Hello, χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 31, Herodotus: What Was His Deal, Anyway? I’m Scott Emmons.

If there’s one name I’ve mentioned more than any other in this podcast so far, it would have to be Herodotus. His massive work, ostensibly about the Persian Wars but encompassing much, much more, is our main source of information for the history of the archaic period. We can supplement it with archaeological evidence, a few inscriptions, and later authors like Plutarch and Diodorus, and all of those are important, but Herodotus is the earliest and often the best authority we have. As we’ve seen, that presents a problem when we’re trying to reconstruct events of the 6th century and earlier, because Herodotus had to get his information from oral traditions, which naturally embellished those events and often reflected political biases. On top of that, Herodotus was a superb storyteller. His narratives have his own distinctive touch. So, when we look at Greek history up to and including the Persian Wars, we’re inevitably looking at it through a Herodotean lens. So for this mid-month episode, I thought it would be valuable to take a closer look at Herodotus — who he was, what his methods were, his value as a historical source, and his place in the intellectual world of his time. 

Right away, we run into a challenge. It’s hard to make general observations about Herodotus, because his work is so big and multifaceted. He can be inconsistent, so that a theory based on one part of his work may be completely undermined by another passage. But we do have Herodotus’ own statement about his aims in writing the Histories, and that makes a convenient entry point. He opens with a long sentence that serves as something like a book blurb. The most literal translation I’ve been able to find is the one by A.D. Godley in the Loeb Classical Library edition. Quote:

What Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth: in order that so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown. Unquote

There’s a lot to unpack there. But one of the key pieces is that last phrase. He’s written his work so that great and marvelous deeds may not lack what the Greeks called kleos —fame, glory, or as Godley renders it, renown. Right at the outset, we have an echo of Homer. The Homeric epics preserve the kleos of great heroes like Achilles and Odysseus. Herodotus is now doing for those who fought the Persian Wars what Homer did for the heroes of the distant past. 

 Homeric influence is no surprise at all, because epic poetry was the only literary model for an extended narrative. And as strange as it may sound to us in the 21st century, the ancient Greeks and Romans always considered history a literary genre. Authors after Herodotus certainly developed more rigorous methods for historical research. But throughout antiquity, history was expected to be written in a literary narrative style and to follow certain conventions. One of the most obvious examples is the use of speeches. Herodotus and Thucydides didn’t have any written speeches by the historical figures they wrote about. So if they were reporting an assembly meeting or a general’s speech to the troops, they were perfectly free to make up something that they considered appropriate for the situation. No serious historian could get away with that today, but it was an accepted convention in the ancient literary genre of history. 

And yet, there’s a crucial difference that makes Herodotus’ work something new. To go back to his opening sentence, he says he’s set forth what he’s learned by inquiry. The Greek word is “historiē” — which eventually came to mean “history” as we think of it, but in Herodotus’ time it meant inquiry. The process of finding things out. Andrea Purvis, whose translation I usually use for this podcast, renders it as “research.” Compare that with the Homeric epics, which begin with appeals to the muse to tell the tale through the poet. 

 In Herodotus’ time, which would be the mid-to-late 5th century BCE, people who thought about such things took a rationalist view of ancient events like the Trojan War. Yes, it was a real historical event, Achilles and Agamemnon had really lived, but gods and goddesses probably hadn’t really appeared in person to help their favorite warriors in battle. It was understood that poets embellished their stories for artistic effect. Herodotus draws a sharp distinction between legendary events that are known from poetry and those that can be verified as fact through historiē, inquiry.

He makes that distinction very clear at a transition point early in his work. Remember, he says in his opening paragraph that he’s especially interested in the reasons why the Persians and Greeks fought each other. He starts by looking at early legends about conflicts between east and west. Curiously, they all amount to abductions of women. Some Phoenicians — people from the Asiatic side — abducted the princess Io from Argos. The Greeks retaliated by taking Europa from Phoenician Tyre. Then the Greeks became the aggressors and took Medea from Colchis on the east coast of the Black Sea — after which the Trojan Paris took Helen from Greece. So these reciprocal acts of woman-stealing are represented as ratcheting up hostility between the Greeks and the Asians. But then Herodotus makes his crucial transition. Again in the Godley translation, quote:

 These are the stories of the Persians and the Phoenicians. For my own part, I will not say that this or that story is true, but I will name him whom I myself know to have done unprovoked wrong to the Greeks, and go forward with my history… Unquote

 He then starts in with his story of Croesus, the Lydian king who subjugated the Greek cities of Ionia. Inquiry, historiē, can’t confirm anything about those ancient stories. But Croesus is only about a century before Herodotus. He can sift through stories he gets from his informants, and he can even see the gifts that Croesus dedicated at Delphi. Historiē is the search for facts and for rational causes. It’s worth noting that the Hippocratic corpus of medical literature started at this time, and historiē was the word used for inquiry into the causes of diseases.

 So how did Herodotus come to make these inquiries and compile his massive work? That’s not an easy question to answer, because so little is known about his life. This is a common problem with ancient authors, that hardly anything was recorded about them during their lifetimes, but later generations got curious about them and invented a lot of stories about them. So our main sources for Herodotus’ life are his own work and the Suda, that 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia I’ve mentioned before, which always has to be used with extreme caution. 

