ARCHIVE - 11. HERODOTUS - THE HISTORIES~BOOK VII/SECTIONS 1-105 (11/24/08 - 11/30/08) ~ No spoilers, please

[Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief]

Hello Everyone,

For the week of November 24th through November 30th, we are reading approximately the next 50 pages of Herodotus - The Histories.

This thread will discuss the following book and sections:

(Book VII - Sections 1- 105)

We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads.

NOTE:

In the Penguin Edition, Book VII, section 1 starts on page 413 and goes through section 105 which concludes on page 450.

This thread should only deal with these sections and with Book Seven (although previous parts of Herodotus already discussed can be referenced). No spoilers, please.

Discussion on these sections will begin on November 24th.

Welcome,

Bentley

TO SEE ALL THREADS FROM PREVIOUS WEEKS SELECT VIEW ALL

[Prunesquallor]

As I once learned it, the Indo-European peoples commonly had a three-part political system: a king (rex, reg, raj); a council of "elders," the senex (senate) usually made up of the richest most powerful clan/ family heads; and then a popular assembly composed of the fighting men of the realm. At times these three power-groups cooperated, at times they competed. Sometimes the king had more power than the council, sometimes (as in Republican Rome) the council of Elders had the predominant power, and occasionally, as in Classical Athens, the leaders of the Assembly controlled the state.

Perhaps we get a distorted picture from Herodotus when he retails so many anecdotes about the willfulness of Persia's kings, it fosters the view that the Persian Empire was ruled despotically by its "tyrant" kings. But, at no time I know of, were the Persian kings ever Absolute Monarchs, they might be capricious, haughty, able to enforce their wills over their society in many ways -- but they still depended upon popular consent to legitimate their rule. Consulting with the equivalent of the Persian senate (the body of its nobles) would be, I should think, a natural situation, reflecting the king's need to get a consensus agreement before undertaking something so large as a national mobilization for a major war.

The actual text of Xerxes speech seems to bear this out, he does not TELL the nobles that he is going to war, rather, I think, he speaks persuasively to them, appealing to their sense of traditional pride in their militant history, reviewing the past glories of the Persian military machine: "What need have I to tell you of the deeds of Cyrus and Cambyses, and my father Darius, how many nations they conquered, and added to our domains. You know right well what great things they achieved." ( VII: 8)

Xerxes further promises to reward highly those of his nobles who can show a matching enthusiasm for the projected war, and those who will raise the largest levies of warriors and bring them to the muster: "I will give the gifts which our people consider the most honourable." (VII:8)

Of course, this matter is tied up with our appraisals of the "historicity" of Herodotus. Did Xerxes in fact address his "senate" before his war, or is this just a made-up, illustrative speech where Herodotus is following the pattern of consultation that would have been used in a Greek city state on the eve of war?

If we do accept the Xerxes appeal to his nobles as a genuine event, it would show us that even the highly developed monarchy of Persia, at her acme, was still not an absolutistic "oriental despotate," but a more complex political construct based still upon the idea of consensus, not royal fiat.

[Sarah]

I was surprised at how wishy washy he was. He gave me the impression on an impetuous youth .. yes we will go to war, no I've changed my mind, now I had a dream and I think we should go. It was very inspiring.

I thought his reaction to Pythios request to let one of his sons stay behind was exceptionally cruel, especially after the man had offered to give him all the money he had (7.27) and (7.38). Right after that he weaps at the brevity of human life. (7.45) He seems a bit bipolar to me .. of course H. wasn't present when these conversations actually took place so the facts are open to interpretation.

Since I've been reading H. I have noticed a lack of biblical overlap until this point. I was surpised that the Isrealits were never mentioned in H's decription of Egypt. Once I'm done with this section, I am going to review the book of Esther though. If I recall correctly Xerxes was the persian king in that chapter. It will be interesting to see if his character is at all the same and if any of the events H. describes are mentioned.

[Prunesquallor]

RE message 4 by Sarah: "Since I've been reading H. I have noticed a lack of biblical overlap until this point. I was surpised that the Isrealits were never mentioned in H's decription of Egypt. Once I'm done with this section, I am going to review the book of Esther though. If I recall correctly Xerxes was the persian king in that chapter. It will be interesting to see if his character is at all the same and if any of the events H. describes are mentioned."

