Histories

"That’s right, ‘historie’ is ‘enquiry.’ He was an interviewer. The key word is ‘thomata,’ which means wonders or marvels in Greek. These are things to make you say coo, I suppose. It is all sorts of things about humanity; things that originate from humans, and then how the Greeks and Barbarians—as he calls them—came to war with one another. The framework is signalled right at the beginning. It’s all going to come around, at the end, to the greatest marvel of all, which is the fact that there had been a series of great Persian invasions of Greece—one in 490 and then again in 480/79—where Greece is wholly outnumbered and yet they win. When he gets to that, he tells that story and he tells it marvellously. But there are many things along the way. In fact, after the first 40-50 pages or so, Greece rather drifts out of view. Persian expansion was terribly useful for him, in that way. First they moved into Lydia. Then they moved into various other tribes like the Massagetae, which is important because it led to the death of the great king, Cyrus. And then there’s Egypt and Herodotus wants to tell you about Egypt. And then Libya, ‘Let me you about Libya. India? Oh yes, I’ll tell you about India.’ So you have this wonderful framework for putting in all sorts of other things. All the time, you have an idea of what’s coming. Part of it is to put this great thing that’s going to come—the final wars—in their place in space and in time. There’s a big world out there and there’s an awful lot of history. It will stand up against all these things but there are lots of other things and they’re all wonderful too. He has got a wonderful capacity to be amazed. It’s a very infectious personality. You get amazed too because there’s always something new. One that I find particularly endearing is a marvel that doesn’t happen. He’s been told that there’s a floating island in the middle of a lake in Egypt. He says, ‘I didn’t see it move. ’ I have this wonderful picture of him sitting there on a stool all day, gazing out to the middle of a lake. ‘Was that a little shift there? No, just a bit of haze.’ It’s this wonderful feeling of enquiry. He’s got all sorts of stories about flying snakes and skulls that don’t break because of the sun. One of the most thought-provoking, I think, is a story that he tells of a Persian king, Darius, who is very interested, as a lot of kings are, in other customs. They’re proto-Herodotuses, I suppose. He has, at his court, some Indians and some Greeks. He asks each of them what they would do with the bodies of their fathers when their fathers die. Would they burn them or would they eat them? The Indians are absolutely horrified by the notion of burning and the Greeks are absolutely horrified by the idea of eating. The conclusion he draws is, ‘Well, there you go, there are customs everywhere and we are all different.’ Custom is king and we each get used to our own. What I think is beautiful is its context. It comes at a time when they have had a particularly batty Persian king, Cambyses, who has been particularly insensitive to the Egyptians’ practices. This is a time when Greeks would feel particularly superior as they were reading—or, more likely, hearing—Herodotus talk about this. Absolutely. So much for anybody who wanted to feel that, ‘We Greeks are dramatically better than those nasty foreigners who are so primitive.’ You’re suddenly caught back and realise that the Greeks are much less sensitive to human difference than the Persians here. It’s one of the ways that people are made to think quite hard about what is special and what is not special about their own culture. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There are many things in the Histories to make you think, ‘Hang on a minute.’ Just as those poets in World War I could take different things away from Homer according to what they were looking for, you can also take different things away from Herodotus. And you will also, unless you’re very sleepy, take away things to make you second-guess yourself and monitor your own prejudices. There’s some dispute about whether he actually travelled to all the places he said he travelled to. He may bend the truth a little. The extreme sceptical position, that most of his travels are fundamentally made up, I don’t think would have many people signing up to. Equally, there are times, for instance in Egypt, where he might not have gone quite as far as he gives the impression he did. But he’s also quite careful sometimes to say, ‘I heard this’ rather than ‘I saw it.’ We know that he travelled a bit because it looks as if he spent some time at Athens. And he wound up, so it was said and it seems right, at Thurii in Italy, which is quite a long way away. Thurii was a very interesting exercise. With all the intercity jealousies and rivalries in Greece, it was a Panhellenic settlement, with people from all the different cities coming together. That’s part of his project, being interested in the different cities. Inevitably, it didn’t necessarily go as smoothly as all that. They were not necessarily greeted with total acclaim by the people already in Italy. And there was also a certain amount of struggle between the different city contingents in Thurii itself. The understanding and interest, I think. It is a frontier zone. It’s close to that area in Asia Minor where a lot of the great intellectual enquiries of the 5th century took their roots. And, in fact, even the ethnic background of Halicarnassus matters because it’s a Dorian city but very close to Ionia. That whole area is full of Ionians. So he knew these two ethnic groups within Greece—who rather defined themselves against one another—all too well. I think it’s his capacity always to be fascinated with something that is new. You get the impression of somebody who really likes a conversation and to be wide-eyed as he’s told things. And yet, he keeps a very critical, not to say cynical, part of the brain as well. He says, ‘I will say what I heard but I don’t have to believe it.’ Yes. This is particularly a keynote when he’s talking about the biggest marvel of them all, the struggle against the Persians: freedom as an inspiring force for the Greeks. There’s a wonderful moment when some Spartan envoys make their way up to what they think is going to be their deaths. They are being sent to atone for an outrage that the Spartans had performed years earlier against the Persians. A Persian says to them, ‘Why don’t you just come over to our side? You’d be treated very well. We’ll take care of you.’ They simply say, ‘Look, you don’t know freedom. We know freedom. If you knew freedom, you’d tell us to fight for it—not just with spears but even with axes.’ That inspirational force is certainly there. But, at the same time, there’s a feeling that it can go badly wrong because when people are free, they’re also free to go their own way. Freedom can lead people to decide that our interest is to get out of all this and be our own state rather than be part of a coherent unit that stands for something bigger."

"All Greek history starts with Herodotus and more than that, all history starts with Herodotus. He’s the first extant, intact historian of any kind and our word ‘history’ comes from his word for ‘inquiry’— historia . Herodotus is the beginning of history and he set out to record what he called the ‘great achievements’ of Greeks and non-Greeks. He decided he would describe the Persian Wars, from the conquest of the Greeks of Asia Minor by the Persians in about 540 BC through to the Greek victory over Xerxes in 479 BC. But he goes off on all sorts of geographical and chronological tangents, so that there’s so much more going on than the narrative of the war. He has an interesting reputation in terms of reliability. He is sometimes called the ‘father of history’, but Cicero called him the ‘father of lies’ because there are just so many weird and wonderful stories. My personal favourite is in Book Three. He’s talking about the Persians and he describes how, at the court of the Persian king, there are giant gold-digging ants. Obviously, there are no giant gold-digging ants. One possible explanation for this is that he mixed up the Persian words for ants and marmots. There’s a French ethnographer who was doing work in the Himalayas and discovered that the marmots there, while digging into the ground, dug up gold dust and the locals harvested the gold afterwards. It’s a really weird story, but it’s possible that Herodotus was slightly right. But I think that puts Herodotus in perspective for you. The reason I’ve chosen him for Sparta and the Spartans is because he’s the first surviving author who describes the Spartans for us. He doesn’t just talk about them in the Persian Wars, he actually introduces us to the Spartans and tells us about their practices, the different ways their society works and its historical origins. He travelled to Sparta, as well, probably around 450 BC, which makes him quite special for us as a primary source. That’s a generation after the Battle of Thermopylae, but he talked to people who were around at the time and, obviously, when it comes to the Spartans, the first thing anyone really thinks of is the Battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus is our first proper narrative account of the Battle of Thermopylae. His vision of the Spartans is very much of that austere, militarized society that has made its way into popular culture. He’s the one who gives us that wonderful line, that when the Spartans were told there were so many Persian archers that the sky would go dark Dienekes said, ‘Good, we’ll fight in the shade’. There are a lot of other wonderful one-liners from Spartans, illustrating their blunt dislike of foreigners, their pushy women and their strange practices. That’s all quite prominent in Herodotus’s account of the Spartans. