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Books Arms and the Man What
was Herodotus trying to tell us? by
Daniel
Mendelsohn April 28, 2008
In the figure of the Persian king
Xerxes, Herodotus achieved a magisterial portrait of an unstable despot, an
archetype that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since. History—the rational and
methodical study of the human past—was invented by a single man just under
twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was
starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty
condescending about the man who invented it and (we’d joke) his penchant for
flowered Hawaiian shirts. The risible figure in question was
Herodotus, known since Roman times as “the Father of History.” The sobriquet,
conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus’ Histories—a
chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to
479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice
repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented
the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or,
indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the
mid-nineteen-eighties the word “father” seemed to reflect something
hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned
“good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the
Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek
historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens
and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer
of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical,
and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a
liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged
in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to
advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik. Herodotus, by contrast, always
seemed a bit of a sucker. Whatever his desire, stated in his Preface, to
pinpoint the “root cause” of the Persian Wars (the rather abstract word he
uses, aitiē, savors of contemporary science and philosophy), what
you take away from an initial encounter with the Histories is not, to put it
mildly, a strong sense of methodical rigor. With his garrulous first-person
intrusions (“I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an
opinion that will cause offense to many people”), his notorious tendency to
digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail (“And so the Athenians were
the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus”),
his apparently infinite susceptibility to the imaginative flights of tour
guides in locales as distant as Egypt (“Women urinate standing up, men
sitting down”), reading him was like—well, like having an embarrassing parent
along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance
between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old
Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered
polyester shirt. A major theme of the Histories is
the way in which time can effect surprising changes in the fortunes and
reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more appropriate, then, that
Herodotus’ reputation has once again been riding very high. In the academy,
his technique, once derided as haphazard, has earned newfound respect, while
his popularity among ordinary readers will likely get a boost from the
publication of perhaps the most densely annotated, richly illustrated, and
user-friendly edition of his Histories ever to appear: “The Landmark
Herodotus” (Pantheon; $45), edited by Robert B. Strassler and bristling with
appendices, by a phalanx of experts, on everything from the design of
Athenian warships to ancient units of liquid measure. (Readers interested in
throwing a wine tasting à la grecque will be grateful to know that one
amphora was equal to a hundred and forty-four kotyles.) The underlying cause—the aitiē—of
both the scholarly and the popular revival is worth wondering about just now.
It seems that, since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Internet,
the moment has come, once again, for Herodotus’ dazzlingly associative style
and, perhaps even more, for his subject: implacable conflict between East and
West. Modern editors, attracted by the
epic war story, have been as likely as not to call the work “The Persian
Wars,” but Herodotus himself refers to his text simply as the publication of
his historiē—his “research” or “inquiry.” The (to us)
familiar-looking word historiē would to Herodotus’ audience have
had a vaguely clinical air, coming, as it did, from the vocabulary of the
newborn field of natural science. (Not coincidentally, the cradle of this
scientific ferment was Ionia, a swath of Greek communities in coastal Asia
Minor, just to the north of Halicarnassus, the historian’s birthplace.) The
word only came to mean “history” in our sense because of the impact of
Herodotus’ text. The Greek cities of Ionia were
where Herodotus’ war story began, too. These thriving settlements, which
maintained close ties with their mother cities across the Aegean to the west,
began, in the early sixth century B.C., to fall under the dominion of the
rulers of the Asiatic kingdoms to the east; by the middle of the century,
however, those kingdoms were themselves being swallowed up in the seemingly
inexorable westward expansion of Persia, led by the charismatic empire
builder Cyrus the Great. The Histories begins with a tale that illustrates
this process of imperialist digestion—the story of Croesus, the famously
wealthy king of Lydia. For Herodotus, Croesus was a satisfyingly pivotal
figure, “the first barbarian known to us who subjugated and demanded tribute
from some Hellenes” but who nonetheless ended up subjugated himself, blinded
by his success to the dangers around him. (Before the great battle that cost
him his kingdom, he had arrogantly misinterpreted a pronouncement of the
Delphic oracle that should have been a warning: “If you attack Persia, you
will destroy a great empire.” And he did—his own.) The fable-like arc of
Croesus’ story, from a deceptive and short-lived happiness to a tragic fall
arising from smug self-confidence, admirably serves what will turn out to be
Herodotus’ overarching theme: the seemingly inevitable movement from imperial
hubris to catastrophic retribution. The fall of Croesus, in 547 B.C.,
marked the beginning of the absorption of the Ionian Greeks into the Persian
empire. Half a century later, starting in 499, these Greeks began a
succession of open rebellions against their Persian overlords; it was this
“Ionian Revolt” that triggered what we now call the Persian Wars, the Asian
invasions of the Greek mainland in 490 and 480. Some of the rebellious cities
had appealed to Athens and Sparta for military aid, and Athens, at least, had
responded. Herodotus tells us that the Great King Darius was so infuriated by
this that he instructed a servant to repeat to him the injunction “Master,
remember the Athenians!” three times whenever he sat down to dinner.
