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New
York Review The
Great Marathon Man By
Peter Green The
Landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited
by Robert B. Strassler, translated from the Greek
by Andrea L. Purvis, with an introduction by Rosalind Thomas Pantheon, 953 pp., $45.00 A
Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV by
David Asheri, Alan Lloyd, and Aldo Corcella, edited by Oswyn
Murray and Alfonso Moreno, with a contribution by Maria Brosius Oxford University Press, 721 pp.,
$320.00 1. When Herodotus was giving a public
reading to an Athenian audience from his work-in-progress, one late source
relates, among those present, brought along by his father Olorus,
was the adolescent Thucydides. Herodotus'
performance allegedly reduced the boy to tears, and the speaker, duly
flattered, declared: "Olorus, your son has a
natural love of learning." This improving, but almost certainly
fictional, anecdote invites a cynical interpretation. Its author, I
suspect—knowing what lay ahead for Thucydides, and
his influence on posterity—saw those tears as precipitated by furious
competitiveness rather than admiration. The young paragon was all set, first
to learn everything he could, without acknowledgment, from his famous
predecessor, and then to work out a methodology that would bury him without
trace as a gullible and frivolous popularizer. Confronted by a broadminded,
witty, and tolerant cosmopolitan, for whom the infinite varieties of human
custom offered a source of inexhaustible fascination, Thucydides presented
himself as a humorless nationalist, an intellectual given to political
aphorisms and abstract generalizations. Herodotus in his Histories
treated the international conflict of the Persian Wars between 490 and 479
BCE as a turning point in Greek history, in fact devoting most of his vast
text to reconstructing the war itself and the events leading up to it, all
prefaced by lengthy ethnographic descriptions of the numerous, and far-flung,
provinces of the Persian empire that it involved. About the Scythians, for
example, he said that they take the seeds of...cannabis, creep [into a
tent-like structure], and throw the seeds onto the blazing-hot stones within.
When the seeds hit the stones, they produce smoke and give off a vapor such
as no steam bath in Hellas could surpass. The Scythians howl, awed and elated
by the vapor. This takes the place of a bath for them, since they do not use
any water at all to wash their bodies. Archaeology confirms this account
in detail. Thus for Thucydides, Herodotus'
reconstruction of the Persian Wars posed a serious challenge: it meant
demonstrating that the falling out between two local city-states, Athens and
Sparta, must be shown to eclipse both the great Greco-Persian conflict and,
for good measure, the Trojan War that had preceded it. The cleverest intellectual move
Thucydides made was the severe limiting of what he deemed permissible as
elements of historiography, on the grounds that everything else outside this
canon was not only irrelevant but unserious. Out went personal
anecdotes, most foreign ethnography, and domestic or private motivation: out,
above all, went anything to do with women. Religion was women's business, and mostly nonsense anyway, so that could be
discarded too. The essence of history was war and politics, as conducted by
men in authority. His exclusive privileging of the male political
association, in its most public form, became accepted, and historians (being
political males themselves) were not inclined to argue. His revisionism not
only won out at the time, but established the basic principles of
historiography for over two millennia. During the past half-century,
however, Thucydides' almost superhuman reputation has come under severe
critical scrutiny, while Herodotus' stock has correspondingly risen—a fact to
which Robert Strassler's new Landmark volume
of translation and commentary bears substantial witness. The change does
little more than belatedly reflect a fundamental revolution in Western
cultural values that has taken place during the last two hundred years.
