Herodotus

The many ages of Herodotus

Herodotus as good neighbour, warmonger, narrative syncopator and the first great artist of Greek prose

Edith Hall

Herodotus makes good box office. Zack Snyder, the director of 300, the ludicrously violent movie of the Battle of Thermopylae that made many millions for Warner Brothers last year, has boasted in an interview that his film, historically speaking, is “ninety per cent accurate”. This would become apparent to his critics, he said, if they just bothered to “read” the real “history”. Since our earliest source for the sequence of events before and during Thermopylae is the seventh book of Herodotus’ Histories, Snyder must mean that his movie corresponds with that ancient Greek narrative as well as with the graphic novella 300 by Frank Miller on which Snyder directly drew.

The film director’s claim reveals something important about how Herodotus’ way of doing history has been conceptualized. It tells us that he is seen as a conduit for factual information. It also tells us that the history he relates, in Snyder’s view, need not be taken too seriously. It is difficult to imagine any episode in Thucydides providing material for such a cynical postmodern exercise in self-ironizing pastiche as the movie 300: a similarly upbeat comic-strip version of the suffering caused by the Athenian plague, the siege of Plataea, or the Syracuse catastrophe is inconceivable. Yet the work of Herodotus seems to lend itself to retelling in light-hearted media. This must be partly because of his inclusion of fables (he is justly claimed to be the father of the short story) and partly because the victors in the war he relates were those on his “side” – the Greeks and not the barbarians.

Praised by Dionysius of Halicarnassus for refraining from the temptation to stir up in his readers the tragic emotions of pity and terror, retold in numerous children’s versions such as the morally sanitized but beautifully illustrated Wonder Stories from Herodotus published by Harper Bros in 1900, Herodotus has always had a reputation for being jolly good fun – “old, chatty, neighboursome and naive companion”, as his Victorian admirer Henry Ellison put it in a panegyric poem. Even female scholars dared to work on Herodotus at a time when commenting on the intellectually heavyweight, and therefore manly, history of Thucydides remained out of bounds: the Greek-language curriculum that Casaubon sets for Dorothea in Middlemarch includes Herodotus’ account of the Persian King Cyrus. After marrying the fifty-seven-year-old Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twenty-one, Agnata Butler (née Ramsay), despite reading “a great deal of Greek” with him on her honeymoon, nevertheless managed to present him with three sons as well as her edition of Herodotus VII. Lucy Snowe’s Croesus: A classical play (1903) is designed for staging in both girls’ and boys’ schools where the pupils “have neither time nor talent to read Herodotus in the original”.

For all his perceived jauntiness, however, some appropriations of Herodotus, including Snyder’s movie, have had deadly serious consequences. In 300, the crassly racist portrait of Xerxes and his armies has been widely perceived as an ideological blow struck by Hollywood in the war on terror. It offended not only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many other contemporary Iranians, but opponents of North American militarism the world over. So is Herodotus a transmitter of accurate historical data? Or is he an entertaining raconteur, suitable for children and for the audiences of action movies? Or should he be seen as the founding father of pernicious Orientalism in the sense that term was used by Edward Said – of Western imperialist fantasies? The answer is that he is all three, and the triangular tension between these lines of interpretation underpins the revival of interest in his Histories recently.

This revival is a merciful development in the English-speaking world. With the exception of Alan Lloyd’s admirable, historically focused three-volume commentary (1975–88) on Book II (Herodotus’ seminal study of Egypt), the aspiring Herodotean reader was for decades left ill-informed and inadequately equipped. The tide turned in 2002 with the appearance of the nuanced commentary on Book IX by Michael Flower and John Marincola; this was the first in what is to be a complete series of the Cambridge University Press “Green and Yellow” commentaries on all nine individual books. In 2006 Brill also published Lionel Scott’s historical commentary on Book VI. But the standard (or rather, default) English-language commentary on several books has long remained the obsolescent complete edition (1912) by two otherwise undistinguished Oxonians, Walter How and Joseph Wells. To read Herodotus in the company of these Edwardian gentlemen is to be left unaware not only of subsequent archaeological developments, but that the work has any literary interest whatsoever. Worse, the user of How and Wells struggles to distinguish what the Greek text says from the commentators’ own views on the importance of ethnicity to character, views which were very much of their time: on one occasion they even cite lines from Kipling’s “Mandalay” in support of their argument. For Books IV–IX it has often been advisable to consult instead the incomplete earlier edition published between 1895 and 1908 by the more perceptive Reginald Macan (also an Oxonian).

