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Herodotus
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Herodotus
Greek historian
born 484 bc?, Halicarnassus, Asia Minor [now Bodrum, Tur.]?
died 430–420
Main
Greek author of the first great narrative history produced in the
ancient world, the History of the Greco-Persian Wars.
It is believed that Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, a Greek city
in southwest Asia Minor that was then under Persian rule. The precise
dates of his birth and death are alike uncertain. He is thought to have
resided in Athens and to have met Sophocles and then to have left for
Thurii, a new colony in southern Italy sponsored by Athens. The latest
event alluded to in his History belongs to 430, but how soon after or
where he died is not known. There is good reason to believe that he was
in Athens, or at least in central Greece, during the early years of the
Peloponnesian War, from 431, and that his work was published and known
there before 425.
Herodotus was a wide traveler. His longer wandering covered a large
part of the Persian Empire: he went to Egypt, at least as far south as
Elephantine (Aswān), and he also visited Libya, Syria, Babylonia, Susa
in Elam, Lydia, and Phrygia. He journeyed up the Hellespont to
Byzantium, went to Thrace and Macedonia, and traveled northward to
beyond the Danube and to Scythia eastward along the northern shores of
the Black Sea as far as the Don River and some way inland. These travels
would have taken many years.
Structure and scope of the History
Herodotus’ subject in his History is the wars between Greece and Persia
(499–479 bc) and their preliminaries. As it has survived, the History is
divided into nine books (the division is not Herodotus’ own): Books I–V
describe the background to the Greco-Persian Wars; Books VI–IX contain
the history of the wars, culminating in an account of the Persian king
Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (Book VII) and the great Greek victories at
Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale in 480–479 bc There are two parts in the
History, one being the systematic narrative of the war of 480–479 with
its preliminaries from 499 onward (including the Ionic revolt and the
Battle of Marathon in Book VI), the other being the story of the growth
and organization of the Persian Empire and a description of its
geography, social structure, and history.
There has been much debate among modern scholars whether Herodotus
from the first had this arrangement in mind or had begun with a scheme
for only one part, either a description of Persia or a history of the
war, and if so, with which. One likely opinion is that Herodotus began
with a plan for the history of the war and that later he decided on a
description of the Persian Empire itself. For a man like Herodotus was
bound to ask himself what the Persian-led invasion force meant.
Herodotus was deeply impressed not only by the great size of the Persian
Empire but also by the varied and polyglot nature of its army, which was
yet united in a single command, in complete contrast to the Greek forces
with their political divisions and disputatious commanders, although the
Greeks shared a common language, religion, and way of thought and the
same feeling about what they were fighting for. This difference had to
be explained to his readers, and to this end he describes the empire.
A logical link between the two main sections is to be found in the
account in Book VII of the westward march of Xerxes’ immense army from
Sardis to the Hellespont on the way to the crossing by the bridge of
boats into Greece proper. First comes a story of Xerxes’ arrogance and
petulance, followed by another of his savage and autocratic cruelty, and
then comes a long, detailed description of the separate military
contingents of the army marching as if on parade, followed by a detailed
enumeration of all the national and racial elements in the huge invasion
force.
Herodotus describes the history and constituent parts of the Persian
Empire in Books I–IV. His method in the account of the empire is to
describe each division of it not in a geographical order but as each was
conquered by Persia—by the successive Persian kings Cyrus, Cambyses, and
Darius. (The one exception to this arrangement is Lydia, which is
treated at the very beginning of the history not because it was first
conquered but because it was the first foreign country to attack and
overcome the Greek cities of Asia Minor.)
The first section of Book I, the history and description of Lydia and
its conquest by the Persians, is followed by the story of Cyrus himself,
his defeat of the Medes and a description of Persia proper, his attack
on the Massagetae (in the northeast, toward the Caspian), and his death.
Book II contains the succession of Cambyses, Cyrus’ son, his plan to
attack Egypt, and an immensely long account of that unique land and its
history. Book III describes the Persians’ conquest of Egypt, the failure
of their invasions to the south (Ethiopia) and west; the madness and
death of Cambyses; the struggles over the succession in Persia, ending
with the choice of Darius as the new king; the organization of the vast
new empire by him, with some account of the most distant provinces as
far east as Bactria and northwest India; and the internal revolts
suppressed by Darius. Book IV begins with the description and history of
the Scythian peoples, from the Danube to the Don, whom Darius proposed
to attack by crossing the Bosporus, and of their land and of the Black
Sea.
