Read Along: Herodotus Gets Going
The Histories | Interface | The Hell Candidate | #002
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Give or take a few centuries, the pyramids were as old to Herodotus as Herodotus is to us. Photo by Leonardo Ramos on Unsplash
New year, new books
Welcome back to the Read Along! And a happy new year to all our Gentle Readers, with this being the first edition of 2024. Which, incidentally, is about the number of new books I acquired in the closing weeks of 2023.
Books just follow me home. I can’t help it.
Two new acquisitions I look forward to digging into are Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist, (Hardcover | Kindle | Audible) by Larry Rohter, a biography of the most famous Brazilian you’ve never heard of unless you’re from Brazil, and The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (Paperback | Kindle | Audible), by Mike Duncan, creator and host of the excellent The History of Rome podcast. Exactly when I’ll get to these is anyone’s guess — I’ve still got hundreds of pages to go on Herodotus. But if you’re interested in Roman or Brazilian history, check them out.
Election novel nightmares
This being a presidential election year I want to set the Wayback Machine for September 2020 when I sent out Thursday Things Tuesday Edition #1 which featured the first (and last) ever Thursday Things Tuesday Book Report, discussing two of my favorite election-themed novels. I have retroactively declared TTTE #1 to be the zero edition of the Read Along.1 The Tuesday Book Report was simply ahead of its time.
Both of these books are set during presidential elections. Both focus on the campaign of an unusual, and perhaps sinister, candidate. Both were written under pseudonyms. One is horror, the other science fiction.
The Hell Candidate by Thomas Luke (aka Graham Masterson) (1980) Short version: Presidential candidate is possessed by Satan. Supernatural shenanigans ensue.
Interface by Stephen Bury (aka Neal Stephenson and George F. Jewsbury) (1995) Short version: Presidential candidate who suffered a stroke is revived by corporate cabal and remote-controlled through a brain implant.
I’ll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to decide which scenario is more plausible.
Follow the link for more about these two political thrillers with a twist.
Herodotus, opening The Histories
The Histories, Herodotus, Translation by George Rawlinson (Everyman’s Library, 1992) (Paperback | Kindle | Audible)
Now for our feature presentation. I’ve read Books 1 & 2 of The Histories by Herodotus and am well into Book 3. The Histories is divided into nine books, named for the nine muses of Greek mythology. This was not a division made by Herodotus himself, but by later editors of his work.
Here is a brief article from History.com with an overview of Herodotus and The Histories: Herodotus
Herodotus was born in about 485 B.C. in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, a lively commercial center on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. He came from a wealthy and cosmopolitan Greek-Carian merchant family.
Halicarnassus fell under the sway of the Persian Empire. The family of Herodotus opposed the pro-Persian ruler of the city and went into exile on the island of Samos. Herodotus returned to his native city as a young man to take part in a failed rebellion against Persian rule. When that didn’t work out he left town — which was probably wise — never to return.
More from History.com:
Instead of settling in one place, Herodotus spent his life traveling from one Persian territory to another. He crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt and traveled through Palestine to Syria and Babylon. He headed to Macedonia and visited all the islands of the Greek Archipelago: Rhodes, Cyprus, Delos, Paros, Thasos, Samothrace, Crete, Samos, Cythera and Aegina.
Herodotus sailed through the Hellespont to the Black Sea and kept going until he hit the Danube River. While he traveled, Herodotus collected what he called “autopsies,” or “personal inquiries”: He listened to ancient myths and legends, recorded oral histories and made notes of the places and things that he saw.
When Herodotus was not traveling, he returned to Athens; there, he became something of a celebrity. He gave readings in public places and collected fees from officials for his appearances.
In 445 B.C., the people of Athens voted to give him a prize of 10 talents—almost $200,000 in today’s money—to honor him for his contributions to the city’s intellectual life.
Herodotus wrote only one book (that we know of): The Histories, which was not published in full until after his death. But that one book was enough to make his name and secure his fame forever. Or for at least for the next 2400 years and counting, which isn’t bad for a first book!
So what was so great about The Histories? And why is Herodotus called “The Father of History”? (A sobriquet bestowed on him by no lesser than the Roman statesman, orator, and writer Cicero.)
The short version is Herodotus broke new ground in the recording of history. His monumental work not only chronicles the Greco-Persian Wars, but also delves into the customs, geography, and cultures of the peoples he encountered in his extensive travels.
Before Herodotus, accounts of the past were largely confined to mythological narratives — think The Illiad — or royal chronicles that recited events without any inquiry into the whys and wherefores of those events. These accounts were often written in verse. Herodotus, on the other hand, hit the road and wore out some shoe leather — or sandal leather — to get the facts.
And he wrote prose. Take that, dactylic hexameter!
Herodotus questioned priests, merchants, mercenaries, sailors, oracles, and others, including eyewitnesses to significant events and battles, to gather information about the Greco-Persian wars and the events leading to them.
Did Homer do that? No.
This sounds like a commonsense approach now, but that’s because historians have been copying the methods of Herodotus ever since. Not only the information gathering, ,but the analysis of the causes of events. Herodotus was not content with “It was the will of the gods” or “Fate decreed it” as explanations for why the wars happened as they did. He blended firsthand observation, second-hand accounts, and critical evaluation of these sources, which laid the groundwork for historical inquiry based on evidence and rational analysis. So for that he gets to add Father of History to his LinkedIn profile.
What makes The Histories awesome, however, are all the tangents Herodotus goes on. We don’t even get to the Ionian Revolt and the subsequent Persian invasions of Greece — with the famous battles of Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae, etc. — until Book 5. Everything before that is build up, with lots of digressions about marriage customs, disemboweling oxen, oracular pronouncement, ironic comeuppances, clever thieves, flying snakes, and, oh by the way, the rise of the Persian empire.
The Histories is a treasure trove of information on the ancient world. Herodotus's descriptions of the customs, geography, flora, fauna, and peoples of the Mediterranean and Near East in the 5th century BCE are just fun. Assuming ancient history and hearsay are your idea of fun in the first place, of course. But if not, you probably wouldn’t be reading Herodotus, now would you?
I’m actually going to pull a Herodotus now and defer getting into the text until next time. But first, let’s meet our translator: George Rawlinson. According to his bio in the Everyman edition I’m reading:
George Rawlinson, born in 1812, was elected Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1840. He became Bampton Lecturer in 1859; was made a Canon of Canterbury in 1872; and in 1861 Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford. He died in 1902, aged ninety. Other works by George Rawlinson include The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient East and The History of Phoenicia.
Both of those books are now on my wish list. Sigh. Anyway, the English prose in this translation is distinctly 19th century, which I love. But not all modern readers may care for it and there are more modern translations available. We’ll get to those later.
I really regret letting this book sit on my shelf for fifteen or twenty years before finally taking a serious run at it. I did read the first 70 pages or so shortly after buying the book, and I’ve leafed through it from time to time since. I know some of the famous episodes from The Histories and, of course, the general outline of the Persian wars. But this is truly my first time through from cover to cover. So we will dig in next time to discuss my read of Books 1 & 2. You’ve got plenty of time to catch up if you’re reading along!
Thank you for reading along!
Have you read Herodotus? Do you have a favorite political thriller? Do you own more books than you’ll ever read? Let me know in the comments!
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