DAWN
The Review, Aug 24-30, 2000 . Karachi, Pakistan
Herodotus
Somewhere around 430 BC in Greece,
a man in his mid-fifties completed a medium sized book on which
he had been working all his life. The book was about the heroic
struggle between his own people, the Greeks, and the mighty empire
of the Persians. But this political story was told through a series
of interesting anecdotes, all heard by the magnificent old man
during his travels in many countries of the world. For this book,
he couldn't find a name more suitable than the seemingly common
and plain title: Researches, or, in Greek, Historia.
Thus history was born, and the old man was, of course, Herodotus.
The ancients used to call Herodotus
the Father of History. The moderns called him the Father of Lies.
Yet, in his own mind he was neither inventing a new subject nor
fabricating lies when he set out to write his book. "Herodotus
of Halicarnassus," the first line of the book went on, "his
Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past
by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our
own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they
came into conflict." This single line contains many keywords:
memory, put on record, astonishing achievements, our own people,
other people, conflict. History, as it was known until our own
times, was all of these things and just these things.
Ironically, history is silent about
Herodotus, its own father. Almost nothing is known about him and
we just have his book, plainly and yet magnificently titled Histories.
Almost everything we known about his life is inferred from a between
the lines reading of this single work. Quite remarkably, the book
itself contains enough evidence to reconstruct the life of its
author.
Herodotus had two major traits that
made him a historian. The first was that he enjoyed life. In his
book he never failed to grasp the human element buried in the
political incidents he was going to record. The second dominant
feature of his personality was that he was broad-minded. He listened
to stories from different sources, and he was willing to give
his enemies their due credit. This might have been because of
his birth in one of the most international regions of the ancient
world: Asia Minor. Halicarnassus, the city of Herodotus, was a
Greek colony on the outskirts of the Persian Empire, and was an
important trade centre between the East and the West. Thus Herodotus
felt as much at ease in Persia as he did in the mainland Greece.
These two features, his love for life and his broad-mindedness,
helped Herodotus produce a book that remained popular in his own
days as well as all times to come. Even today, when the academic
trends have changed so much that Histories of Herodotus
could be regarded more easily as a collection of fairy-tales than
as a sourcebook of history, the book still retains much of its
popularity and is never out of print, especially in its English
translation.
When Herodotus was probably a few
years old, he may have seen the great battle ships of the Persian
emperor sailing towards the mainland Greece. The Persian Emperor,
the King of the Earth, had decided to annihilate Greece. The child
must have been told that the Persian Armada was far greater than
the fleet of Jason, who had brought the Golden Fleece in the mythical
times, or the navy that captured Troy in the ancient days. And
soon afterwards, news arrived from the mainland Greece that the
small but efficient navy of Athens with the help of other Greek
states had sunk the great armada of the Persian King! Soon afterwards,
Halicarnassus received visitors and tourists who had taken part
in the great sea-battle. Herodotus met several of them, and learnt
an eyewitness account of the astonishing event. The Battle of
Salamis, in 480 BC, has been seen by the historians as the turning
point in the history of the ancient world. Apart from its political
impact, it also had a moral implication: power is impermanent.
At least that was the lesson that Herodotus learnt from that incident.
At the same time, another child far away in the mainland Greece
itself was hearing the same stories, and learning the same lesson
about the impermanence of power. His name was Sophocles.
When Herodotus was about twenty
years old, his family decided to participate in a revolt against
the local ruler of Halicarnassus. The ruler, supported by his
Persian masters, defeated the rebells and executed its ringleader,
a close relative of Herodotus. Herodotus had to flee for his life.
He left his parent city and thus started his life-long wanderings
into the foreign lands.
The first stay of Herodotus was
the island of Samos, not very far from his native city. But he
probably had a natural bent on travelling and it is assumed that
he sailed frequently up the Black Sea and some of its tributary
rivers. Once acquainted to the life of a stranger, the young adventurer
began to like it and although his party was successful in its
second rebellion against the ruler of Halicarnassus, Herodotus
never settled again in that city. At the age of thirty, he set
out to see the world.
We are not sure of the sequence
of his travels, but we know that he visited Egypt, Babylon and
many other cities of the Near East. In Egypt the great tombs of
the ancient kings baffled him. In his characteristic manner, he
refrained from giving them any special name, and described them
for just what they were: built in a "pyramid" shape.
Yet Herodotus could not help feeling disgusted at cruelty of the
forced labor. When he was told scandalous stories about the kings
who built them, he was all too pleased to believe them. One such
story was about Cheops, the pharaoh who ordered the greatest pyramid.
The story went on that when Cheops ran out of money he sent his
daughter to a brothel where she earned money for her father's
pyramid through prostitution! Herodotus didn't use his logic when
he listened to this story. He wanted to see a perfect world, a
meaning into everything. The story of Cheops satisfied Herodotus'
sense of purpose. The man who was cruel enough to enslave thousands
of men for building something as useless as a tomb, must have
been crazy enough to barter his own daughter to the same end.
"No crime was too great for Cheops," Herodotus concluded.
We are not sure how Herodotus financed
his travels, nor do we know their purpose. It is generally assumed
that like many other Halicarnassians he too was a merchant. But
the ancients had an ear for interesting stories, and with his
rich repertoire of exotic tales from all known regions of the
world, Herodotus must have found hospitality everywhere he went.
He was one international citizen that was never at a loss in any
foreign land.
If Herodotus ever came closer to
patriotism for any city it was Athens. He was drawn to that great
metropolis of the ancient Greece, like many other intellectuals,
due to the principle of human freedom that was the hallmark of
that first democracy of the world. He must have been in his thirties
when he migrated to Athens, and for once in his life he was willing
to settle down. Ironically, he was denied the status of a citizen.