Then follows the story of the Persian invasion of Scythia, which
carried with it the submission of more Greek cities, such as Byzantium;
of the Persians’ simultaneous attack from Egypt on Libya, which had been
colonized by Greeks; and the description of that country and its
colonization. Book V describes further Persian advances into Greece
proper from the Hellespont and the submission of Thrace and Macedonia
and many more Greek cities to Persian might, then the beginning of the
revolt of the Greek cities of Ionia against Persia in 499, and so to the
main subject of the whole work.
Method of narration
This brief account of the first half of Herodotus’ History not only
conceals its infinite variety but is positively misleading insofar as it
suggests a straightforward geographical, sociological, and historical
description of a varied empire. The History’s structure is more complex
than that, and so is Herodotus’ method of narration. For example,
Herodotus had no need to explain Greek geography, customs, or political
systems to his Greek readers, but he did wish to describe the political
situation at the relevant times of the many Greek cities later involved
in the war. This he achieved by means of digressions skillfully worked
into his main narrative. He thus describes the actions of Croesus, the
king of Lydia, who conquered the Greeks of mainland Ionia but who was in
turn subjugated by the Persians, and this account leads Herodotus into a
digression on the past history of the Ionians and Dorians and the
division between the two most powerful Greek cities, the Ionian Athens
and the Doric Sparta. Athens’ complex political development in the 6th
century bc is touched upon, as is the conservative character of the
Spartans. All of this, and much besides, some of it only included
because of Herodotus’ personal interest, helps to explain the positions
of these Greek states in 490, the year of the Battle of Marathon, and in
480, the year in which Xerxes invaded Greece.
One important and, indeed, remarkable feature of Herodotus’ History
is his love of and gift for narrating history in the storyteller’s
manner (which is not unlike Homer’s). In this regard he inserts not only
amusing short stories but also dialogue and even speeches by the leading
historical figures into his narrative, thus beginning a practice that
would persist throughout the course of historiography in the classical
world.
Outlook on life
The story of Croesus in Book I gives Herodotus the occasion to
foreshadow, as it were, in Croesus’ talk with Solon the general meaning
of the story of the Greco-Persian Wars, and so of his whole History—that
great prosperity is “a slippery thing” and may lead to a fall, more
particularly if it is accompanied by arrogance and folly as it was in
Xerxes. The story of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece is a clear illustration
of the moral viewpoint here; a war that by all human reasoning should
have been won was irretrievably lost. To Herodotus, the old moral “pride
comes before a fall” was a matter of common observation and had been
proved true by the greatest historical event of his time. Herodotus
believes in divine retribution as a punishment of human impiety,
arrogance, and cruelty, but his emphasis is always on the actions and
character of men, rather than on the interventions of the gods, in his
descriptions of historical events. This fundamentally rationalistic
approach was an epochal innovation in Western historiography.
Qualities as a historian
Herodotus was a great traveler with an eye for detail, a good
geographer, a man with an indefatigable interest in the customs and past
history of his fellowmen, and a man of the widest tolerance, with no
bias for the Greeks and against the barbarians. He was neither naive nor
easily credulous. It is this which makes the first half of his work not
only so readable but of such historical importance. In the second half
he is largely, but by no means only, writing military history, and it is
evident that he knew little of military matters. Yet he understood at
least one essential of the strategy of Xerxes’ invasion, the Persians’
dependence on their fleet though they came by land, and therefore
Herodotus understood the decisive importance of the naval battle at
Salamis. Similarly, in his political summaries he is commonly content
with explaining events on the basis of trivial personal motives, yet
here again he understood certain essentials: that the political meaning
of the struggle between the great territorial empire of Persia and the
small Greek states was not one of Greek independence only but the rule
of law as the Greeks understood it; and that the political importance of
the Battle of Marathon for the Greek world was that it foreshadowed the
rise of Athens (confirmed by Salamis) to a position of equality and
rivalry with Sparta and the end of the long-accepted primacy of the
latter. He knew that war was not only a question of victory or defeat,
glorious as the Greek victory was, but brought its own consequences in
its train, including the internal quarrels and rivalry between the
leading Greek city-states, quarreling that was to later culminate in the
devastating internecine strife of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bc).
