The Histories (in Ancient Greek)

"Ah, Herodotus, The Histories . This might be familiar to some and unfamiliar to others. It holds a special place in my heart. This is one of the first works of great ancient Greek history that I had contact with and it was the work of historiography that inspired me to pursue all this… Ancient Greek history, politics, religion, literature, how they fit together, how they blend, how they come into conflict and why. From a linguistic perspective the first thing that needs to be said about Herodotus’s Histories , is that Herodotus is from a place on what is now the top coast of Turkey, the Ionian Coast. He’s from a place called ancient Halicarnassus, which today is beside if not underneath Bodrum. So he writes with the same alphabet but in a slightly different style, so there’s a little bit of linguistic slippage. But I think it’s definitely, in its writing style, very accessible to an intermediate learner. If you’ve spent several months working through the grammars and maybe read a bit of Plato on the way, and then gone through Aristophanes, then really you ought to find yourself with Herodotus. There’s a lot more of Herodotus than there is of Plato’s Apology or a single play of Aristophanes, but it’s basically a series of phenomenal and rollicking tales told from an ancient Greek reader’s perspective, in an almost fairy tale style. There’s a lot of ‘and then this happened and then that happened,’ which is what makes it accessible. But I think actually, it’s deceptively sophisticated, this work. Herodotus basically sets out to write an account of why all of the various Greek poleis, the Greek city-states, came to have war waged on them by the Persian Empire. That’s his goal. More or less the first words of his text are, ‘the aim of this is to write why the Greeks and Persians fought each other.’ But in doing that he doesn’t just ask how these series of events were connected, but why they came to be at all. So despite the fact that stylistically, it’s much, much simpler and arguably less rich than something like Thucydides—who is the other main pillar of Greek historiography—it smuggles in, under the cover of this semi-simplicity, a whole bunch of absolutely essential and seminal concepts for historiography. Is history devoid of morality or is history tragic? Is time cyclical? Is there any way for humans to truly understand why things happen or can we only come to grips with the how? If you’re trying to explain an event, do you just need the players involved or, as Herodotus does, do you actually want to give an account of what their culture is like and what their landscape is like and the reactions of the people who live there to their environment? All of this is embedded in The Histories. And over and above that, perhaps as a bonus, there’s a whole bunch of really weird stuff that he delivers. There’s a bit that I’m pretty keen on. Herodotus is describing this region in the desert of Egypt or North Africa, where there’s all this gold dust. For whatever reason, it has been deposited in the sands, just below the surface. Obviously that’s fantastic, a potential boon to anyone who’s trying to build a navy, for example, or just trying to get rich quick. But, as with everything in Herodotus, wherever the really amazing stuff is, there’s equally weighted really, really horrific things. Which is a central idea or conceit of Herodotus, that the further away you get from Greece, which is very moderate and balanced, the more you get fascinating things, stranger things, better things, more lucrative things but also much worse, much more sinister things. So in this sand with the gold dust live these giant ants, which Herodotus describes as ‘larger than a fox but smaller than a dog.’ The level of detail for this potential lie is astounding. “Herodotus basically sets out to write an account of why all of the various Greek poleis, the Greek city-states, came to have war waged on them by the Persian Empire.” He’s describing the cultural practice of people who live in the region and he says that enterprising young lads have worked out a system to skirt around the outside of these larger-than-a-fox-smaller-than-a-dog, ants and get to the gold dust. So he says that what you need to do is this. You need to wait till the hottest part of the day. You need three camels, two male camels and one female camel who’s recently given birth. You tether them together and you ride the female camel in the middle, with your big packs on the side to carry the gold dust back. And you race out there in the hottest part of the day, when it’s too hot for the ants to be on the surface. So they’re burrowed underground. And you hurry out there and as quickly as you possibly can, you scoop as much of this gold dust and sand and everything else into these bags. And then the ants inevitably come out of the ground and start to attack you. So you turn tail and you run with your three camels sitting on the middle one, which is the female one who’s recently given birth. And, as you’re running, you cut the ties which hold the male trace camels (that’s the best translation of the Greek at this point). The idea is that the female camel really wants to get back to her young, who she’s just given birth to, so she races ever so slightly quicker ahead of the male ones, who are condemned to be eaten by these giant ants. Which is completely bizarre but it really sustains you in what is a very long but fascinating and rich work. It crosses boundaries of genre and concepts in philosophy and historiography while, at the same time, being extremely accessible in its original language. Yes, it’s a bit of a call to action. Yes. At first when you’re learning Greek, this lexicon, this Greek to English dictionary is formidable . When you look at it and you’re like, ‘oh God, how do I deal with this?’ But very quickly it becomes your compass and your North Star. For me, it was important to get those three in, absolutely. But If I had six, Liddell and Scott would be the sixth. Yes. Absolutely."