It is rare to review three new books with equal enthusiasm, but all these substantial, meticulous and intelligent aids to the reader of Herodotus are to be unconditionally applauded. Most of the nine books now enjoy adequate contemporary commentaries in English; we await Simon Hornblower’s editions of V–VI, and Chris Carey’s of VII, for the Cambridge University Press series. Certainly, Angus Bowie’s new Cambridge commentary on Book VIII, the Salamis story, whets the appetite. In the preface Bowie states that his aims have been “to bring to life for the reader the Achaemenid Empire, and to offer a good deal of help with the grammatical aspects of the text”. Both aims are fulfilled admirably. Bowie uses the most up-to-date critical assessments of archaeological sources, and will be thanked by every student of the Greek text for the generosity of the help provided in construing sentences. But there is more to this commentary than Elamite inscriptions and locatival datives. The Herodotus who emerges is one that How and Wells would scarcely recognize: nor would J. Enoch Powell, whose comments in his terse little 1939 edition of Book VIII are confined to points of grammar and what was still comfortably regarded as objective fact. You only have to compare a few sentences from Bowie’s commentary to see how things have moved on. The Ionian researcher, far from being a chatty anecdotalist only one remove from a preliterate society, has become a narratologist’s dream – he is a master of ironic focalizers, telling juxtapositions, chilling ellipse, and narrative syncopation. He uses echoes and inversions of previous literature – above all the Iliad – with grace and precision. His very presence on the curriculum poses an implicit challenge to the hoary distinctions between “historical” and “literary” scholarship, as Bowie skilfully wrestles with the epistemological conundrum that faces all Herodoteans: what is the relationship between the Halicarnassian’s account of events and the unknowable “reality” of “what actually happened” during those momentous months between 480 and 479 bc?

Book VIII is the ultimate prose source for all ancient accounts of the Battle of Salamis – in Diodorus and Trogus, as well as Plutarch – but it is also more than usually important in literary terms since the events it recounts are portrayed in an alternative, indeed prior, source text, Aeschylus’ Persians. The availability of the two accounts – an Ionian Greek’s and an Athenian’s, one composed half a century after the event and the other after a lapse of scarcely eight years, Herodotus’ text a prose narrative and Aeschylus’s a verse drama – provides a unique opportunity for encouraging students to think about the nature of any historical endeavour, ancient or modern. Thanks to Bowie, comparison of the two media of representation will now be easier and much more fun.

His wide-ranging, lucid introduction includes excellent contributions from the notable Herodotean Stephanie West on the ancient biographical traditions relating to Herodotus and on the transmission of the text; the help of other specialists on linguistic and grammatical details is acknowledged. The sheer diversity of subject matter involved in studies of Herodotus makes him a particularly appropriate candidate for scholarly collaboration. The hefty new Oxford University Press contribution, a revised translation of the monumental Italian Mondadori commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV, is the most telling illustration of this principle. The sheer complexity of what has been achieved by the translation’s energetic editors, Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno, is staggering. It is wholly proper that the book will always be associated primarily with the name of the late David Asheri, who provided half the commentary and also the magisterial General Introduction, but on its cover no fewer than six individuals are credited. Besides the editors, there are the three commentators and Maria Brosius, an Achaemenid specialist whose translation of Darius’ inscription at Bisistun is usefully appended to the commentary on Book III. Inside, four young translators and Asheri’s partner, Dwora Gilula, are added to the list of those who contributed substantially to the enterprise.

Herodotus was a Greek-speaker from Asia who spent the later part of his life as a colonist in southern Italy; two of the greatest Herodotean scholars have, similarly, been displaced persons with an Italian connection. Like his mentor and role model Arnaldo Momigliano, Asheri was a Jewish Italian driven from his homeland by Fascism. It was as late as a few days after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 that Asheri’s family escaped to what was then British Palestine. Asheri spent his whole working life, from 1962, in the Classics Department at Jerusalem University. But his interest in empires, nationalism, propaganda, ethnic identity and in the ways that war is remembered and justified was informed by intense personal experience.