Contemporary historians see a different, less personal motive at the root of
the war that was to follow: the inevitable, centrifugal logic of imperialist
expansion. Darius’ campaign against the
Greeks, in 490, and, after his death, that of his son Xerxes, in 480-479,
constituted the largest military undertakings in history up to that point. Herodotus’
lavish descriptions of the statistic-boggling preparations—he numbers Xerxes’
fighting force at 2,317,610 men, a figure that includes infantry, marines,
and camel-riders—are among the most memorable passages of his, or any,
history. Like all great storytellers, he takes his sweet time with the
details, letting the dread momentum build as he ticks off each stage of the
invasion: the gathering of the armies, their slow procession across
continents, the rivers drunk dry, the astonishing feats of engineering—bridging
the Hellespont, cutting channels through whole peninsulas—that more than live
up to his promise, in the Preface, to describe erga thōmasta,
“marvellous deeds.” All this, recounted in a tone of epic grandeur that
self-consciously recalls Homer, suggests why most Greek cities, confronted
with the approaching hordes, readily acceded to Darius’ demand for symbolic
tokens of submission—“earth and water.” (In a nice twist, the defiant
Athenians, a great naval power, threw the Persian emissaries into a pit, and
the Spartans, a great land force, threw them down a well—earth and water,
indeed.) And yet, for all their might, both
Persian expeditions came to grief. The first, after a series of military and
natural disasters, was defeated at the Battle of Marathon, where a fabulously
outnumbered coalition of Athenians and Plataeans held the day, losing only a
hundred and ninety-two men to the Persians’ sixty-four hundred. (The
achievement was such that the Greeks, breaking with their tradition of taking
their dead back to their cities, buried them on the battlefield and erected a
grave mound over the spot. It can still be seen today.) Ten years later,
Darius’ son Xerxes returned to Greece, having taken over the preparations for
an even vaster invasion. Against all odds, the scrappy Greek coalition—this
one including ultraconservative Sparta, usually loath to get involved in
Panhellenic doings—managed to resist yet again. It is to this second, far grander
conflict that the most famous Herodotean tales of the Persian Wars belong;
not for nothing do the names Thermopylae and Salamis still mean something
today. In particular, the heroically suicidal stand of the three hundred
Spartans—who, backed by only a couple of thousand allied troops, held the
pass at Thermopylae against tens of thousands of Persians, long enough for
their allies to escape and regroup farther to the south—has continued to
resonate. Partly, this has to do with Herodotus’ vivid description of the
Greeks’ feisty insouciance, a quality that all freedom fighters like to be
able to claim. On hearing that the Persians were so numerous that their
arrows would “blot out the sun,” one Spartan quipped that this was good news,
as it meant that the Greeks would fight in the shade. (“In the shade” is the
motto of an armored division in the present-day Greek Army.) But the persistent appeal of such
scenes, in which the outnumbered Greeks unexpectedly triumph over the masses
of Persian invaders, is ultimately less a matter of storytelling than of
politics. Although Herodotus is unwilling to be anything but neutral on the
relative merits of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy (in a passage known as
the “Debate on Government,” he has critical things to say about all three),
he ultimately structures his presentation of the war as a kind of parable
about the conflict between free Western societies and Eastern despotism. (The
Persians are associated with motifs of lashing, binding, and punishment.)