Conclusion
Herodotus had his predecessors in prose writing, especially Hecataeus of
Miletus, a great traveler whom Herodotus mentions more than once. But
these predecessors, for all their charm, wrote either chronicles of
local events, of one city or another, covering a great length of time,
or comprehensive accounts of travel over a large part of the known
world, none of them creating a unity, an organic whole. In the sense
that he created a work that is an organic whole, Herodotus was the first
of Greek, and so of European, historians. Herodotus’ work is not only an
artistic masterpiece; for all his mistakes (and for all his fantasies
and inaccuracies) he remains the leading source of original information
not only for Greek history of the all-important period between 550 and
479 bc but also for much of that of western Asia and of Egypt at that
time.
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THE HISTORY
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Type of work: History
Author: Herodotus (484-c. 425 B.C.)
Time: 500-479 B.C.
Locale: Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor
First transcribed: с 430 B.C.
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Principal Personages
Croesus, king of Lydia
Solon, an Athenian statesman
Cyrus the Great, king of Persia
Darius, Cyrus' cousin
Xerxes, Darius' son and successor
Leonidas, king of Sparta
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"Heredotus, beyng of the citye of Halicarnassus in Greece, wrote and
compiled an History to the end that nether tract of time might
overwhelme and bury in silence the actes of humayne kind; nor the
worthye and renowed adventures of the Grecians and Barbarians (as well
others as chiefly those that were done in warre) might want the due
reward of immortale fame." So did the unknown "B.R." begin his
translation of two of the nine books of Herodotus, "entitled with the
names of the nine Muses."
As the first to use the word "history* Herodotus deserves Cicero's
title, "Father of History." To be sure, this son of wealthy upper-class
parents did not have the historian's critical attitude toward his
sources. Interesting anecdotes of the wars between the Greeks and the
Persians of the fifth century B.C. found their way into his pages
whether he could verify them or not, but he does sometimes hedge and tag
certain items as hearsay. From his quotations, he must have read widely.
From the details in his descriptions and the comments like "this I saw,"
he must have visited most of the places he mentions. The true greatness
of Herodotus lies in the fact that he was the first important writer to
depart from the verse of Homer and others, to produce Europe's first
prose literature. Some predecessors had chronicled the beginnings of
their small communities or states, but the writings of Herodotus embrace
a vaster panorama, not only Greece, but Egypt, Sardis, and Babylon as
well. And he looked for the reasons back of the events. His aim was to
trace the early rivalries between Greek and barbarian; in the process he
recounted the story of many tribes, described the lands they inhabited,
and reported many of their interesting customs. Those who want greater
accuracy can consult Thucydides (c. 455-400 B.C.), who wrote a
half-century later. His work is more objective, but it lacks the color
of Herodotus' account.
The Persians maintained that the Phoenicians originally started the
quarrel by kidnapping women from Argos. Later the Hellenes raided the
port of Tyre and abducted Europa, the king's daughter. The wars actually
started, however, when Croesus, whose magnificent court was visited by
Solon, desired to enlarge his empire by conquering some of the Ionian
cities of Asia Minor. When he consulted the oracles, he was persuaded at
Delphi to gather his allies for an attack on the mainland. The invasion
resulted in a stalemate, however, and Croesus returned to Lydia, where
his capital, Sardis, was surprised and captured by the Persians. Only a
rainstorm, sent by the gods, saved him as he was being burned to death.
The same miracle persuaded Cyrus to free his captive after taking
possession of some of his vassal states. With them, Cyrus went on to
capture Babylon. However, the Mas-sagetae, under Queen Tomyris, were too
strong in their resistance and strategy. Book 1, titled Clio, ends with
the death of Cyrus.
Book 2, called Euterpe, tells how Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, became
king and planned to march against Egypt. The rest of the book is a
tourist's guide and history of Egypt from its beginnings to the
coronation of Amasis.
Book 3, called Thalia, tells how Cambyses marched against Amasis. The
Egyptian king having died in the meantime, the mercenary army of his son
was no match for the Persian, who then betrayed his incipient insanity
by dishonoring his slain enemies.