Greece, in particular the Athenian democratic ideal, only came to be
privileged over Rome[1] after the
Greek, French, and American revolutions gave imperialism a decidedly shopworn
look. Thucydides' main virtue for the seventeenth-century monarchist Thomas
Hobbes had been that "he made me realize how silly is
democracy." (This is hardly surprising. For true democracy
Thucydides had no more time than did that aristocratic intellectual Plato; he
welcomed the authoritarianism implicit in Pericles' de facto rule as first
citizen, and his favorite acknowledged form of government was in fact a
limited oligarchy.) The swing toward idealistic republicanism was further
developed in the English-speaking world[2] by the banker
George Grote's unprecedentedly liberal History of Greece, published in
twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, which praised not only democracy but
the Sophists as the true heralds of freedom. This was the most radical change
in Western assumptions about the ancient world since the Renaissance, and it
prepared the ground for many other changes. Alexander the Great, for example,
hitherto looked up to as the imperialist conqueror par excellence, now had to
have his career of conquest explained and justified as a crusade designed to
bring Hellenic culture to the benighted East (Victorian missionary work in
Africa and Polynesia helped to support this view of him). The century-long
struggle by feminists from the suffragette movement onward meant that
eventually their automatic exclusion from the Thucydidean
historiographical canon would be seriously
questioned. Later still, first post-colonialism and then globalization meant
a vast change—not always appreciated for what it was, or even, sometimes,
noticed—in assumptions made about both other nations and one's own when
studying the historical evolution of ancient society. That current trends
in historiography echo, to a quite remarkable extent, the methods and
assumptions of Herodotus is undeniable. The widespread use of social and
ethnographic anthropology as an investigative tool is only the most obvious
instance. Herodotus' observations about different customs and cultures—which
in fact take up the greater part of the first half of the Histories,
as he surveyed the various regions of the Persian empire—make him a
groundbreaking anthropologist. Personal motivation (as opposed to abstract
trends) and the influence of women in public affairs are very much back in
the picture. The new understanding of oral transmission provides a satisfying
answer to those who dismissed Herodotean anecdotes
as mere crowd-pleasing digressions, and sheds fresh light on his careful
evidential distinction between seeing (opsis)
and hearsay (akoê). Many of the Persians,
despite belonging to the Barbarian Other, come off with honor and dignity in
his pages, even during the final narrative of Xerxes' invasion. Such
insatiable and open-minded curiosity about the unfamiliar, including one's (undemonized) enemies, got him labeled philobarbaros
by Plutarch, but today counts strongly in his favor.[3] Against these inroads Thucydideans have maintained a vigorous (and often
contemptuous) defense. The positivist historians of the nineteenth century
stressed Thucydides' seriousness, his scientific objectivity, his advanced
handling of evidence. (That he was exiled for military incompetence, did a
hatchet job on the man responsible, and praised as virtually unbeatable the
Spartan general to whom he had lost the key city of Amphipolis
bothered them not at all.) Generals and statesmen loved him: the world he drew
was theirs, an exclusive power-brokers' club. It is
no accident that even today Thucydides turns up as a guiding spirit in
military academies, neocon think tanks, and the
writings of men like Henry Kissinger; whereas Herodotus has been the choice
of imaginative novelists (Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and
the film based on it, boosted the sale of the Histories to a wholly
unforeseen degree) and—as food for a starved soul—of an equally imaginative
foreign correspondent from Iron Curtain Poland, Ryszard
Kapuscinski. 2. Though he often, and innovatively,
writes in the first person when voicing opinions, we know frustratingly
little about Herodotus himself, and much of what we do know has to be deduced
from his own work. His birth was dated by one ancient source to 484/3, and
this—though probably arrived at by mere guesswork—seems about right. He was a
native of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), on the Turkish coast south of Miletus, in what then was
Caria. His parents were prominent citizens, but their names—Lyxes and Dryo (or Rhoia)—suggest Carian, rather
than Ionian, ancestry, as does that of his uncle (or possibly cousin) Panyassis, a soothsayer and epic poet. Halicarnassus,
like its most famous son, was in every sense cosmopolitan: a largely Greek city,
part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, and ruled on
Persia's behalf by a Carian dynast named Lygdamis, grandson of the warrior queen Artemisia who
accompanied Xerxes during his great invasion, and of whom Herodotus gives us
an unforgettable portrait. Brought up in this busy trading
port, with access to the age-old caravan routes that ran eastward from Sardis
to the Persian capital of Susa, Herodotus, not surprisingly, displays a sharp
interest throughout the Histories in the practical details of commerce.