While he isn’t shy about portraying the shortcomings of the fractious Greek
city-states and their leaders, all of them, from the luxury-loving Ionians to
the dour Spartans, clearly share a desire not to answer to anyone but their
own leaders. Anyone, at any rate, was
preferable to the Persian overlord Xerxes, who in Herodotus’ narrative is the
subject of a magisterial portrait of corrupted power. No one who has read the
Histories is likely to forget the passage describing the impotent rage of
Xerxes when his engineers’ first attempt to create a bridge from Asia to
Europe across the Hellespont was washed away by a storm: after commanding
that the body of water be lashed three hundred times and symbolically
fettered (a pair of shackles was tossed in), he chastised the “bitter water”
for wronging him, and denounced it as “a turbid and briny river.” More
practically, he went on to have the project supervisors beheaded. Herodotus’ Xerxes is, however, a
character of persuasive complexity, the swaggering cruelty alternating with
childish petulance and sudden, sentimental paroxysms of tears: it’s a
personality likely to remind contemporary audiences of a whole panoply of
dangerous dictators, from Nero to Hitler. One of the great, unexpected
moments in the Histories, evoking the emotional finesse of the best fiction,
comes when Xerxes, reviewing the ocean of forces he has assembled for the
invasion, suddenly breaks down, “overcome,” as he puts it to his uncle
Artabanus (who has warned against the enterprise), “by pity as I considered
the brevity of human life.” Such feeling for human life, in a dictator whose
casual indifference to it is made clear throughout the narrative, is a
convincing psychological touch. The unstable leader of a ruthlessly
centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the
sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it. Gripping and colorful as the
invasions and their aftermaths are, the Greco-Persian Wars themselves make up
just half of the Histories—from the middle of Book 5 to the end of the ninth,
and final, book. This strongly suggests that Herodotus’ preoccupation was
with something larger still. The first four and a half books of
the Histories make up the first panel of what is, in fact, a diptych: they
provide a leisurely account of the rise of the empire that will fall so
spectacularly in the second part. Typically, Herodotus gives you everything
you could conceivably want to know about Persia, from the semi-mythical,
Oedipus-like childhood of Cyrus (he’s condemned to exposure as a baby but
returns as a young man, disastrously for those who wanted him to die), to the
imperial zenith under Darius, a scant two generations later. (Darius, who had
a talent for unglamorous but useful administrative matters—he introduced
coined money, a reliable postal system, and the division of the empire into
manageable provinces called satrapies—was known as “the shopkeeper.”) From
book to book, the Histories lets you track Persia’s expansion, mapped by its
conflicts with whomever it is trying to subjugate at the time. In Book 1, there are the exotic
Massagetae, who were apparently strangers to the use, and abuse, of wine.
(The Persians—like Odysseus with the Cyclops—get them drunk and then trounce
them.) In Book 2 come the Egyptians, with their architectural immensities,
their crocodiles, and their mummified pets, a nation whose curiosities are so
numerous that the entire book is devoted to its history, culture, and
monuments. In Book 3, the Persians come up against the Ethiopians, who
(Herodotus has heard) are the tallest and most beautiful of all peoples. In
Book 4, we get the mysterious, nomadic Scythians, who cannily use their lack
of “civilization” to confound their would-be overlords: every time the
Persians set up a fortified encampment, the Scythians simply pack up their
portable dwellings and leave. By the time of Darius’ reign,
Persia had become something that had never been seen before: a multinational
empire covering most of the known world, from India in the east to the Aegean
Sea in the west and Egypt in the south. The real hero of Herodotus’
Histories, as grandiose, as admirable yet doomed, as any character you get in
Greek tragedy, is Persia itself. What gives this tale its
unforgettable tone and character—what makes the narrative even more leisurely
than the subject warrants—are those infamous, looping digressions: the
endless asides, ranging in length from one line to an entire book (Egypt),
about the flora and fauna, the lands and the customs and cultures, of the various
peoples the Persian state tried to absorb. And within these digressions there
are further digressions, an infinite regress of fascinating tidbits whose
apparent value for “history” may be negligible but whose power to fascinate
and charm is as strong today as it so clearly was for the author, whose
narrative modus operandi often seems suspiciously like free association.