Shortly before Herodotus arrived in Athens, or roughly around
the same time, the Athenians had passed a law to stop the naturalization
of the crowd that was pouring in over the ancient world to the
new super power. Acquiring nationality had become a difficult
process, requiring a double vote from the parliament, and whatever
friends Herodotus had in Athens failed to acquire this honor for
the historian. In spite of the fact, Herodotus remained an enthusiastic
advocate of the Athenian democracy in the classical times.
Athens of the fifth century BC was
an interesting place. The great leader Pericles was at his prime.
Playwrights like Sophocles (c 495 - 406 BC) and Euripedes (c 480
BC - 406 BC) while a younger breed of entertainers and thinkers
was coming up. If Herodotus arrived in Athens around 450 BC, and
remained there for about ten years, as we generally believe, then
he might also have seen an awfully irreverent teenager going around
by the name of Aristophanes (c460 BC - 385 BC). Another young
contemporary was Socrates (c469 BC
- 399 BC), and it's interesting to speculate whether the young
philosopher, then in his twenties, ever stopped Herodotus to ask
him, "What is history?"
In any case, it was here in Athens
that Herodotus probably first began writing down his "researches."
A hundred years ago, it wouldn't have been possible for any writer
to write such a book in Greek prose. It had long been regarded
that all great writing must be committed in verse. But a new awareness
was growing since the previous century, and prose was now accepted
as a medium for writing notable books. However, the boundary line
between fiction and non-fiction was not clearly demarcated. It's
interesting to remember that when Herodotus sat down to write
his book, he was looking at himself as a successor of Homer rather
than a follower of Hecataeus, the Greek politican who had made
an attempt at writing history around 500 BC.
To begin with, the poems composed
by Homer had always been seen as the primary sources of information
on the past. Somewhat recently, scholars had begun to question
their authenticity. A new awareness was coming up, and it was
stated that Homer was essentially a poet and therefore his work
should be seen as literature rather than fact. Herodotus probably
didn't agree with this radical view. If something is interesting,
it doesn't mean it can't be true, he must have thought. The only
thing that distanced him from Homer was that Herodotus saw himself
as a citizen of a "new world order." Things had changed
since the days of Homer. There are new heroes, and they must receive
glory. This may not have been Herodotus' own idea. It was all
in the air. The Battle of Salamis, fought at the time when Herodotus
was only four year old, might have been a military business to
the ones who fought it. But to the generation that had grown up
on stories about it, such as Herodotus himself, it was a second
Trojan War. The parallels were so uncanny: once again, there had
been a battle between the East and the West in which the Greek
navy had defeated the Eastern power. But quite dramatically, if
the first war was about the Greek invasion on an Eastern city,
the recent one was fought to defend a Greek city against the Eastern
invasion. And just as all Greek states had united by the bond
of honour to restore Helen, they had united to defend the freedom
of Athens. The generation of Herodotus felt that it was living
in mythical times, and deserves a Homeric treatment. For Herodotus,
who obviously shared this feeling of greatness about his times,
it was all the more important that there should be a new Homer,
so that "the astonishing achievements of both our own and
of other people" should not be forgotten. And the essence
of their action lied in the element of conflict -- a principle
of drama, which Herodotus might have picked up from his new friend
Sophocles.
Herodotus planned his book on a
literary canvas. Just like Homer, it should open at the middle
of the conflict, and the background could be filled in later,
as the story goes along. Also, it should have a progression and
a satisfying ending. For that, Herodotus believed, he neither
needed to twist the events, not invent from his own imagination.
It was his firm belief that human action is governed by a divine
code of ethics. Good deeds are rewarded, while bad deeds are punished,
and destiny too plays a part. To the Greek mind, these three aspects
of truth could explain the entire human history. Every action
was either a consequence of a good action, or of a bad action,
and if that didn't make sense then it must have been an intervention
by fate, or destiny. Unlike many other civilizations who played
with the element of destiny in their world view, the Greek response
to destiny wasn't passive: they must be faced with courage rather
than self-pity. This, then, was the theme of the book Herodotus
called his researches while its plot was the centuries old conflict
between the Greeks and Persians, beginning with the abduction
of Helen of Troy of perhaps a little earlier. He went about it
in a simplistic manner. Where he found contradictory statements
about the same event, he recorded them all. He didn't regard it
his duty, or even his privilege, to tell his readers which ones
were true unless where he found a clear argument. This approach
may have had its root in the Athenian spirit of democracy, whose
central principle was that everyone must get a hearing. The stories
of Amazon women, phoenix, or the labyrinth of Minotaur may have
sounded as absurd to Herodotus as they sound to his modern-day
critic. But then he had heard far more absurd speeches being made
in the name of political debate form the speaker's platform in
the city-centre Athens. If the citizens had the right to choose
their own truth in the city-centre, why shouldn't they have the
same right when reading the researches of Herodotus?
We are not sure how long did it
take him to complete his book. It is commonly believed that he
took out several editions, and the first one was brought in his
early days at Athens. He might still have hoped to get citizenship.
Those hopes getting sour, he left for the Athenian colony of Thuria
in Italy around 443 BC. It is supposed that he had enough wealth
to purchase some property there and live happily ever after. Some
believe that the passages in his book that refer to events taking
place at Athens after 443 BC, are evidence that he returned to
that city sometime in later in his life. And the fact that there
is no reference to any event after 430 BC is taken as a proof
that Herodotus died soon after that year. He might have died of
plague during his second visit to Athens, since Athens was in
the grip of that epidemic. But the event of his death, like almost
everything about his life, is a mere speculation. The only thing
we can say with certainty is that he existed. And that his existence
made a difference, not only to those who came after him, but also
to those who had lived before.