In this he differs sharply from upper-class Athenians, who regarded business
and economics as socially beneath them, something best left to money-grubbing
resident aliens. On his own account he traveled widely—in Greece, Egypt,
Phoenicia, Asia Minor, to Scythia and the Black Sea region—and may have paid
his way as a merchant. But he was also clearly imbued
with the spirit of freedom (eleutheria) so prominent as a leitmotif throughout his work, and seen
by him as the answer to tyranny. He and Panyassis both
fought against Lygdamis' rule: Panyassis
was killed, Herodotus exiled (perhaps more than once). He went to Samos, then
Athens, and in about 440 to the new international colony of Thurii in south Italy. In fact, like Thucydides, like
Polybius, he spent much of his life in exile—to the great benefit of his
magnum opus. As David Asheri rightly stresses in A
Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV, "Life in exile broadens
horizons, limits parochialism, furthers skepticism
and impartiality." References in Herodotus' work to early incidents in
the Peloponnesian War, principally between Athens and Sparta, which broke out
in 431, suggest that he was alive perhaps until 425. Thurii
showed his tomb in the agora, but both Athens and Pella in Macedonia also
claimed to have his body. Other facts are scarce. The Histories
was in all likelihood his only book, and he made a good living giving public
readings from it (in lengthy sessions, it would seem: "the shadow of
Herodotus" became a popular phrase for lecturers who overran their
time). His final departure from Halicarnassus, according to one account, was
caused (after Lygdamis' removal) by his
unpopularity among his fellow citizens. After his death, however, his
birthplace took great pride in him: one recently discovered inscription there
lauds him, accurately, as "the prose Homer." In Athens he is said
to have been a good friend of Sophocles, and this is plausible. A surviving
portrait-bust shows him with a forked beard, and there is no reason for the
sculptor to have invented such a detail. We know nothing about his private
life, even whether he was married: his marked literary interest in women and
sexual oddities—such as Nasomonean brides having intercourse
with the wedding guests—gives away nothing on that score. In ways his great
work is as enigmatic as its author. Its first four books deal with the growth
and expansion of Achaemenid Persia, founded by
Cyrus the Great in the mid-sixth century BCE, and contain ethnographic
accounts—some, in particular that on Egypt, extremely long and detailed—of
the numerous peoples either absorbed piecemeal or, like the Egyptians,
reluctantly dragooned, into the Persian empire, as well as those others
brought (like Athens and Sparta) into uneasy contact with it. They also
contain strategically placed digressions on such things as Solonian wisdom, the genesis of Athenian democracy, and
the dynastic feuding between early Spartan kings. The last four books offer a well-planned
narrative of Xerxes' great invasion and ultimate defeat. Book 5, linking the
two groups, provides a cobbled transition between broad survey and military
chronicle. The enigma lies in the extraordinary fact that, to the best of our
knowledge, nothing quite like the Histories had ever been attempted
before. It is significant that the division into nine books (each named after
a Muse) was not the work of Herodotus himself, but a desperate attempt by
Hellenistic scholars to bring some visible external order to a magnum opus
about twice the length of Homer's Iliad. We know, more or less, what models
Herodotus had to help him. His greatest debt was undoubtedly to Homer, who
showed him how to manage characterization, speeches, the manipulation of time
sequences, and vivid description, and also gave him his first great theme,
that of recording great deeds for posterity. Early geographers such as Hecataeus (circa 550–circa 475) had already begun to
experiment with ethnography. Herodotus was also familiar with the work of the
Milesian natural philosophers, who made him