 What we get is a bare outline of a biography. Herodotus tells us in his opening sentence that he’s from Halicarnassus, a coastal city that’s now Bodrum in southwestern Turkey. He must have been born sometime between 485 and 480 BCE, so Halicarnassus would have been under Persian rule at the time. It was in the region of Caria, and some of his relatives had Carian names, which suggests Herodotus himself may have been of mixed Greek and Carian ancestry. That mixed background may help explain his respect for other cultures and his openness to their customs. There’s very little Greek chauvinism in Herodotus. Right at the outset, he says he wants to preserve the memory of great deeds done by both Greeks and foreigners. He clearly had an intense curiosity about non-Greek peoples and how they lived. Some later Greek authors took him to task for that. Plutarch wrote an essay called “On the Malice of Herodotus,” where at one point he calls him “philobarbaros” — a “barbarian lover.”

 In any case, he didn’t spend his whole life in Halicarnassus. If we can believe the Suda, he was exiled during some political upheaval in the city. We don’t know where he went at first, but his elaborate descriptions of Samos and its architectural wonders show that he spent a good deal of time there. He also had an extended stay in Athens, where we hear that he gave public readings of his work, or at least parts of it. Later in his life, he joined the panhellenic colony of Thurii that Athens founded in southern Italy. In fact, a lot of early manuscripts of his work gave his name as Herodotus of Thurii.

 That very sketchy account illustrates one defining feature of his life — Herodotus was a great traveler. Some of that travel may have been forced, as in his exile. Some scholars have speculated that he might have started out as a trader, which would have taken him to important commercial points around the Mediterranean. But in his writing, he emphasizes travel for the purpose of inquiry, of seeing things for himself in order to get accurate knowledge. The link between travel and wisdom is a recurring motif in Greek culture. At the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer says Odysseus saw the cities of many people and came to know their minds. Herodotus’ own account of the wise lawgiver Solon reflects that same idea. Solon left Athens in part to avoid pressure to repeal some of the laws he’d established, but also to see the world.

 That kind of curiosity seems to have been the motivating factor in many of Herodotus’ travels. He had wide-ranging interests, from the great deeds of kings and pharaohs down to the details of commercial boat traffic on the Euphrates. He was interested in scientific questions involving astronomy, climatology, zoology, and botany, to name just a few. I’ve already mentioned his keen interest in ethnography. For that, he had a definite forerunner in the prose writer Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote a work describing the peoples inhabiting all the coastal areas of the known world. A few extensive fragments of it survive. But Hecataeus doesn’t seem to have ever woven his ethnography into a larger historical framework the way Herodotus did. Along with ethnography, Herodotus shows a special fascination with wonders. If something is impressive or out of the ordinary, whether a feat of engineering or a natural phenomenon, he’ll be sure to report it.

 All of that means Herodotus’ work includes much more than what we would call history. His strategy for organizing all that material is simple in principle, but it can sometimes make it frustrating for a modern reader. Because his narrative is definitely not linear. For example, in Book 1, he tells us that King Croesus went looking for Greek allies to prepare for his confrontation with the Persians, and he found out that the foremost cities were Athens and Sparta. That was during Pisistratus’ tyranny in Athens. So when he gets to that point, Herodotus drops the narrative about Croesus to tell us all about how the Pisistratid tyranny got started. And when he’s done with that, he says, “Now I’ll tell you all about Sparta’s wars with Tegea and how it got the upper hand after finding the bones of Orestes.” Then, after completing those two narratives, he says, “These are the things Croesus learned,” and he picks up again with the main story. This is a device called “ring composition,” and it’s another technique taken straight out of Homer. The author interrupts the narrative to dive into some other subject matter, then announces, “That’s the end of the digression; I’m now continuing with the main story.” And that completes the ring.

 So, what about his historical method? We’ve seen that Herodotus intended his work to be different from the narratives of Homer and other poets, to be based on fact. There’s a striking passage where he makes the distinction crystal clear. At one point in Book 2, which is essentially one long digression on Egypt, he argues that when Paris abducted Helen, he was driven off course to Egypt, and the Egyptians kept her there while Paris went on to Troy. He says Homer himself knew that, but it was more “appropriate” for an epic poem that she should be taken off to Troy. In other words, the poet had the freedom to choose or invent a narrative that suited his artistic purposes. In this new kind of literature that Herodotus is inventing, he has to rely on inquiry to come as close as possible to the truth.

 For that, he has to have some kind of method for evaluating his information. He’s often careful to point out how much is based on his own observation and how much he gets at second hand. From those comments, we can reconstruct a basic methodology. For geography and monuments, it’s best to have his own empirical observation. If he can’t see something for himself, the next best option is to find a reliable eyewitness. A classic example is his description of the Nile. He tells the reader he traveled as far as the city of Elephantine, but from that point on, his report is based on what he’s heard from others. 

