Rehabilitating Herodotus (Updated)
Karl Barth famously enjoined the preacher to mount the pulpit with “the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.” For forty years I have tried to follow Barth’s counsel, but the object of choice, held lightly in my left hand, is not the newspaper, but (chauvinist that I am) The New Yorker.
The current issue offers a striking essay by Daniel Mendelsohn on a new edition of Herodotus’ Histories. The central drama recounted by the “father of history” is the double invasion of tiny Greece by the military prowess of Persia, led first by King Darius and, ten years later, by his son, Xerxes. Here is Mendelsohn’s resume:
And yet, for all their might, both Persian expeditions came to grief. The first, after a series of military and natural disasters, was defeated at the Battle of Marathon, where a fabulously outnumbered coalition of Athenians and Plataeans held the day, losing only a hundred and ninety-two men to the Persians’ sixty-four hundred. (The achievement was such that the Greeks, breaking with their tradition of taking their dead back to their cities, buried them on the battlefield and erected a grave mound over the spot. It can still be seen today.) Ten years later, Darius’ son Xerxes returned to Greece, having taken over the preparations for an even vaster invasion. Against all odds, the scrappy Greek coalition—this one including ultraconservative Sparta, usually loath to get involved in Panhellenic doings—managed to resist yet again.
But, Mendelsohn, preacher-like, is not content merely to recount, he is intent to press the moral. So, at the end of a longish, but always stimulating, homily, we hear:
the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.
Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.
Except, of course, the expectations of those who have read the Histories. If a hundred generations of men, from the Athenians to ourselves, have learned nothing from this work, whose apparent wide-eyed naïveté conceals, in the end, an irresistible vision of the way things always seem to work out, that is their fault and not the author’s. Time always tells, as he himself knew so well. However silly he may once have looked, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh.
Update:
Once again dotCommonweal shows the way. Since dotCom declared Herodotus rehabilitated, the New York Review of Books can only echo the verdict. In its current issue Peter Green examines the new translation and commentary, and concludes:
The neophyte reader will certainly get a very great deal, even allowing for its gaps, from The Landmark Herodotus: an up-to-date translation, a superb analytic index, several background essays by experts (on Egypt, Sparta, Scythia, and the Black Sea especially) that are the last word on current scholarship, intelligent illustrations geared to the text, running lessons in Mediterranean geography, occasional useful notes, and a handy glossary. But it is a volume to consult, in study or library, rather than carry around; the latter purpose is still best served—faute de mieux, and despite its highly un-Herodotean translation—by John Marincola’s new 2003 annotated edition of the translation published by Aubrey de Sélincourt in 1954. So there remains a help-in-trouble gap to be filled, for students and common readers alike—and, of course, Herodotus’ workshop still has secrets in plenty waiting to be solved. His rehabilitation has only deepened the enigma. [Emphasis added]
I just got my copy of this new book, which may be of interest to others: A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
by John Burrow.
Fr. Imbelli
I suggest you cancel your subscription to the New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker?) and spend your free time reading Herodotus. He is well worth it, an endless treasure house of delights. It would be interesting to compare his sense of narrative with that of the authors of the Hebrew Bible. In any case he would be a refreshing change from Mendelsohn. Mendelssohn, of course, is something else. I am very fond of the Reformation Symphony.
Dear Mr. Gannon,
I happily accept your counsel to plunge once more into the Hellespont with Herodotus. However, being a “both/and” kind of guy, I will, s’il vous plait, retain my fondness for, yes, “The New Yorker.”
But, really, the “Reformation Symphony?” Why it’s a bare branch above “Bolero!”
Why is Herodotus the “father of history?” I’ve heard it argued (and am not enough of a classicist to respond) that the Greeks were in fact not terribly interested in history, and that both Herodotus and certainly Thucydides wrote primarily about current events, or events in the recent enough past, to make no difference. Even if one thinks that’s OK (and who am I to quibble, since I write about the xx cent?) what about the Books of Kings, for instance? — a good century earlier than Father Herodotus. Or do we consider them out of bounds because they can be seen as “salvation history” as opposed to the — what, secular? scientific? — work of the Greeks?
The Reformation Symphony is a wonderful piece, and well above “Bolero!” (Incidentally, and completely beside the point, I caught a snippet of the papal Yankee Stadium mass last Sunday, and noted that during the Presentation of the Gifts, a part of the Brahms Requiem was being sung, though NOT apparently identified as such by EWTN, who were perhaps scandalized by the fact that the work of a Protestant composer was being sung in such a venue.
Mr. Clifford
I am delighted that you share my fondness for the Reformation Symphony. If our taste may be called into question by certain purists, still we are in good company.
As to your question, Cicero (De Oratore 2.55) says that Herodotus was the first to use elegance of style in historical writing (Herodotum illum, qui princeps genus hoc (sc. historiam) ornauit…). I believe this is the source of the “Father of History” cliche. Actually Cicero was thinking of the stylistic superiority of Herodotus to his Hellenic predecessors, of whose style we can know little since their work has not survived. He was not particularly thinking of history as we think of it.
As to the more general question, Thucydides wrote an account of Peloponnesian Wars in which he himself had taken part. He was interested in the past, and from time to time takes the trouble to point out that, in his view, popular conceptions about past events are often wrong.
Herodotus sets out to tell the story of the conflicts beween the Greeks and the Persians culminating in the war of 480-479, but he is led by his intellectual curiosity to trace the historical roots of these events in the rise of empires in the Near East and in the interacton between these empires and the Greeks who had long been active along the Western and southern coast of the Anatolian Peninsula. I think it is fair to say that in that sense Herotous was very interested in what we call history. He found Egypt so fascinating that he tried to give a far fuller account of its history than his sources could support, but that is not to say that he was a mere fabulist.
As for the “historical” books of the Bible, I leave it to others to explain why they should not be considered history as we think of it.
Dear Fr. Imbelli
I have often thought it would be interesting to know what Herodotus would have made of his Jewish contemporaries. He was certainly a man of real piety, and had he visited Jerusalem, he could hardly have failed to be interested in what was going on in the Temple and what god was being worshiped there. I can only believe that he never got to Jerusalem.
Mr. Clifford
The actual “father of History” text, as further inquiry has revealed, is Cicero de Legibus 1.5. A.R. Dyck in his Commentary says: “The famous description of Herodotus as “father of history” is a characteristically Roman way of constructing literary or intellectual history as a genealogy ordered under a paterfamilias…” “Herodotus, Father of History” was used by J. L. Myres as the title of his book on H. (1952).
Also handy and inexpensiveis the Herodotus translated by Geroge C. Macaulay in a version revised by John Lateiner (Barnes & NobleClassics).