inquisitive about aitiai, causes, responsibilities: not only what, for instance, produced
the Nile flood, but also, crucially, and his second great theme, why and how
Greeks and Persians came to fight each other. Hippocratic physicians alerted
him to the social effects of climate and environmentalism: tough lands breed
tough men, a lesson which (delivered by Cyrus the Great) is the last thought
Herodotus leaves us with. A vigorous oral tradition, maintained by Near
Eastern as well as Greek logopoioi (storymakers), was something he had grown up with, and
accounts for the polished elegance of his countless illustrative anecdotes
and travelers' tales. Yet no one before Herodotus had
ever taken all these scattered elements and combined them into a
near-seamless and subtly structured whole, let alone on so vast a scale. The
nearest parallel is, again, Homer, who likewise would seem to have made the
jump from a mass of short epic lays to those large yet unified works the Iliad
and the Odyssey. The sudden extraordinary expansion of structured size
is also manifested in that group of giant Late
Geometric funerary urns from roughly the same period as Homer, that
suddenly emerge—vast, organic, patterned, apparently ex nihilo—after
centuries of more modest-sized run-of-the-mill pots.[4] Herodotus
apparently achieved a similar structural leap into the void. But how? As that great ancient historiographer
Arnaldo Momigliano
assured me (and many other people: it was one of his favorite obiter dicta)
half a century ago, the secrets of Herodotus' workshop are not all out yet.
The biggest one of all, his total, and seemingly instantaneous, mastery of
structural form on an unprecedentedly large scale, probably never will be.
Scholars cannot even agree on the Herodotean
chicken-and-egg question: Did he write the text from start to finish as we
have it (that is, fitting the ethnographies into an overall plan ab initio), or draft the invasion narrative first and
then see how his earlier, and presumably experimental, writings could be
reworked as part of a greater whole? Some odd, and on the face of it
unnecessary, repetitions in the later narrative suggest the second
explanation (further developed by Asheri), yet
could, in the last resort, be no more than symptoms of Herodotus'
fundamentally conversational style: no other ancient author is so clearly
talking to an audience rather than writing for readers. 3. The contrasting yet inseparable
evolution of Herodotean and Thucydidean
historiography,[5] as sketched
above, has had some curious results. The long-persistent Anglo-American
academic bias in favor of Thucydides has in recent years given us two major
commentaries, those of Arnold W. Gomme and Simon Hornblower (the latter still in progress). Herodotus, on
the other hand—so strong was Thucydides' dominant influence—has had, for
almost a century, to make do with the never satisfactory and now badly
antiquated volumes of W.W. How and Joseph Wells.[6] Thus the
appearance, at long last, of a new Herodotean commentary
that in weight, thoroughness, and professional expertise yields nothing to
its Thucydidean rivals is an event to be warmly
welcomed as something long overdue and a major advance in Herodotean
studies. At the same time its genesis is
revealing. The new Commentary in fact started life not, as would have
been desirable, as the work of a historian with a single unifying vision, but
as the four first volumes of a multi-authored Italian series published by Mondadori between 1988 and 1993, and thus familiar to
scholars for over a decade. Of this collective project Book VII—including the
famous defense of the pass at Thermopylae by King Leonidas
of Sparta and his three hundred picked warriors (an episode recently
popularized, and travestied, by the movie 300)—has yet to appear,
while some of its later volumes were, to put it politely, of less than
stellar quality. Uneven scholarship and no overall vision: not, on the face
of it, an encouraging prospect. And was there really no Anglophone classicist
able and willing to do for Herodotus what had already been done so well for
Thucydides by Gomme and Hornblower?