 It’s trickier when he’s reporting events from the past, because in that case, everything is based on hearsay. It’s ideal if he can get information from an eyewitness, and there would be a few of those around for his main subject, the Persian Wars. But those accounts can often contradict each other, and for events farther back, oral traditions are all he has to work with. He sometimes presents different narratives of an event and gives reasons why he thinks one version is more trustworthy. But not always. More often, he just tells the story and lets it go at that. At one point, he makes a general comment about the way he uses sources. He’s been discussing competing accounts of an event, and he admits that in this case he can’t even venture an opinion on which one is true. He goes on to say, as translated by Andrea Purvis, quote: 

 I may be obliged to tell what is said, but I am not at all obliged to believe it. And you may consider this statement to be valid for my entire work. Unquote

 Those are the basics of his method, at least in theory. But now we run up against the thorny question that scholars have debated for centuries… Just how trustworthy is Herodotus? How rigidly did he stick to his own methods? His work contains dozens of fantastic travelers’ tales, a lot of bogus science, and observations that don’t hold up against what we know from archaeology or other sources. One of the most famous examples is his account of giant ants, bigger than foxes, that live in an Indian desert and build anthills out of gold dust. The natives have to sneak up to get the gold while they’re asleep and then get a good head start back home, because those ants are super fast. Does Herodotus believe it? He doesn’t say. There are other times when his critical brain just seems to be out to lunch. He tells us that when a female lion gives birth, the cub destroys her womb with its claws, so she can only have one cub during her lifetime. Obviously, if that were true, there wouldn’t be any lions.

 Even some things that Herodotus reports having seen for himself have been called into question. His description of a gigantic labyrinth in Egypt doesn’t square with the later description by the geographer Strabo. Some recent scholars have gone so far as to argue that he made up his sources and cribbed a lot of what he claimed to have seen from earlier written accounts. But as I said at the beginning, Herodotus is inconsistent. Even though he can be wildly wrong at times, his information is often solid. Egyptologists have confirmed that his description of Egyptian embalming practices is mostly accurate. His account of the Persian King Darius’ accession differs in some details from the Bisitun inscription I described in an earlier episode, but the broad outline is the same, and Herodotus gets the names of six out of the seven conspirators right. So it’s dangerous to dismiss something Herodotus says just because it sounds outlandish.

 Long story short, I’m inclined to believe Herodotus when he tells us where he’s been and what he’s seen and heard, bearing in mind that he never developed a rigorous method of inquiry and critical examination. Within that framework, there’s plenty of room for certain cultural, religious, and philosophical patterns of thought to influence his work. One of the most noticeable is the assumption of balance and symmetry in both the physical world and in human events. We’ve seen in previous episodes that the early Greek attempts at world maps assumed a certain symmetry. Herodotus reflects that assumption in his discussions of world geography. Since the Nile is the largest river in the southern part of the known world and the Danube is the largest in the north, he asserts that their lengths must be similar. At one point he rejects the popular notion that there’s a race of people called “Hyperboreans” living in the extreme north. A part of his argument is that if there are Hyperboreans, there must also be “Hypernotians,” people of the extreme south, and you never hear anything about them! He’s not dogmatic about this. He doesn’t try to force observable topography into symmetrical patterns, but he does assume a general symmetry in the world.

 The principle of balance holds true not only in the physical world but in the political and moral spheres. Occasionally in Herodotus’ history, a god or some undefined divine power intervenes, and when it does, it’s usually to restore some kind of balance. When a storm destroys much of the Persian fleet before the battle of Artemisium, he sees it as the hand of god working to equalize the Greek and Persian forces at sea. Instances where the gods take an active role in specific events are rare. For the most part, Herodotus looks for human motivations and actions as the causes of historical events. But there’s still an overarching principle that a divine or cosmic power will preserve balance. Xerxes, the king who led his massive army against Greece, is portrayed as a megalomaniac whose aggression often amounts to hybris. Although Herodotus never says so explicitly, there’s a sense that he’s got payback coming to him, just as it would in a Greek tragedy.

 That law of balance means that power inevitably shifts over time. Individuals and states may gain immense power, but no one keeps it indefinitely. Herodotus states that as a fundamental principal, just when he transitions from ancient legends to history, beginning with Croesus. Again in the Purvis translation, quote:

 I shall describe him and then proceed with the rest of my story recounting cities both lesser and greater, since many of those that were great long ago have become inferior, and some that are great in my own time were inferior before. And so, resting on my knowledge that human prosperity never remains constant, I shall make mention of both without discrimination. Unquote

 It’s interesting to recall that Herodotus gave public readings to Athenian audiences, and that would have been at the height of the Athenian Empire. When he shares his observations about the inconstancy of power and prosperity, I have to wonder if he’s delivering an implied warning to Athens.

 And that concludes Episode 31. Whatever you think of Herodotus’ work, there’s never been anything quite like it before or since. If you haven’t read Herodotus, I’d highly recommend it. Although if you’re reading him purely for pleasure, I’d recommend skimming over some parts. Meanwhile, if you have questions or comments on this episode, anything you’d like to add, please reach out! My email is scott@epicgreekhistory.com, and as always, you can comment on Instagram or Facebook. I’m Scott Emmons. Music for this episode was composed and produced by Matt Hobbs and Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.