The Italian original that is translated in the Oxford volume was published between 1988 and 1993 (English versions of the later additions to the Italian series are also in the OUP pipeline). In addition to Asheri’s commentary on Books I and III, it contained an Italian version of Lloyd’s edition of Book II, and an indispensable new commentary on Book IV by Aldo Corcella. The commentaries in their English translations are considerably revised and updated. Indeed, so much emphasis on providing responsible pointers to further reading may make the book feel out of date sooner than is necessary, and raises the question of whether in the electronic age commentaries might not be better published online where they can be routinely updated.

Asheri and Corcella, whose commentary on Book IV is of comparable sophistication, fundamentally believe – with most modern scholars – that the variety of discourses within the Histories results from Herodotus transforming an ethnographic project into a diachronic account of the Persian wars, without fully completing the conversion. What is so distinctive about Asheri’s voice is that as early as the 1980s he was arguing that much of Herodotus consists of “literary invention” rather than reflecting real sources; the notes are rich in references to archaic poetry, rhetorical figures, inherited imagery, and to Herodotus’ place in ancient aesthetics. In this approach Asheri may be challenged not only by more traditional, empirical historians but by those younger scholars, such as Johannes Haubold, who have been showing how barbarian peoples contributed to the shaping of Greek traditions. But Asheri stated explicitly in the seminal Fondation Hardt volume on Herodotus (1990) that he was more interested in understanding why Herodotus wrote in the way he did than in the task of confirming or repudiating the truth of his statements by comparing them with other sources. In his commentary on Book III, Asheri’s literary sophistication is especially revealed especially in his stress on the interweaving of the themes of autocracy and of lies, as Herodotus implies through dramatic narrative the extent to which tyrannical power requires treachery and guile in order to sustain itself.

At four books to two, Oxford is still (just) in the lead over Cambridge in the race to cover all the books of Herodotus, but CUP’s study of Book V, edited by Elizabeth Irwin and Emily Greenwood, is a new – and in Herodotean studies, at any rate – unprecedented project. In this deftly edited collection of essays, each of several distinguished scholars addresses a different section of the central book of the Histories. The volume reflects the proceedings at a colloquium held in Cambridge in 2002, and readers are made to feel as if they have been invited to an exciting party. This is partly because the final essay, by John Henderson, offers such a characteristically bewildering – indeed, dizzying – verbal workout. But, more importantly, there is a real sense that the assembled scholars struck sparks off one another which enabled them to make new sense of the peculiarities of Book V. There are no weak contributions, and some exceptionally strong ones. Irwin throws new light on the way that the Thracian ethnography both consolidates and challenges the broad schemes of ethnic categorization that were such a feature of cultural life in Herodotus’ day. David Fearn writes fascinatingly on Herodotus’ use of the figure of Alexander of Macedon in his own self-positioning as a writer born and bred on a boundary between Hellenic and “barbarian” culture. Rosaria Munson makes a persuasive case for the importance of the Ionian revolt in Herodotus’ historical methodology and theory of causation. Only thorough acquaintance with postcolonial theory’s work on interstitial spaces could have produced Greenwood’s dazzling study of the image of the Hellespont and its bridge; she sees it as a metaphor that creates meaning both about content (the difference between two continents) and form (the different parts of the History). A consistent trend in Herodotus’ thinking that is explored in several chapters is parallelism – the implicit and explicit juxtaposing of Coes and Histiaeus (Robin Osborne), the episodes of Dorieus of Sparta and of the Ionian revolt (Simon Hornblower), or Hipparchus the tyrant and Cleisthenes the reformer (Vivienne Gray).