Seemingly not. There were, however, powerful
mitigating circumstances. Book II, the Egyptian digression, went to Alan
Lloyd, an Egyptologist as well as a classicist, who had already produced a
masterly separate edition of it.[7] Above all,
Books I and III were in the hands of David Asheri,
a first-class Israeli Herodotean, who as overall
editor of the project also contributed a lengthy, and brilliant, introductory
essay on Herodotus and his work. The original Italian version of this
essay—heavily thumbed and annotated in my copy—has now been carefully updated
and elegantly translated. For the general reader it, and the excellent
introductions to all four individual books, remain
the most valuable and accessible matter in an advanced commentary directed
otherwise, more or less exclusively, to professional ancient historians. And there is one most welcome
surprise, briefly mentioned by Oswyn Murray in his
editorial memoir of Asheri. Before his death Asheri had, it seems, completed commentaries on Books
VIII and IX, and these—replacing two of the least satisfactory contributions
to the Italian series—will appear in the concluding volume of this two-volume
commentary. Thus Asheri will be, in effect,
directly responsible for almost half of the English-language version, as well
as overseeing the whole. As a unifying factor this is excellent news. Scrupulous revision by
contributors, a team of bilingual translators, watchful editing throughout,
and plain but elegant production make this solid volume a pleasure to handle
as well as a cornucopia of useful and up-to-date interpretative scholarship.
Topics well explored include (to take a random selection) the details of King
Croesus of Lydia's sumptuous offerings at Delphi—including a statue of a lion
made of refined gold, and weighing nearly six hundred pounds); the myth of
archaic Sparta's philistine isolationism; the reigns of both Medes and
Persians; Herodotus' apparent antipathy to the Ionians, and his odd blend of
hard factual observation and wild fantasy in describing Egypt. Also
perceptively examined are Herodotus' didactic reflections on truth and falsehood
(including his comments on an alleged Persian debate on forms of government)
in Book III; and the exploration of the previously unknown Scythian art and
culture that dominates Book IV (though lacking, alas, the gorgeous color
plates of Scythian gold artwork from the St. Petersburg Hermitage that was
such a striking feature of the original Italian volume). Only two things give one pause.
The first is the truly horrendous price, which will largely restrict this
commentary, despite its great importance, to major university libraries. The
second is the editorial decision "that we should not interfere in any
way with the views of the original authors, or seek to add anything to their
commentaries." This means that the cut-off date for Asheri
is 2000, the year of his death: to look no further, his forthcoming work in
the second volume of the Commentary will not, therefore, benefit from
the admirable and innovative edition of Book IX published a couple of years
later by Michael Flower and John Marincola.[8]
Here is a policy that clearly needs rethinking. In any case, the new material,
from many countries and disciplines, that—combined
with the ongoing historiographical reassessment of
Herodotus—gives this long-awaited commentary its peculiar value is not going
to reach most people directly, but by the usual process of filtering and
reduction, in the first instance via university teaching. Courses in
classical civilization, popular histories (often with inflated titles)
written by experts but designed for the general reader,[9]
TV programs, encyclopedia entries, Web sites, movies: all speed (and dilute,
and distort, and oversimplify) the dissemination of original research.
Sometimes this process can be shortened and safeguarded by a specialist
assuming both roles: Alan Lloyd, the classicist-cum-Egyptologist responsible
for Book II of Herodotus in the Commentary, was also tapped to write
the relevant appendix—equally cutting-edge, but far clearer, and far punchier
in its judgments—in Robert B. Strassler's Landmark
Herodotus, which presents a new translation by Andrea Purvis, plus
running notes, topical appendices, and a plethora of maps. In general, however, knowledge
thus spread only catches on slowly. It is still going to take a lot of work
to dislodge the public notion that the Father of History was, if not quite
the Father of Lies, at any rate a simple-minded traditional storyteller,
imaginative but credulous, who needed the stern corrections of Thucydides to
put him straight. 4. Translations of Herodotus,
paradoxically, are as plentiful as commentaries are scarce. Counting the new
version made by Purvis for the Landmark series, there are no less than