Book 4, called Melpomene, introduces Darius, cousin of and successor to
Cambyses, who let the barbarous Scythians outwit him into making peace
with them.
The next volume, whose Muse is Terpsichore, begins with a plan that
failed. Two Paeonian nobles, wishing to be named rulers over their
people, brought their beautiful sister to Sardis, where Darius saw her,
carrying water on her head, leading a horse, and spinning. Anxious to
spread such industry throughout his empire, he had the Paeonians sent
throughout Asia Minor. But the book deals largely with the revolt in
Ionia, the growth of Athens, and its expedition, encouraged by
Aristagoras, against Sardis. Although the capital was captured and
burned, Darius rallied and defeated the invaders at Salamis, in Cyprus.
Erato is the Muse of book 6, which tells of a battle fought between 353
Ionian triremes and six hundred Babylonian ships. By dissension among
the enemy rather than by his strength Darius defeated them and went on
to besiege and conquer Miletus. Again Greek bickering helped him during
his march to Athens, but the Athenians, rallying and with a few
Plataeans, successfully engaged the forces of Darius at Marathon, on
September 14, 450 B.C. The Persians were driven back with a loss of
6,400 dead. The Athenians lost only 192 in the battle.
Book 7, named after Polymnia, Muse of the Sublime Hymn, tells in
considerable detail how Darius prepared to revenge his defeat. Fate
delayed him; rebellious Egypt sidetracked him, and death ended all his
plans. The uncertain Xerxes, succeeding his father to the throne,
undertook the Egyptian campaign. After a quick victory, at the head of
twenty thousand soldiers he marched on Athens. It took seven days for
Xerxes' army to cross the Hellespont bridge, erected by his engineers,
and Xerxes, reviewing them, lamented that none would be alive a hundred
years hence.
Many Greek cities were quick to surrender. Only Athens, as Herodotus
boasts, dared confront the host of Xerxes. Themistocles interpreted the
oracle's counsel to defend the city with "wooden walls" as advice to use
the two hundred warships originally built for an attack on Egypt.
Nature, however, provided a better defense in an east wind that wrecked
four hundred Persian galleys along with uncounted transports and
provision carriers. However, neither armed forces nor natural obstacles
halted Xerxes' army until it reached the Pass of Thermopylae. There, for
a day, the Athenians and Spartans checked the Persian host until a
traitor revealed another path to the invader. The next day the Persians
were again on the march, leaving all the defenders and twenty thousand
of their own troops dead behind them.
In book 8, titled Urania, there is an account of Xerxes' march into
Athens and the firing of the Acropolis. But the "wooden walls" of the
Athenian fleet were victorious at Salamis on September 20, 480 B.C.
Winner of the greatest glory was the Persian queen Artemis, who used the
confusion of battle to get revenge on another Persian by ramming and
sinking his ship. Because Xerxes thought she was attacking an enemy and
the Athenians believed she had changed loyalties, everybody lauded her.
Fearing that the Greeks might sail on to destroy his bridge, Xerxes
ordered a retreat. From the Asian mainland he sent demands for a peace
treaty, promptly refused by both Athens and Sparta.
Calliope is the Muse presiding over book 9. Here the account tells how
Mardonios renewed the attack against the Greeks in the hope of sending
word of victory back to Xerxes in Sardis. Though temporarily checked by
the Thebans, he again entered Athens, whose citizens had fled to Salamis
to assemble their allies. When they marched back, Mardonios burned what
was left of Athens and retreated.
Except for cavalry skirmishes, neither side wanted to engage in battle
until the sacrifices were propitious, but Mardonios' patience broke
first, and he fell into a trap at Plataea, where he was killed and his
army routed; there were twenty thousand Persian and Boeotian casualties
against ninety-one Spartans and fifty-two Athenians killed.
At Thermopylae, Leonidas, the Spartan king, had been crucified and
beheaded by the Persians. Certain Greeks wanted to dishonor Mardonios in
the same way, but they were told that dishonoring a dead enemy was
worthy only of barbarians. Some of the fleeing Persians were pursued and
killed at Mycale. Their defeat ended Xerxes' ambitious plan to crush the
Hellenes.
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