5TH CENTURY BC
The Histories of Herodotus, written in the 5th century BC, are the earliest prose work of Ancient Greece to survive intact. They tell the story of the expanding Persian Empire and the Graeco-Persian struggles of the 6th and 5th centuries. But beyond that, they are the source of much of our knowledge about the ancient world and the foundational work of history in Western literature.
It was Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who established the idea of investigating the past. He coined the term for the genre, the Greek word historiai translating as ‘investigations’, or ‘inquiries’. With Herodotus, writers began to find first-hand accounts, look for evidence and describe what happened, and why, without reference to godly intervention or miracles.
Herodotus’s first words in the Histories are a declaration that the work will concentrate on what actually happened.
These are the researches of Herodotus of Helicarnassus, which he publishes in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud …
But elsewhere, in digressions from his main story of the Greeks and Persians, he describes the religious rites, flora and fauna, and topography of ‘exotic’ peoples, in often colourful – if sometimes fanciful – evocations:
The rites which the wandering Libyans use in sacrificing are the following. They begin with the ear of the victim, which they cut off and throw over their house: this done, they kill the animal by twisting the neck … The eastern side of Libya, where the wanderers dwell, is low and sandy, as far as the river Triton; but westward of that, the land of the husbandmen is very hilly, and abounds with forests and wild beasts. For this is the tract in which the huge serpents are found, and the lions, the elephants, the bears, the aspicks, and the horned asses. Here too are the dog-faced creatures, and the creatures without heads, whom the Libyans declare to have their eyes in their breasts; and also the wild men, and wild women, and many other far less fabulous beasts.
THE HISTORIES, BOOK 1, INTRODUCTION, AND BOOK 4, PP. 188 AND 191, TRANSLATED BY GEORGE RAWLINSON, 1860
The first five of the Histories’ nine books cover the background to the Persian invasions of Greece, beginning in the mid-6th century BC. Book 1 describes Persian Emperor Cyrus’s conquest of Lydia, in western Anatolia (Turkey), while Books 2 and 3 extend to Egypt and the expansion of the Persian Empire under Cambyses and then Darius I. Book 4 follows Darius into North Africa, while Book 5 contains the (unsuccessful) revolt of the Ionian Greek cities on the Anatolian coast in the 490s. The final four books then deal with the Graeco-Persian Wars (490–479 BC), until, as Herodotus says at the end of Book 9, ‘the Persians departed with altered minds’.
The traditional date for Herodotus’s birth is 484 BC, at Helicarnassus, an Ionian Greek city on the site of Bodrum, southwestern Turkey – and much of the Histories is written in Ionian dialect. But little is known about Herodotus’s life. He seems to have lived at various times on the north Aegean island of Samos, in Athens, and in the southern Italian city of Thurii (modern Taranto). Both Thurii and Pella, in Macedonia, claimed to have been the place of his death, sometime between 430 and 420 BC. (The last events mentioned in the Histories occur in 430 BC.)
Herodotus was thus about five years old when the wars he describes in Books 6–9 concluded. They began with an invasion of the Athenian hinterland by Darius I in 490 BC, in retaliation for Athenian support of the Ionian revolt. Herodotus describes in Book 6 how, even though the Persians ruled most of the known world at that time – their empire stretching from Asia Minor through the Middle East to Egypt – their expeditionary force was defeated by the Athenians on land at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC).
When Darius’s successor, Xerxes, returned with an army ten years later to sack their city and conquer much of the Greek mainland, his initial success was overturned by the Athenian naval victory at the Battle of Salamis (480 BC), the turning-point of the war. The bulk of the Persian army withdrew, cut off from its supplies by the loss of the navy, and the remainder was finally defeated at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. Athens now began a period of imperial domination of, and competition with, other Greek city-states. The fact that Herodotus was writing during this period, with the Athenian forces now under increasing pressure from Sparta, has encouraged some commentators to suggest that the underlying purpose of the Histories was to warn his contemporaries about the transience of military power.
Within his work’s broad structure, Herodotus introduces many digressions in which he explains how various peoples came into contact with their Persian conquerors, and he passes on travellers’ tales – some more believable than others – about far-off tribes, their customs, their lands, and the animals that live there.
The Histories are thus both more and less than history as we understand it today. They are more, because Herodotus’s interest ranges far more widely than his declared subject, the invasions of Greece. He was no book-bound researcher, but a traveller, whose journeys around the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and the Persian Empire would have taken him many years; and his subjects included not just history, but also geography, biology and ethnography, loosely bound together as a description of the lands and peoples conquered by the Persians.
But they are also less than what we think of as history, because Herodotus frequently appears to be carried away by his enthusiasm for a good story, and so the reader finds ‘fabulous’ headless creatures with mouths in their chests (as illustrated on page 10) and great ants bigger than foxes scrabbling gold up from the earth. Additionally, Herodotus puts imagined speeches into the mouths of the often heroic protagonists as if they were characters in a drama.
In this respect, his closest literary ancestor is Homer. But in the Histories, unlike the Iliad, there are no sudden direct interventions by the gods to change the outcome of battles or rescue hard-pressed heroes. Although Herodotus, like Homer, appears to believe in the divine punishment of human greed, cruelty and arrogance, he concentrates on the effect of human actions on events – the first time such a realistic, rationalist approach had been seen in Greek literature.
Furthermore, Herodotus does at least attempt to evaluate the information he is given. Sometimes he admits that what he is reporting sounds unlikely; and at others, he offers his own restrained seal of approval: ‘This seemed to me likely enough.’
There are also eye-witness accounts of his own from his travels, either to demonstrate the truth of what he is saying or simply for dramatic effect. In Egypt, for example, he describes a visit he made to the scene of the Battle of Pelusium, at which the Persians had seized the Egyptian town of Memphis more than a century earlier. There, he says, he saw the skulls of the dead soldiers, Persians in one part of the field, Egyptians in another, scattered where they fell – providing a sombre introduction to his account of the Egyptian defeat. Herodotus’s infectious passion for information and insatiable appetite for tales, opinions, and theories make him the forerunner of today’s travel writers as much as historians.
Plutarch, the author of Parallel Lives five centuries later and the founder of another historico-literary genre, biography, took a dim view of Herodotus’s accuracy. But there are occasions when the claims Herodotus makes carry the ring of truth, even if unknown to him.
On one occasion he repeats – disbelievingly – a claim that Phoenician sailors had travelled westwards and around the southern tip of Africa. On his own travels in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun would always have been on his left when he was sailing west, and he describes how the Phoenicians claimed that on their journey they ‘had the sun upon their right hand’. For Herodotus, this disproved their story, but ironically, this is the detail that proves it is true: Herodotus did not know that the earth was round, and so could not realize that in the Southern Hemisphere the apparent position of the sun changes.
Despite the strong Greek national feeling that runs through the Histories, Herodotus attempts to be even-handed in his treatment of Greeks and Persians, to such an extent that in the 1st century AD the biographer-historian Plutarch accused him of being philobarbaros, a ‘lover of the barbarians’. This has not, though, saved him from complaints by modern historians about a lack of objectivity in writing about other cultures.
The themes underlying Herodotus’s writing – the dangers of absolute power, the importance of religion in society (although he is always reticent about his own beliefs) and the human cost of war – are also among the important themes of Western literature in the centuries that followed him. Herodotus, for all the inaccuracies and tall stories (which led him to be derided later as the ‘Father of Lies’ too), set the literary and philosophical agenda for centuries to come.