eight English-language competitors currently in print, three Victorian
(ranging in date from 1847 to 1889), and four made in the last half-century,
with one, the Loeb bilingual,[10] as a kind of
transitional hybrid between them. As Strassler sees
clearly, an accurate and responsible translation is the general reader's
prime requirement. Yet current fashions, and the wish to neither puzzle nor
offend the reader, will always leave their mark. The Victorian versions of
Herodotus, besides converting Greek deities into their nearest Roman
equivalent—one Renaissance habit that died hard—omitted or bowdlerized any
passage (and Herodotus has quite a few of these) that could conceivably be
regarded as indelicate. Their modern successors, while
uninhibited about sexual matters, have become racially squeamish
("barbarians" tend to appear as "foreigners," for which
there's a perfectly good Greek word had Herodotus wished to use it). Worse,
their concern for readers accustomed to short Dick-and-Jane sentences and
political cliché has often led them to chop up Herodotus' long, marvelously
organized paratactic clauses, scramble his sentences, omit his oral-style repetitions
altogether, pepper his text with unmarked explanatory glosses, and turn his
concrete phraseology into a series of bland bureaucratic abstractions. The
result at times has been paraphrase rather than translation. Andrea Purvis was well aware of these
hazards while making her new version ("I have tried to remain faithful
to the text in sense, tone, and style while striving for clarity," she
writes), and the result comes appreciably closer to Herodotus than do the
translations of her most recent rivals. It might have come closer still had
it not been for Robert Strassler's editorial
concern that the text should be "comprehensible to the modern
reader," even if that meant losing some fidelity (and, I suspect, Herodotean style). Purvis's prose is flat and
unadventurous, at times (when grappling with Herodotus' more idiosyncratic
usages) a little awkward; but for the narrative of the Persian invasion of
Greece in particular her version comes off at least as well as anything on
the market. The important question raised, but
not fully answered, by The Landmark Herodotus is, of course, just what
aids in understanding the Histories are most important for that
not-quite-mythic figure, the intelligent—but Greekless
and largely ahistorical—general reader.[11]
The first essential requirement, something handy, portable, and reasonably
cheap, this Landmark volume disregards on principle. Strassler complains vigorously about the lack, in rival
translations, of full background information, adequate maps, informative
appendices, complete indexes, and accurate chronologies. Apart from the
chronologies (the months, weeks, even days of Xerxes' invasion campaign in
480 are still fiercely debated by scholars: Strassler
seems to think, by and large, that getting the right year is enough), to make
good the other deficiencies—sometimes, as in the case of the maps, with
overkill seemingly aimed at the geographically illiterate—has resulted in a
weighty volume of nearly a thousand large pages. Paradoxically, these pages have
two-inch-wide outer margins, empty except for a brief précis of each numbered
paragraph of Herodotus' text as it comes: ideal for a student aiming to skim
the contents without actually reading the text, but otherwise merely taking
up space better allocated to the all-too-brief running notes crammed in at
the bottom of each page. An extraordinarily high percentage of even this
limited space is devoted to map references. The maps, no less than 127 of
them, and to a great degree repetitive, are "designed to support every
episode of the narrative." This they do, but only in the oddly limited
sense of telling you roughly where each episode took place. None of them provide
battle plans, or even large-scale surveys, for the major engagements
(Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, or Mycale), though Marathon and
Salamis do at least get (unannotated) aerial
photographs. Nor, even more surprisingly, are these battles, the core and
center of the Greco-Persian Wars, directly analyzed in any of the twenty-one
appendices (though we get general pieces on hoplite and trireme warfare, the
Persian army, Xerxes' logistics, and the Ionian Revolt). To do so would
demand a discussion of non-Herodotean sources (most
importantly Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus), and we aren't given that either. These are puzzling omissions. From
years of reading the text with students, I know, all too well, that among the
biggest problems confronting a first-time explorer of Herodotus is the
difficulty of getting a clear picture of the strategy and tactics involved in
