After reading The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, I found myself hankering for more ancient histories. As we approached the season finale of America, I still craved that welcome distraction from the modern world by reading about ancient peoples.
One thing that had fascinated me about Thucydides was the contemporaneous nature of his account; reading the history told by someone who lived through it was particularly appealing. So I set out trying to find other histories written by people who lived through events.
I initially landed on Polybius, a Greek in Rome, writing about the rise of the Roman empire. However, my Project Gutenberg forays into it had me struggling. Partially it was because I seem to have a bit of a bias against Roman history; for whatever reason I find myself predisposed to dislike it. I also found Polybius' writing clunky; that may be translation.
After bouncing off Polybius, I briefly flirted with trying to read Julius Ceasar, but I was concerned that the best way for me to approach that would be to start by reading the his recount of the Gallic wars, before moving onto what really I thought would be interesting, which was reading his Civil Wars.
After hemming and hawing for a week or two, downloading reams of classics onto my Kobo, I finally decided that I really ought to give Herodotus a try. Thucydides had a low opinion of Herodotus (I realized while reading Herodotus that they were largely contemporaries), which had certainly influenced my desire to read him. Yet, as you look for ancient histories, his name is nigh-unescapable.
After starting, I was intrigued fairly quickly: Herodotus is chronicling a great battle between Persia and the Hellenic people, from a legendary history of conflict, to the retreat of the Persians under Xerxes, after a series of defeats at Salamis, Platea and Mycale.
The Translation
As with Thucydides, I relatively quickly realized that I would like a more up-to-date translation, and so after some research I decided upon the Landmark Herodotus. A weighty tome, the translation by Andrea L. Purvis is very new, and extremely readable. The book is filled with footnotes, and oh so many maps, very helpful in Herodotus given the enormous geographic scope of the book. The book also includes a series of appendices on a variety of topics adjacent to or directly related to Herodotus' text.
As I did with Thucydides, let me share the first little bit of both translations for flavour. Here's the George Campbell Macaulay translation, available on Project Gutenburg:
This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos, to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another.
Those of the Persians who have knowledge of history declare that the Phenicians first began the quarrel. These, they say, came from that which is called the Erythraian Sea to this of ours; and having settled in the land where they continue even now to dwell, set themselves forthwith to make long voyages by sea. And conveying merchandise of Egypt and of Assyria they arrived at other places and also at Argos;
Here is roughly the same section of text from Andrea L. Purvis's translation:
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds — some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians — not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.
Persian authorities of the past claim that the Phoenicians were responsible for the dispute. This is because, after they had come to and settled the land which they still inhabit from what is now called the Erythraean Sea, they at once undertook long sea voyages and brought back cargo from Egypt, Assyria, and elsewhere, but more to the point they came to Argos.
The History
Where Thucydides is razor focused on a narrow slice of history, the 27 years of the Peloponnesian war, Herodotus instead is interested in sharing everything he knows of the known world insofar as it can be tangentially related to his main topic of the Greco-Persian war. He weaves seamlessly between legendary history and recorded or recounted history.
Where Thucydides made it clear in his introduction that he made great effort to find out what actually happened and when, recounting only the most likely series of events when there are multiple stories, Herodotus retells all he knows, even when he is unsure of the truth, or even when he flat out considers a tale to be untrue. I found that to be interesting to see his criticism of ancient people's conceptions of themselves or others, and how they agree or conflict with each other.
In addition to being hugely philosophically different, Thucydides and Herodotus could perhaps not be more different from a writing style. Thucydides almost exclusively tells his history in Chronological order, counting summers and winters through his text. Herodotus instead wrote in a style of nested digressions; in the middle of a particular story he would take some opportunity to interject a dump of his knowledge about something related; then he would digress in the middle of yet another digression. In computer programming thinking, it was as if he was maintaining a stack of topics, freely pushing and popping the topics as appropriate.
