Week Six

Herodotus, Histories

How is historiography different from mythology?

Does what has happened before us affect how we should act?

Born a Persian subject in Halicarnassus, a Dorian Greek colony south of Ionia on the western coast of modern-day Turkey, Herodotus (c.484-c.425 B.C.) was crowned the “father of history” by Cicero for having written the Histories, an account of the Greco-Persian Wars. After extensive travel from which he gathered a trove of oral traditions, Herodotus took up residence in Periclean Athens around 447 B.C. for a few years, becoming friends with Sophocles. The Histories has as its goal “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks.” Here we see a continuation of the Iliad’s concern for kleos (fame, glory), though now in the context of a universal humanity. The book inquires into the causes of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians and tries to understand how Greece could have defeated the world’s first superpower. It is organized according to the stages of formation of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, with each subjected land treated ethnographically.

Herodotus does not resort to the gods for explanations of events. A shift to a more secular approach to reality is indicated in his recourse to prose (then still a novelty); poetry was associated with a people’s political mythology. Before his work, we have annals chronicling events, but these served politico-religious purposes. The power of the aristocracy was being eroded during the Archaic period by a rising merchant class and written law codes, which constrained traditional privileges. Prose belongs to a world in which not only the grandees (priests and aristocrats) make history, in which persuasive speech in public assemblies has import. Though Herodotus includes large amounts of legendary material, he is the first to have attempted to sift facts from myth. This was certainly progress, though as with other scientific inquiries, this project involves the danger of reducing reality to empirical data. Heir to the Ionian explosion of vigorous intellectual speculation of the previous century, Herodotus brought philosophy’s new “scientific” spirit of conducting research (Greek historia), or systematic questioning, into the causality of past events.

- David Franks