each engagement, and the same is almost certainly true, a fortiori, for the
general reader. Here Michael A. Flower and John Marincola,
in their text, noted in footnote 6, score heavily: they know exactly what the
beginner wants, and needs, to know, from battlefield topography to Herodotus'
life (a topic barely touched on by Rosalind Thomas in her otherwise
illuminating Landmark introduction). Their informative little edition
also shows up a certain high-level indifference in David Asheri's
Commentary to explication of basic matters. Rather too often for
comfort, when reading the latter, I found myself recalling A.E. Housman's
acerbic put-down of one unfortunate professor: that one turned to his
commentary for many things, but not for help in trouble. The neophyte reader will certainly
get a very great deal, even allowing for its gaps, from The Landmark
Herodotus: an up-to-date translation, a superb analytic index, several
background essays by experts (on Egypt, Sparta, Scythia, and the Black Sea
especially) that are the last word on current scholarship, intelligent
illustrations geared to the text, running lessons in Mediterranean geography,
occasional useful notes, and a handy glossary. But it is a volume to consult,
in study or library, rather than carry around; the latter purpose is still
best served—faute de mieux,
and despite its highly un-Herodotean translation—by
John Marincola's new 2003 annotated edition of the
translation published by Aubrey de Sélincourt in
1954.[12] So there
remains a help-in-trouble gap to be filled, for students and common readers
alike—and, of course, Herodotus' workshop still has secrets in plenty waiting
to be solved. His rehabilitation has only deepened the enigma. Notes [1] See the excellent account by Frank M. Turner in The
Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (Yale University Press, 1981),
chapter 5, pp. 187–263. [2] Conservative Germans, interested in creating a united
Germany from a congeries of small quarreling states, understandably found the
authoritarian policies of Philip and Alexander of Macedon more to their
taste. [3] See, e.g., Alan Griffiths and Sara Forsdyke
in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, edited by C. Dewald and J. Marincola
(Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 134, 225. [4] The comparison is tellingly developed, in detail, by
Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Harvard University
Press, 1958), chapter 5, "Homer and Geometric Art," pp. 87–101.
These urns today are in the Kerameikos and National
Museums in Athens. They are well illustrated in M. Hirmer
and P.E. Aris, A History of Greek Vase Painting
(Thames and Hudson, 1962), figs. I, 4, 9. [5] One ancient sculptor symbolized the relationship neatly
by means of a double bust (now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples, inv. 6239), with the two historians
joined back to back, indissolubly linked yet facing in opposite directions:
see G.M.A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks, revised edition by
R.R.R. Smith (Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 132–133 and 214, with
figs. 94 and 176. [6] A.W. Gomme, A Historical
Commentary on Thucydides, five volumes (Volumes 4–5 by K.J. Dover and A. Andrewes) (Oxford University Press, 1945–1981); Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, three
volumes (Oxford University Press, 1991–); W.W. How and J. Wells, A
Commentary on Herodotus, two volumes (Oxford University Press, 1912). [7] Alan B. Lloyd, Herodotus Book II: Introduction and
Commentary, three volumes (E.J. Brill, 1975–1988). [8] Michael A. Flower and John Marincola,
Herodotus Histories Book IX (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Another obvious candidate is the massive (716 pp.) Historical Commentary
on Herodotus Book 6 (Brill, 2005) by Lionel Scott. [9] Recent examples in the area of Herodotean
studies are Paul Cartledge's Thermopylae: The
Battle That Changed the World (Macmillan, 2006) and Barry Strauss's The
Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece—and Western
Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 2004). [10] Herodotus, translated by A.D. Godley, four volumes
(Harvard University Press, 1920–1925). [11] What puts a good deal of the Asheri
Commentary beyond the general reader's reach is the assumption of
fluency in Greek and Latin, as well as of familiarity with scholarship in
several modern European languages, and the often arcane periodicals in which
much of that scholarship is contained. [12] Herodotus: The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt (Penguin, 1954); revised edition with
introduction and notes by John Marincola (Penguin,
1996, 2003). There is also Robin Waterfield's
translation (Oxford University Press, 1998), with valuable notes and
introduction by Carolyn Dewald. |