Although historians in antiquity routinely attacked Herodotus for his unreliability or his tendency to say unpatriotically positive things about barbarians, he was universally admired for his literary qualities. Indeed, the first attested commentary on a prose author was the work on Herodotus by the great Hellenistic scholar Aristarchus, and the Histories’ influence on Hellenistic poetry was extensive. Christopher Pelling is aware of Herodotus’ skilful diction, and his essay includes an extended pyrotechnic analysis of the games Herodotus plays with the shades of meaning provided by one verb – diaballein – which would have been unthinkable in Herodotean scholarship even twenty years ago. It is clear from all three of these books that Herodotean studies are now emphasizing his writing strategies – how he writes history – more than what he said happened. His text has knocked the “reality” that it recorded from the centre of the academic radar.

If I have a complaint that applies to all three books it is that there is too little traditional literary analysis of his prose style. Herodotus almost singlehandedly took writing without the aid of metre from the plodding parataxis of Acusilaus to high art (Jebb called him “the Homer of European prose”); his genius at word order and variation in colon length has never been surpassed. There are sentences in Herodotus of heart-stopping beauty, created by hyperbaton, the mirroring of the content in the aural effect (as when the Nile rises), the use an abstract noun to denote the onset of an emotion “falling” on someone, or the delicate bafflement or reserve that an oblique infinitive in indirect speech can insinuate. It would have been good if one of the ancient critics who appreciated these virtues – Longinus or Dionysius – could be summoned from the grave to comment at Irwin and Greenwood’s party.

Herodotus’ Histories have “become eponymous of a genre and a discipline”, as François Hartog reminded us. The state of Herodotus scholarship always reveals much about the state of Classics and of historiographical studies more widely. The Renaissance Herodotus was, like Xenophon, first read as a moralist and mirror of princes; his reliability – at least as an ethnographer – was, however, taken seriously once Stephanus had in his 1566 Apologia pro Herodoto pointed to the similarities between some of his barbarians and the savages in ethnographic reports currently arriving from the New World. Herodotus’ first English-language translation (1584), a version of Books I–II attributed to Barnaby Rich, recommends him to the reader as “in many poyntes straunge, but for the most part true”.

Yet the early modern and eighteenth-century Herodotus was turned into a novelist (indeed, his 1709 translator, Isaac Littlebury, was attracted to him on account of the success previously enjoyed by his translation of Fénelon’s Télémaque); he was contrasted by serious thinkers like David Hume with Thucydides, the father of “real” history. The self-contained narratives that Herodotus so attractively embedded in his work were ransacked by playwrights but also by Romantics rediscovering oral traditions, most famously in Schiller’s catchy ballad “Der Ring des Polykrates” (1798). The Victorian translator of Herodotus, Canon George Rawlinson, still subscribed to the view that Herodotus did not write skilful prose but disgorged “a spontaneous outpouring”.

The eventual rehabilitation of Herodotus as a serious thinker in the nineteenth century was related to the rise of anthropology in tandem with imperial ethnography. By 1874, in his Social Life of Greece, the Irish scholar J. P. Mahaffy (by no means an anticolonial thinker), could openly challenge the alleged superiority of Thucydides as historian. In the twentieth century, the combined efforts of Momigliano and Isaiah Berlin illustrated the incomparable role played by Herodotus in the philosophy as well as the practice of history, while the reinstatement of oral sources at the heart of historical study did much to revive interest in the Ionian logographer within Classics. But his most recent revival inside the academy is linked with the post-structuralist distrust of grand narratives, and with its accompanying love of multiplicity, ambiguity and the erasure of categories. This makes it even more paradoxical that within popular culture, as Zack Snyder has demonstrated in 300, the “grand narrative” of the liberty-loving West’s defeat of an eternally despotic Oriental foe, a narrative for which Herodotus is indeed partly responsible, remains perniciously seductive.

A. M. Bowie, editor
HERODOTUS
Histories Book VIII
258pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (paperback, £18.99). US $99 (paperback, $36.99).
978 0 521 57571 8

David Asheri et al
A COMMENTARY ON HERODOTUS BOOKS I–IV
721pp. Oxford University Press. £165 (US $399).
978 0 19 814956 9

Elizabeth Irwin and Emily Greenwood, editors
READING HERODOTUS
A study of the Logoi in Book V of Herodotus’ Histories
343pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (US $99).
978 0 521 87630 8





Edith Hall is Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her most recent book, The Return of Ulysses: A cultural history of Homer's "Odyssey", was published earlier this year.