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He’s a wonderful source for Sparta because he talks about the Spartans when he’s just talking about events in Sparta itself and, as well as the Battle of Thermopylae, he also describes the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea, the following summer, when they defeat the Persians. There are a lot of snippets about Sparta in Herodotus’s account. Yes. Thermopylae was fought by the Spartans plus the Peloponnesian and some Central Greeks as well. The Athenians were, at that stage, occupied with the fleet at the Battle of Artemisium, which popular culture versions of the story tend to leave out. There are a lot of interesting exchanges between the Spartans and the Athenians in Herodotus’s account. In the summer after the Athenian-led naval victory at Salamis, which was a few months after the Battle of Thermopylae, the Athenians send an embassy to Sparta saying, ‘You’re going to come and lead us to war against the Persians now, aren’t you?’ And the Spartans are spectacularly rude to them, to the point where the Athenians started to really get unhappy with them. And then, finally, the Spartans get their act together and send out a massive army, but they do so in a peculiarly secret way: they send 40,000 men out after dark. And then, when the Athenian ambassador makes one last attempt to encourage the Spartans to fight and lead them in the war, they say, ‘Our army’s already gone, as far as we know’, and the Athenians are left completely confused by this reply. Herodotus gives us a lot of messages about the weirdness of the Spartans and the tension of their relationship with the Athenians, even though they are allies against the Persians. There is a sense that the Spartans are being very self-interested. It was part of the deal that the Spartans were chosen by the rest of the Greeks to be the leaders on land and sea. So, even though the Athenians effectively won the Battle of Salamis at sea, there was a Spartan admiral in overall command of the fleet. Herodotus says the other Greeks refused to serve under Athenian leadership, which is an interesting statement. Not an Athenian, but he spent time in Athens and knew Athens well. There is a scholarly line of thought that Herodotus’s story of the Persian Wars is quite Athenian-leaning. For instance, he tells dodgy stories about the Corinthians at the Battle of Salamis—that there was scuttlebutt, according to the Athenians, that the Corinthians ran away. Herodotus says that no one else agrees with the story and it’s not true, but he still tells it. Herodotus tells us a series of stories about Leonidas’s wife, Gorgo, and how she’s politically active, even when she’s only eight or nine years old, advising her father, King Cleomenes—Leonidas’s half-brother whom Leonidas succeeded when Cleomenes went mad. There’s one episode where a Greek from Asia Minor goes to Sparta to ask for help against the Persians. Once he realizes how far Persia is away from Sparta, Cleomenes is not interested. The next day the same man comes back as a suppliant and says, ‘Can you get rid of your daughter, I want to talk to you properly’. Cleomenes says, ‘No’, and leaves his eight or nine-year-old daughter there. The Greek from Asia Minor starts trying to bribe Cleomenes and keeps offering him larger and larger sums of money until Gorgo says, ‘Daddy, get rid of this foreigner. He’s going to corrupt you.’ Herodotus says that Cleomenes was delighted with her response and then ran out of the room. So Gorgo is quite prominent in Herodotus’s account, and at least one modern scholar suggests that Gorgo might have been one of the lost sources for Sparta because he’s got so many Gorgo stories. She would have been alive in Sparta when he visited the city. It would be nice if that was the case, but I wouldn’t want to stake my reputation on it. He doesn’t describe it in a way that we’d like him to describe it. Thucydides describes it as unimpressive physically, but Herodotus doesn’t go into those sorts of details. He’s more focused on telling you about what’s going on in Sparta and who talks to who—that kind of thing. He doesn’t even say he saw the monument with the names of the 300 on it. He says he learned their names and a later travel writer says that the Spartans had a monument set up with the names of the 300 on it. So it would make sense that that’s what Herodotus saw, but he doesn’t say, ‘I stood there and looked at the monument’. He’s a bit vague on some of those details. Yes. Maybe there wasn’t much to see."

