IDS 118           INTRO TO GREEK LITERATURE

HERODOTUS: Some introductory remarks

Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, on the southern fringe of Ionia some years before Xerxes’ invasion of Greece.  As a boy, he must have seen the queen of Halicarnassus, Artemisia lead her fleet to join the invasion force.  As a young man, he joined the unsuccessful uprising against the tyrant Lygdamis, Artemisia’ grandson.  After the failure of the uprising, he went into exile in Samos.  From there he embarked on his travels, which eventually took him around most of the known world.  He visited Lydia, including Sardis, and Syria, from where he reached the Euphrates and sailed down the river to Babylon.  From Babylon he went on to the Persian capital of Susa.  In the north, he sailed right around the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus), staying some time at Olbia at the mouth of the Dnieper (Borysthenes) and traveled up the river into the wild interior of Scythia.  In the south, he visited Egypt twice, staying for several months, and sailed up the Nile as far as Elephantine.  In the west he knew Sicily and south Italy.  Whether he traveled as a merchant or, as Solon, simply for sightseeing, he continually amassed information, seeing and listening, gathering oral tradition, and studying records and monuments, all of which he was to use in his history.

During this period he settled in Athens.  He became friends with Sophocles, who wrote an ode to him when he left Athens to join the panhellenic colony of Thurii in south Italy (443 BCE).  Thurii became his home thereafter, though he continued to travel and returned to Athens to give recitations of his history in the 430's.  He lived through the first years of the Peloponnesian War, and his history must have been published before 425 BCD, when Aristophanes parodies its introduction in the Acharnians.

Herodotus has rightly been called the “father of history”.  He had no predecessor except Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500 BCE), who wrote a description of the earth in two books: one on Asia, the other on Europe.  Herodotus knew this work and refers to it twice, when he disagrees with Hecataeus’ statements.  It is hard for us, with books and libraries at hand, to imagine the difficulties that confronted a man who set out to write a history of events that took place a generation or more earlier.  The only written sources he could have consulted were local records, e.g., he must have had access to some Persian records: temple lists and oracles and some official documents, such as the Persian army list.  Otherwise he had to rely entirely on what he saw on his travels and what he heard from the people he met.  He was a man of infinite curiosity with an unflagging interest in the beliefs and customs of foreign peoples.  Free from usual Greek prejudice, he listened to what strangers had to tell him, and he could never resist passing on a good story.  Not that he believes all that he was told.  He had a healthy scepticism: “I am obliged to report what people say, but I feel no obligation to believe it always; this principle applies to my whole history” (7.152).

Herodotus called his work the Historia, which means in Greek “investigation”.  Until his time the legends of poetry had been accepted as true accounts of the past.  He set out to distinguish fact from legend, to write an account based on direct observation and evidence.  The sources he used, to be sure, were not all reliable, but he usually warns his reader when he was passing along doubtful information.  The major portion of the Historia is a survey of Herodotus’ world: political and military affairs, social customs, religious beliefs, and leading personalities.  We owe much of our knowledge of the early history of Greece and the Persian Empire to Herodotus.  In the final portion of his work he tells the story of the Persian Wars in a manner sympathetic to both Persian and Greeks, though presenting it as a dramatic contest between slavery and freedom.

Herodotus tells us, in his introduction, that “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds - some displayed by Greeks, some by Barbarians - may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with each other”.  Internal evidence demonstrates that this was not the original intent of the text.  The latter story of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (Books 7 - 9) was in all probability, the original text.  This account of the invasion represents a continuous narrative not interrupted by investigations of custom and social practices found in the earlier portion of the whole text.  Likewise, it would also appear from the structure of the earlier portions of the narrative, that Herodotus combined a separate work: one based on his observations of the customs of non-Greeks, into the narrative structure of the earlier accounts of the Wars between the Greeks and the Persians.  One might wonder why he chose to include these earlier accounts into the seemingly complete narrative of Xerxes’ invasion?  I suggest that he is influenced by the science of his time, namely the pre-Socratic interest in origins.  Notice that the accounts of Cyrus and Darius explain, to some extent, the origin of Xerxes’ invasion.  Also, Herodotus is keen to notice the function of custom or nomos to account for why people do the things that they do.  Also, Herodotus noticed the role of religion and built into the fabric of his narrative, he demonstrates how the will of the gods affects humanity.  The idea of nemesis plays an important function within the overall narrative structure.  Hybris or arrogance, or overwhelming pride, also serves as a narrative device to structure the explanations of why different events took place.  The Croesus story is a good example of both in action.

Several recent studies have focused on aspects of these elements found in Herodotus.  Rosaria Munson, in Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus, focuses on examining the narrative role of the “tales of wonder” to account for some of the historical causes.  Munson does a good job in highlighting the fact that Greek narratives always have a moral dimension, and these tales of wonder were useful devices to illustrate the overarching moral dimension.

Robert Drews, in The Greek Accounts of Eastern History, focuses on Herodotus’ use of oral reports as a source of information for distant lands.  He questions the legitimacy of Herodotus’ investigations as a faithful report of other lands.  One thing to notice in this connection, Herodotus may have been influenced by near Eastern models.  If one looks at the Hebrew Bible, one finds an interesting parallel to Herodotus.  In the early books of the Hebrew Bible, we find preserved in writing, differing accounts of events.  Explanations of these differing accounts have been offered, the best of which is that what the scribes attempted to do was to preserve all of the variations of the stories.  Something similar is going on in the Herodotus narrative.  Even if Herodotus does not believe some of these tales, he is preserving them.