Tangential to your concern here, Sarah, matching Biblical and Herodotean accounts, I was just wondering why Herodotus never details Israelite history, or seems to have any explicit knowledge of these people. For western European based cultures, even in this, our modern "secular" era, we have primarily viewed the history of the ancient circum-Mediterranean world through the lens of the Bible. Its narratives loom large in our thoughts, and the position/ power/ importance of the ancient Israelite people seems to be paramount. Quite frankly, the Bible has absolutely overshadowed Herodotus -- we even have the separate discipline of Biblical Archaeology, but no matching funds for Herodotean Archaeology. So why does Herodotus leave this "all important" Biblical source out of his reckoning? Did he consider the whole Israelite phenomenon to be so unimportant, and such a minor bit of near eastern history that it was not worth mentioning? Or, was the Biblical narrative simply not available at the time he was doing his own investigations? Whatever the reason, we look in vain for a direct appraisal of the Hebrew events, characters, and traditions in Herodotus -- despite finding in his book several passages that investigate the general Syro-Palestinian area and Phoenicia.

Maybe Herodotus was going to treat the Israelites and their Biblical account under the rubric of the Assyrians, a chapter he promises to give his audience, but, alas, never seems to have written.

At any rate, I decided to try a Google-search: "Herodotus + Israelites," hoping some specialized scholars had already treated this situation. Apparently, at least since the 1980s, there have been a number of books investigating the question "whether Herodotus ever read any of the Israelite historical texts." In the course of their studies, some of these investigators began to see patterns in Herodotus' "Histories" that were also found in the Biblical narrative. This immediately became a "chicken or the egg" situation, with some scholars proposing that Herodotus had read the Biblical accounts, especially the Book of Ezra, and used some of its material, its organization, and its themes in his own composition. A lot of the force of this argument (Herodotus borrowed from the Bible) depended upon the belief that Biblical literature was available in a written form from quite early times. But most Bible scholars have agreed that the Biblical narrative as we have it was actually written some time after 450 BCE, maybe as late as the Hellenistic era, 300 BCE. If this latter proposition is correct, it would presumably reverse the situation, and we would have Jewish editors and redactors actually borrowing elements from Herodotus in their attempts to create a history of the Israelite people.

The best treatment of this issue I have found so far is "The Origin of the History of Israel," by Jan Wim Wesselius, 2002, ridiculously over priced, but available in university libraries and in a partial format from Google Book Search at:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nvyO...
The+Origin+of+the+History+of+Israel%22#PPP14,M1

"Few works have had more influence on the course of human history, religion and culture than the books of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, yet strangely their origin has hitherto remained shrouded in mystery. ... Finally, the Primary History, the historical books Genesis-2 Kings at the beginning of the Bible which present one continuous historical account from creation to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE, to our great surprise appears to derive its structure, with nine books divided into three parts, namely book 1, books 2-6, and books 7-9, from the Greek-language 'Histories' of Herodotus of Hallicarnassus (written between about 445 and 425 BCE)." ("The Origin of the History of Israel," pp. vii - ix)

Wesselius, in the next 60 pages, presents the parallels between Herodotus and the Bible, concluding (along with many other scholars) that the numerous and exact similarities cannot be due to mere coincidence. A good synopsis of his thought may be found running from page 51 to page 61 in his chapter-sections "The Significance of the Agreement between Herodotus and Primary History," and "A Remarkable Procedure."

I'll let those interested read this chapter and come to their own conclusions regarding Wesselius'results, though I must say I found them convincing. In the end, Wesselius says that Herodotus does not mention the Israelite Biblical tradition as a source precisely because it was not yet available in his own time -- but shortly after "The Histories" were published, Israelite authors got a copy of this Greek work, and used it as a template for writing down their own oral histories and whatever scraps of written history they had collected concerning the Jewish people.

"It seems rather likely that Primary History [the historical books of the Biblical Narrative:] derives from a situation in which the history of the Israelite kingdoms was known until some time after the reigns of David and Solomon, but the earlier history of the people of Israel had been lost in the fog of the past and probably only some disparate traditions about it were known. Apparently a need was felt, on the one hand to fill out the blanks in this history by pressing the description of the nation's history as far back in time as possible, and on the other hand to give an explanation of how Israelites entered into the possession of their lands ... A likely course of events in this case would be the author of the Primary History, either because he was impressed by Herodotus' work and wanted to emulate it for the history of his own people, or because he was looking for a suitable model for this history ... decided to use certain structural elements of this work [Herodotus' "Histories":] which may have appealed to him in the first place because of the important role played in it by King Cyrus." (Wesselius, pp 57 - 58)

I find it ironic that Herodotus, who was so largely and strongly castigated by the writers of the Graeco-Roman tradtion -- to the point that it is said of him that he had no followers, no students who modeled their histories on his -- nonetheless may have had Israelite admirers who did use his methods, forms and structures in the compilation of their own Israelite Bible.

[Sarah]

Wow thanks for your research and insight. I am definitely going to pick up the book you mentioned (although hopefully a cheaper version on ebay).

Sarah