There are sections of the Histories that remind me of Buzzfeed articles: "You’ll never believe the intercourse traditions of this Libyan people", and others where he simply recites whatever his source at the time gave him, occasionally with a heavy eye roll implied. He seemed perfectly wiling to share tales that smell strongly of myth, like Xerxes having the Hellespont whipped. There are sections where he recounts people and places just beyond the edge of Greek knowledge that include crazy things, like huge ants the size of foxes in India that collect gold.
Though the framing of Histories is as a tale of war between the Persians and the Hellens, to me it is the least interesting part of reading the Histories. Where Thucydides has a firm grasp of warfare, Herodotus tells a tale of a war that doesn't make much sense as he recounts it. To inflate the power of greek victory Xerxes' invading army is made comically large by Herodotus, and yet, the actual deciding battles of the war (Salamis, Platea and Mycale) are treated fairly perfunctorily. After a few losses, the enormous army of Xerxes mostly flees, with a small force left behind under the command of Mardonios, who in turn is seemingly easily chased from Greece. There is a propagandistic element to Herodotus' history, hoisting the deeds of the Greeks to the status of legend, and freely tossing in anecdotes of barbarity to ensure that the Persians aren't seen as just people.
Where Herodotus is best (though perhaps the least reliable) is when he is writing his 'Travellers Guide to the Ancient World'. As he recounts his history he find occasion to tell of Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya (all of Africa that's not Egypt or Ethiopia). These pieces, which feel perfectly in keeping with modern Travel literature, are some of the most enjoyable to me to read. His tales of the structure and societies of these ancient peoples, while not always terribly accurate, nevertheless provide a fascinating insight into how he (and Greeks more broadly) saw the rest of the world. Some bits of this include laugh out loud anecdotes of bizarre legends, peculiar customs of dubious veracity, or flat out wrong descriptions of things he must have never seen himself (hippos with horse manes).
I found the pieces of his history corroborated by archeological evidence fascinating. For example, the discovery of the Tunnel of Eupalinos, a tunnel a mile through a mountain in Samos, is partially due to Herodotus' description.
The Landmark Herodotus
I have mixed feelings about the Landmark edition of Herodotus that I ended up reading. I appreciated the maps enormously, but I found the footnotes to be underwhelming having just previously read the Oxford World Classics version of Thucydides which had excellent notes written by P.J. Rhodes.
If you were to casually scan my Landmark edition of Herodotus, you'd be left with the impression that the book is footnoted with reams of information; however that appearance is at least a little deceiving. About 50% of the footnotes are map references to named places, and large number of footnotes are repeated many times. One footnote in particular stood out to me:
Lacedaemon (Sparta): Herodotus uses the names Spartans and Lacedaemonians interchangeably. "Spartans" however often refers specifically to citizens of the state of Sparta, whereas any inhabitant of the territory of Lacedaemon is a Lacedaemonians. See Appendix B, the Spartan State in War and Peace, §5,7 and n. B.7.a.
This footnote is probably repeated 50 times throughout the text. By the end of the book I actually found the footnoting to be quite annoying. It distracted me from reading the main body of the text, and yet only about 1 in 10 footnotes were actually worth reading. Most were map references to places I already well knew where they were, or repetitive footnotes for concepts that were already clear to me. I suppose if you were using this book as a scholastic reference, and assigned to read a single chapter or section of the book you'd be immensely appreciative of this style of footnotes, but as I read from cover to cover, they just increasingly became an annoyance.
The Appendixes are good, but I didn't find them as helpful as Rhodes' notes in Thucydides. This is because I read them at the end, after I'd finished the main text, and as well because they feel a bit abbreviated. Most are only three pages, and a good chunk is summarizing or cataloguing the text I'd just read.
Assorted Thoughts:
- I will never stop reading Megabazos as Mega-Bezos, Jeff Bezos' final form.
- It's funny to see Herodotus, 2400 years ago complaining about the concept of Continents, an idea that still causes consternation today.
- Bookstores struggle with authorship of translated works, leading to bizarre computer generated phenomena as I found looking for a paper copy, like naming the author of Herodotus' histories 'John M. Herotodus' or 'Paul Herotodus'.
