Herodotus, First paragraph of The Histories (fifth century bce)
You can read the whole thing if you like. You won’t get bored. Herodotus’s Histories is said to be the first book of non-fiction ever written, a problematic claim because large parts of it are so gloriously improbable. The word Herodotus uses for ‘history’ is actually more like ‘enquiry’, or even ‘research’, an apt reminder of what historians really do or should be doing. They are tedious when they only want to prove a point, however close that point may be to their heart. They are fascinating when they find things out and expose those things to uncomfortable questions such as ‘Why?’ and ‘What did this lead to?’ and ‘Did anyone really think this was a good idea at the time?’
Herodotus and Socrates, who knew each other in the relatively small world of Athens in the fifth century bce, were two very different kettles of fish. They both unsettled the world with endless questions, but Socrates used questions to distil the world to its essence. His habit of mind was sceptical. Herodotus, on the other hand, was credulous. He used questions to celebrate the complexity of the world. His Histories is full of digressions and back alleys and the most sublime irrelevancies. Anyone who has ever lost track of the time when online will be right at home in Herodotus. He is not a historian for whom one thing leads to another. For him, anything can lead in dozens of directions. He was as much interested in links as in cause and effect.
Herodotus had a big story and used over twenty-five thousand lines to tell it. In many ways, it’s a story whose effects we live with every day, arguably as much as we live with the impact of World War I or World War II. In the first half of the fifth century bce, a Greek alliance fought off a planned takeover from the empire of Persia, based where Iran happens to be today. The smart money was on Persia but the Greeks held them back. Had the result gone the other way, the extraordinary flourishing of thought and culture in fifth-century Greece would most likely never have happened. There would have been no Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. None of the great theatre of that time. None of the ideas that became the raw material out of which our civilisation was built. Instead, we would have just had more battlefields and more dead bodies, and God knows history has had plenty of those. Herodotus is great partly because he had a great topic. Battles such as Marathon and Thermopylae are on his bailiwick.
He is also great because of the way he dealt with his material. Nothing was beyond his interest and it is not surprising that he has also been considered the first ethnographer. His researches led him to tell stories about flying snakes, snakes whose young eat their way out of their mothers in order to be born and snakes with horns. He also encounters ants the size of cats, men that eat other men, women who eat other women, men with the heads of dogs and men without heads at all. Indeed, when Shakespeare’s Othello wants to woo the divine Desdemona, he impresses her with tales of travel in a world that could only have been charted by Herodotus (see Chapter 34).
Herodotus is also a connoisseur of human eccentricity. By the second or third page of his vast epic, he puts the story on hold so he can tell us about Candaules, the king of Lydia, who has given his name to a particular sexual proclivity. Candaules believes he has the most beautiful wife in the world and insists that his steward, Gyges, hide himself in his bedchamber so he can see the queen in the nude and judge for himself. When the queen finds out, she says that Gyges can only restore her honour by either killing himself or killing the king and taking her hand in marriage. Gyges takes the second option and thus becomes king.
Herodotus enjoys the grim humour of history. He tells of a practical joke played by Queen Nitocris, who left an inscription on her tomb that any king of Babylon who was short of money could find some handy cash in her coffin. King Darius can’t resist. But when he defiles the queen’s grave, he only finds another note accusing him of greed. No reader could doubt that Herodotus loved his work.
Nevertheless, if you only have time to read the first few lines of Herodotus, you will find a description of the historian’s craft that has never, in my experience, been bettered. Here is Tom Holland’s translation:
Herodotus, from Halicarnassus, here displays his enquiries, that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time, and that everything great and astounding, and all the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and Barbarians alike to such effect, be kept alive—and additionally, and most importantly, to give the reason they went to war.
The first thing to think about is how similar and yet different this is from the opening of Homer’s Iliad (see Chapter 38), a work which Herodotus actually gave its name. Homer also says that he is going to explain the causes of war. But The Iliad looks for explanations both beyond the human realm and inside it. The work is inspired by the goddess of song. It asks of the participants in the tragic Trojan War: ‘Which of the gods was it that made them quarrel?’
Herodotus, by way of contrast, starts with his own name, and to ensure there is no mistaking his identity, adds his birthplace as well, a city on the coast of what is now western Turkey. It might say something about the open-mindedness of Herodotus that he was born between Persia and Greece. At all events, this is history as the creation of an author, an individual whose personality and nimble wit infuses every page. It is not an anonymous official version. There is a creative imagination at work and that means there is somebody taking responsibility.
The second thing is Herodotus’s motivation. He writes so that ‘human achievement may be spared the ravages of time.’ So, like a good friend of Socrates, he is writing in the face of mortality, pushing back against the great oblivion to which most of us will be eventually consigned. He wants the ‘great and astounding’ achievements of all people, not just the Greeks and certainly not just himself, to be ‘kept alive’. This is a bid for immortality.
There are countless deaths in Herodotus, as there are in The Iliad. Readers of both works get lost in the enormous databank of names that each work enshrines, every name of a dead person, often brutally savaged without much dignity. But each work is powered by a belief in immortality. Homer finds it in the gods. This does not mean he believes in life after death. Those hundreds of Homeric dead bodies are well and truly dead, and that is how they are going to stay. But while alive, they were the playthings of a circus troupe of gods. Herodotus finds immortality in our present realm, in collective human memory. Later thinkers would come to realise that these two approaches are not so very different. Homer’s gods are often intemperate little brats. Herodotus’s humans are often larger than mere life.
Finally, in his first paragraph, Herodotus wants to show how two great civilisations, both of which has an energy he admires, came into conflict. All history needs to explain conflict. The first paragraph of the first book of history ever written seems to understand what the job was all about. The centuries that followed have shown just how tough that job was going to be.