"In some ways, you could look at these two books as a prequel and a sequel to Thucydides’ history. Herodotus was a historian who was writing a couple of decades earlier. We’re not quite sure about his dates, but he seems to have known how the first phase of the Peloponnesian War turned out. So maybe he was working until at least 421 or so. The main subject of his Histories is the Persian invasion of Greece, but he does a lot more than just write about the Greco-Persian wars. He’s very interested in ethnography and documenting the specificities of different cultures beyond Greece—through the ancient Near East and into Egypt. He provides a much more textured, cultural lay of the land than Thucydides does, because Thucydides is not so interested in the specificities of different cultures. But Herodotus, through his narrative of what happens with the Persian Wars, really lays out what then goes on to become the Athenian justification for their control of the Delian League and therefore the Athenian Empire. The Delian League is formed as an alliance to keep Persia at bay and this is what puts Athens in a position to be in charge. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the first book of his history, Thucydides picks that up and shows how that position that Athens had, largely through the Athenians’ own behaviour, went on to breed a huge amount of resentment amongst the people who were allies of Athens and throughout Greece in general. So I chose Herodotus because, on the one hand, he provides really important background. On the other hand, I think it’s interesting, as with Stuttard and Azoulay, to see the contrasting methodologies. With Herodotus and Thucydides, you see two nearly contemporary historians with very different approaches to history writing. I think whichever of the two you’re taken a really deep dive into becomes your favourite at that time. They work in such different veins. I find them both extremely compelling in different ways. If you trace the role of Athens, in the beginning, when the Persian king finds out that the Athenians have been involved in a revolt, he says, ‘Who are you talking about? I’ve never heard of them.’ So it starts out from this place where the Athenians are this tiny dot in the background. Then, as the narrative proceeds over the nine books, they come to completely dominate. In Herodotus’ time, they have come out of nowhere. Thucydides covers, very briefly in Book I, from the end of the Persian Wars to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. He really sees himself as doing some excavation—in fact that part of his history is called the ‘Archaeology.’ It’s this deep excavation of the forces that eventually led to the breakout of the biggest war that Greece had ever seen, which he locates in this resentment that the other Greeks—and particularly the Spartans, as the head of the Peloponnesian League—felt at Athens’s rise to power after the Persian Wars had ended. So he catches you up in Book I and then we’re off and running through the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides had meant to cover the entire Peloponnesian War and he seems to know how it turned out—which is why we usually place his death around 400—but the narrative breaks off in the year 411. He clearly wasn’t able to finish his work. There are several questions about the extent to which the work was dynamic, in that he was initially writing by marking out annalistically what had happened and then going back and inserting speeches. Some people, even in Antiquity, thought that’s maybe why it’s a little bit speech heavy towards the beginning of the work, because he had gone back and was inserting them. But it does break off in 411. Athens had suffered because of this disastrous Sicilian Expedition, as we call it, because we’re thinking of it from the Athenian perspective. The Athenian invasion of Sicily, from 415 to 413, went completely and terribly wrong for them. After that, the Peloponnesian War picks up again, with direct conflict between Athens and Sparta. People have realized that Athens is in this weakened situation and alliances with Sparta start intensifying. You get Persian support against Athens. It’s really all unravelling."

"This is the point. The fact that the father of history was, in a way, a historian of the present, of very recent times. He is the father of us all. I read it when I was at school and he’s really the first one who goes around with his eyes and ears and notebook open, recording all these fantastic stories and trying to put it all together to work out what happened and why. Then, famously, he says: ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them.’ He is the first person who does this business of saying, ‘Well this is what the Persians say about it and this is what the Greeks say about it, so let’s try and work out what’s the truth in between.’ I think they could expect to learn a lot about the ancient world, the Greeks and, to a lesser extent, the Persians, but they could also learn a fair amount about how history happens – the interplay of individuals, personalities and larger forces like economics, geography, technology and, of course, chance. It’s all there in Herodotus, along, it has to be said, with a lot of fantastical details, like ants the size of dogs, flying snakes and stuff like that. It’s also a lot of fun and there’s vigour in the prose. Well, as I say, I think the passage where he is weighing up the Greek and Persian accounts for the origins of what the Greeks call the Persian Wars, that really is what we are still doing 2,500 years later."