Hence a discussion of Darius’ tax-gathering procedures in Book 3 leads to an
attempt to calculate the value of Persia’s annual tribute, which leads to a
discussion of how gold is melted into usable ingots, which leads to an
inquiry into where the gold comes from (India), which, in turn (after a brief
detour into a discussion of what Herodotus insists is the Indian practice of
cannibalism), leads to the revelation of where the Indians gather their gold
dust. Which is to say, from piles of sand rich in gold dust, created by a
species of—what else?—“huge ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes.”
(In this case, at least, Herodotus’ guides weren’t necessarily pulling his
leg: in 1996, a team of explorers in northern Pakistan discovered that a
species of marmot throws up piles of gold-rich earth as it burrows.) One reason that what often looks
like narrative Rorschach is so much fun to read is Herodotus’ style. Since
ancient times, all readers of Herodotus, whatever their complaints about his
reliability, have acknowledged him as a master prose stylist. Four centuries
after Herodotus died, Cicero wondered rhetorically “what was sweeter than
Herodotus.” In Herodotus’ own time, it’s worth remembering, the idea of
“beautiful prose” would have been a revolutionary one: the ancient Greeks
considered prose so debased in comparison to verse that they didn’t even have
a word for it until decades after the historian wrote, when they started
referring to it simply as psilos logos, “naked language,” or pedzos
logos, “walking language” (as opposed to the dancing, or even airborne,
language of poetry). Herodotus’ remarkable accomplishment was to incorporate,
in extended prose narrative, the fluid rhythms familiar from the earlier,
oral culture of Homer and Hesiod. The lulling cadences and hypnotically
spiralling clauses in each of his sentences—which replicate, on the
microcosmic level, the ambling, appetitive nature of the work as a
whole—suggest how hard Herodotus worked to bring literary artistry, for the
first time, to prose. One twentieth-century translator of the Histories put
it succinctly: “Herodotus’s prose has the flexibility, ease and grace of a
man superbly talking.” All the more unfortunate, then,
that this and pretty much every other sign of Herodotus’ prose style is
absent from “The Landmark Herodotus,” whose new translation, by Andrea L.
Purvis, is both naked and pedestrian. A revealing example is her translation
of the Preface, which, as many scholars have observed, cannily appropriates
the high-flown language of Homeric epic to a revolutionary new project: to
record the deeds of real men in real historical time. In the original, the
entire Preface is one long, winding, quasi-poetic sentence, a nice taste of
what’s to come; Purvis chops it into three flat-footed sections. Readers who
want a real taste of Herodotean style can do a lot worse than the 1858
translation of George Rawlinson (Everyman’s Library; $25), which beautifully
captures the text’s rich Homeric flavor and dense syntax; more recently, the
1998 translation by Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics; $10.95) loses
the archaic richness but, particularly in the opening, gives off a whiff of
the scientific milieu out of which the Histories arose. But in almost every other way “The
Landmark Herodotus” is an ideal package for this multifaceted work. Much
thought has been given to easing the reader’s journey through the narrative:
running heads along the top of each page provide the number of the book, the
year and geographical location of the action described, and a brief
description of that action. (“A few Athenians remain in the Acropolis.”)
Particularly helpful are notes running down the side of each page, each one
comprising a short gloss on the small “chapters” into which Herodotus’ text
is traditionally divided. Just skimming these is a good way of getting a
quick tour of the vast work: “The Persians hate falsehoods and leprosy but
revere rivers”; “The Taurians practice human sacrifice with Hellenes and
shipwreck survivors”; “The story of Artemisia, and how she cleverly evades
pursuit by ramming a friendly ship and sinking it, leading her pursuer to
think her a friendly ship or a defector.” And “The Landmark Herodotus” not
only provides the most thorough array of maps of any edition but is also
dense with illustrations and (sometimes rather amateurish) photographs—a
lovely thing to have in a work so rich in vivid descriptions of strange
lands, objects, and customs. In this edition, Herodotus’ description of the
Egyptians’ fondness for pet cats is paired with a photograph of a neatly
embalmed feline. For all the ostensible detours,
then, the first four and a half books of the Histories lay a crucial
foundation for the reader’s experience of the war between Persia and Greece.
