eastern Mediterranean and beyond to do research into human affairs: from Greece to Persia, from the sands of Egypt to the Scythian steppes, and from the rivers of Lydia to the dry hills of Sparta. The Greek for “research” is historia, where our word “history” comes from.
As for the lies, they are an unjust charge. Herodotus is a great historian. His work holds up very well when judged by the yardstick of modern scholarship. But he is more than a historian. He is a philosopher with three great themes: the struggle between east and west, the power of liberty, and the rise and fall of empires. Herodotus takes the reader from the rise of the Persian Empire to its crusade against Greek independence, and from the stirrings of Hellenic self-defense to the beginnings of the overreach that would turn Athens into a new empire of its own. He goes from the cosmos to the atom, ranging between fate and the gods, on the one hand, and the ability of the individual to make a difference, on the other.
Read Full Article »
