The Well-Educated Mind Histories discussion
The Histories by Herodotus
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The Histories: responses to Suggested Questions
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This is an excellent review, and I commend you for your thorough study and answers to the questions. I like how Herodotus sought to determine the causes of the Greco-Persian conflicts. This is a much more difficult thing to do than to only report what one hears.
Thanks for the timeline. It would have been so helpful if the editor of my edition included one.
Interesting that Plutarch referred to Herodotus as the "barbarian lover" because of his unbiased report of history.
Right off the bat, I think the term "Philobarbarus" which Plutarch employs just means Herodotus was enamored of things non-Greek, which nobody can deny, right? The charm of the book is that, if Egypt comes up in the narrative, H. will take time out to go into the peculiar customs of the Egyptians. "Barbarian lover" sounds like the title of a bodice ripper.
But I want to see if that essay "On the malignity of Herodotus" is in my big Kindle Works of Plutarch...
Mod
Mod
Yes, it was my understanding that the term barbarian did not carry a negative connotation. As you said, it simply meant non-Greek. And it does help to be enamoured of the things you are writing about. :-)
Level I:
Who is the author, and does he/she state the purpose for writing?
Herodotus’s opening sentence:
“These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of 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 the grounds of feud.”
Herodotus’s aim is to preserve the memory of the great deeds done on both sides of the war between the Greeks and Persians, and to explain the origins of the conflict. In Books I-IV, however, the Persian Wars aren’t the main focus. Most of this part of the book is concerned with stories of notable people, geographical accounts, and ethnographies of the peoples ruled by the Persians. (And in the case of the Scythians, peoples that the Persians tried to rule…)
Herodotus’s reference to his “researches” (also translated “inquiries”) uses the Greek word historie, from which we get “history.” This is the first recorded use of the word. (read in The Oxford History of the Classical World [189])
Who is the story about, and what are the major events?
major figures
Croesus - the king of Lydia - captured nearly all Greek towns along the west coast of Asia.
Cyrus the Great - Cyrus defeated his overlord Astyages and took over his empire. He also defeated Croesus and added his territory to the Persian Empire.
Cambyses - Son of Cyrus. He conquered Egypt for the Persian Empire. Three years later, civil war broke out when his courtier Gaumâta revolted. Cambyses returned home but died in Syria.
Darius the Great - Persian prince who killed Gaumâta and ascended the throne. When he died the Persian empire was at its greatest extent. Darius made the conquest of the Greek mainland one of the goals of the Persian foreign policy.
Xerxes - Xerxes has some reflective moments, but he’s definitely more reckless and driven by anger than Darius or Cyrus. He thinks that greater numbers alone can assure victory, and he turns out to be disastrously wrong.
major events - from the timeline in The Everyman’s Library edition
650 BCE - Rise of Achaemenid Empire in Persia
c. 561 - 528 - Peisistratus rises and falls from power as tyrant of Athens
528 - 527 - Hippias succeeds to the tyranny at Athens
560 - 546 - Croesus is king of Lydia
559 - Cyrus the Great becomes king of Persia
550-539 - Cyrus conquers Media, Lydia, the Greeks of Asia Minor, Babylon
530 - Death of Cyrus. Cambyses succeeds him as king of Persia
525 - Persians conquer Egypt; Darius seizes the kingship of Persia
521 - 491 - Cleomenes is king of Sparta; expansion of Spartan power
510 - Hippias, the son of Peisistratus and tyrant of Athens, overthrown by Cleomenes; democracy reinstated in Athens
499 - 494 - Ionian Revolt
490 - Xerxes’s expedition against Greece; battle of Marathon
484 - Birth of Herodotus, according to later biographers. He came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city on the edge of the Persian Empire.
486 - Death of Darius; Xerxes succeeds him
480 - 479 Second Persian expedition under Xerxes; battles of Artemisium, Thermopylae, & Salamis. The two major battles that ended the Persian invasion were the battles of Plataea & Mycale.
478 - After the Greek victory, the Delian League of Greek city-states opposing the Persian Empire founded under Athenian leadership
450s-420s - This is when Herodotus was active as a historian; he died sometime in the 420s
Level II:
What are the historians' assertions, and what questions is he/she asking?
Herodotus begins by presenting the alleged origins of the wars between Greece and Persia in mythic times. He adds Persian and Phoenician accounts that he has heard to Greek ones. These stories have to do with the abduction of women. According to the Persians, the Phoenicians began the quarrel by carrying off the Greek woman Io and taking her to Egypt. The Greeks retaliated by abducting the woman Europa from the Phoenicians, and later they carried off Medea of Colchis, which motivated Paris to abduct Helen. Herodotus says that the Persians trace their enmity toward the Greeks back to the Trojan War. The Phoenicians, on the other hand, insist that Io left willingly.
After summarizing these stories, Herodotus says that he will not discuss further which account is correct, and changes the subject to historical causes more recent than the legendary past. “I prefer to rely on my own knowledge, and to point out who it was in actual fact that first injured the Greeks…” Herodotus traces the beginning of the conflict to when Croesus of Lydia conquered the Greek towns of Asia. In the course of The Histories, the Persians conquer the Lydians, the Babylonians, the Indians, the Egyptians, some of the Scythian tribes, the Libyans, and the Thracians. So Herodotus identifies the expansionism of the Persian empire as the true cause of the war.
The story of the Persian Wars, as Herodotus presents it, is a story of how “the god with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent… likewise his bolts fall ever on the highest houses and the tallest trees” (Bk VII).
What sources does the historian use to answer them?
Herodotus’s sources are “sight and hearing,” what he has seen and what people have told him. The Oxford History of the Classical World gives a list of the places that Herodotus claims to have visited firsthand: “Egypt and Cyrene in North Africa, Tyre in Phoenicia, Mesopotamia as far as Babylon, the Black Sea and the Crimea, and the north Aegean, apart from the main cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and ultimately (though this has left little if any trace in The Histories) south Italy where he settled."
The Oxford History of the Classical World goes on to say: “In each place he seems to have sought out ‘men with traditions,’ particular groups, interpreters, priests or leading citizens, and to have recorded a single version of the oral tradition available, a version which may of course have been partial, biased or merely frivolous; he compares different versions only if they come from different places. The difficulties of writing oral history are well recognized today; yet on the main cultures such as Egypt and Persia, where Herodotus can be checked he is revealed to be remarkably well informed for someone working from such oral sources.” [190]
Level III:
*How is this history the same as - or different than - the stories of other historians who have come before?
The Oxford History of the Classical World provides some background on this: “A work by Hectateus of Miletus called Genealogies has often been thought to be the first to exhibit that spirit of critical enquiry which is characteristic of western history writing, for it began ‘Hectateus the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as it seems true to me; for the stories told by the Greeks are various and in my opinion absurd.’ This book actually seems to have been a collection of heroic myths and genealogies of heroes, designed to reduce them to a pseudo-historical account by rationalizing them; it is a curious false start to history, on the one hand recognizing the need to understand the past in rational terms, but on the other hand using the fundamentally unsuitable material of myth. It shows both a desire to liberate history from myth, and an inability to distinguish between the two.” [188]
Herodotus tried to be more evenhanded, which caused him to be called a “barbarian lover” by the Roman writer Plutarch.