The latter is not the “real” story that Herodotus has to tell, saddled with a
ponderous, if amusing, preamble, but, rather, the carefully prepared
culmination of a tale that grows organically from the distant origins of
Persia’s expansionism to its unimaginable defeat. In the light of this
structure, it is increasingly evident that Herodotus’ real subject is not so
much the improbable Greek victory as the foreordained Persian defeat. But why
foreordained? What, exactly, did the Persian empire do wrong? The answer has less to do with
some Greek sense of the inevitability of Western individualism triumphing
over Eastern authoritarianism—an attractive reading to various constituencies
at various times—than it does with the scientific milieu out of which
Herodotus drew his idea of historiē. For Herodotus, the Persian
empire was, literally, “unnatural.” He was writing at a moment of great
intellectual interest in the difference between what we today (referring to a
similarly fraught cultural debate) call “nature vs. nurture,” and what the
Greeks thought of as the tension between physis, “nature,” and nomos,
“custom” or “law” or “convention.” Like other thinkers of his time, he was
particularly interested in the ways in which natural habitat determined
cultural conventions: hence the many so-called “ethnographic” digressions. This is why, with certain
exceptions, he seems, perhaps surprisingly to us, to view the growth of the
Persian empire as more or less organic, more or less “natural”—at least,
until it tries to exceed the natural boundaries of the Asian continent. A
fact well known to Greek Civ students is that the word barbaros,
“barbarian,” did not necessarily have the pejorative connotations that it
does for us: barbaroi were simply people who didn’t speak Greek and
whose speech sounded, to Greek ears, like bar-bar-bar. So it’s
suggestive that one of the very few times in the Histories that Herodotus
uses “barbarian” in our sense is when he’s describing Xerxes’ behavior at the
Hellespont. As the classicist James Romm argues, in his lively short study
“Herodotus” (Yale; $25), for this historian there is something inherently
wrong and bad with the idea of trying to bleed over the boundaries of one
continent into another. It’s no accident that the account of the career of
Cyrus, the empire’s founder, is filled with pointed references to his
heedless treatment of rivers, the most natural of boundaries. (Cyrus dies, in
fact, after ill-advisedly crossing the river Araxes, considered a boundary
between Asia and Europe.) What’s wrong with Persia, then,
isn’t its autocratic form of government but its size, which in the grand
cycle of things is doomed one day to be diminished. Early in the Histories,
Herodotus makes reference to the way in which cities and states rise and
fall, suddenly giving an ostensibly natural principle a moralizing twist:
The passage suggests that, both
for states and for individuals, a coherent order operates in the universe. In
this sense, history turns out to be not so different from that other great
Greek invention—tragedy. The debt owed by Herodotus to Athenian tragedy, with
its implacable trajectories from grandeur to abjection, has been much
commented on by classicists, some of whom even attribute his evolution from a
mere note-taker to a grand moralist of human affairs to the years spent in
Athens, when he is said to have been a friend of Sophocles. (As one scholar
has put it, “Athens was his Damascus.”) Athens itself, of course, was to
become the protagonist of one such tragico-historical “plot”: during
Herodotus’ lifetime, the preëminent Greek city-state travelled a Sophoclean
road from the heady triumph of the Persian Wars to the onset of the
Peloponnesian War, a conflict during which it lost both its political and its
moral authority. This is why it’s tempting to think, with certain classical
historians, that the Histories were composed as a kind of friendly warning
about the perils of imperial ambition. If the fate of the Persians could be
intended as an object lesson for the Athenians, Herodotus’ ethical point is
much larger than the superiority of the West to the East. Only a sense of the cosmic scale
of Herodotus’ moral vision, of the way it grafts the political onto the
natural schema, can make sense of his distinctive style, of all the seemingly
random detours and diversions—the narrative equivalents of the gimcrack
souvenirs and brightly colored guidebooks and the flowered shirts. If you
wonder, at the beginning of the story of Persia’s rise, whether you really
need twenty chapters about the distant origins of the dynasty to which
Croesus belongs, think again: that famous story of how Croesus’ ancestor
Gyges assassinated the rightful king and took the throne (to say nothing of
the beautiful queen) provides information that allows you to fit Croesus’
miserable ending into the natural scheme of things. His fall, it turns out,
is the cosmic payback for his ancestor’s crime: “Retribution would come,”
Herodotus says, quoting the Delphic oracle, “to the fourth descendant of
Gyges.” These neat symmetries, you begin
to realize, turn up everywhere, as a well-known passage from Book 3 makes
clear:
For Herodotus, virtually
everything can be assimilated into a kind of natural cycle of checks and
balances. (In the case of the vipers and snakes he refers to, the male is
killed by the female during copulation, but the male is “avenged” by the fact
that the female is killed by her young.) Because his moral theme is
universal, and because his historical “plot” involves a world war, Herodotus
is trying to give you a picture of the world entire, of how everything in it
is, essentially, linked. “Link,” as it happens, is not a
bad word to have in mind as you make your way through a text that is at once
compellingly linear and disorientingly tangential. He pauses to give you
information, however remotely related, about everything he mentions, and that
information can take the form of a three-thousand-word narrative or a
one-line summary. It only looks confusing or “digressive” because Herodotus,
far from being an old fuddy-duddy, not nearly as sophisticated as (say)
Thucydides, was two and a half millennia ahead of the technology that would
have ideally suited his mentality and style. It occurs to you, as you read
“The Landmark Herodotus”—with its very Herodotean footnotes, maps, charts,
and illustrations—that a truly adventurous new edition of the Histories would
take the digressive bits and turn them into what Herodotus would have done if
only they’d existed: hyperlinks. Then again, Herodotus’ work may
have presaged another genre altogether. The passage about lions, hares, and
vipers reminds you of the other great objection to Herodotus—his
unreliability. (For one thing, nearly everything he says about those animals
is wrong.) And yet, as you make your way through this amazing document,
“accuracy”—or, at least, what we normally think of as scientific or even
journalistic accuracy, “the facts”—seems to get less and less important. Did
Xerxes really weep when he reviewed his troops? Did the aged, corrupt
Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens now in the service of Darius, really
lose a tooth on the beach at Marathon before the great battle began, a sign
that he interpreted (correctly) to mean that he would never take back his
homeland? Perhaps not. But that sudden closeup, in which the preparations for
war focus, with poignant suddenness, on a single hopeless old has-been, has
indelible power. Herodotus may not always give us the facts, but he
unfailingly supplies something that is just as important in the study of what
he calls ta genomena ex anthrōpōn, or “things that result
from human action”: he gives us the truth about the way things tend to work
as a whole, in history, civics, personality, and, of course, psychology.
(“Most of the visions visiting our dreams tend to be what one is thinking
about during the day.”) All of which is to say that while
Herodotus may or may not have anticipated hypertext, he certainly anticipated
the novel. Or at least one kind of novel. Something about the Histories,
indeed, feels eerily familiar. Think of a novel, written fifty years after a
cataclysmic encounter between Europe and Asia, containing both real and
imagined characters, and expressing a grand vision of the way history works
in a highly tendentious, but quite plausible, narrative of epic verve and
sweep. Add an irresistible anti-hero eager for a conquest that eludes him
precisely because he understands nothing, in the end, about the people he
dreams of subduing; a hapless yet winning indigenous population that, almost
by accident, successfully resists him; and digressions powerfully evoking the
cultures whose fates are at stake in these grand conflicts. Whatever its debt
to the Ionian scientists of the sixth century B.C. and to Athenian tragedy of
the fifth, the work that the Histories may most remind you of is “War and
Peace.” And so, in the end, the
contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic
with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That
cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with
heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand
narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious,
footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic
amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something
David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that
continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers
a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related
to the subject at hand. Then, there is the story itself. A
great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy
target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later,
by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so
people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son;
and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of
history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more
aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators
ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster
competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a
leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is
an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems
incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how
different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by
the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country
he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all
expectations. Except, of course, the
expectations of those who have read the Histories. If a hundred generations
of men, from the Athenians to ourselves, have learned nothing from this work,
whose apparent wide-eyed naïveté conceals, in the end, an irresistible vision
of the way things always seem to work out, that is their fault and not the
author’s. Time always tells, as he himself knew so well. However silly he may
once have looked, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh. ♦ ART:
ADRIEN GUIGNET, “XERXES AT THE HELLESPONT” (1845)/AKG-IMAGES |
