3 Herodotus’s Program (§§5-6)

Herodotus draws a very sharp distinction between the things the Persians and Phoenicians say and the things he will say. He will discuss the first he knows of who commenced unjust works (πρῶτον ὑπάρξαντα ἀδίκων ἔργων) upon the Greeks.^[1] This does not, mean, of course, that there was no earlier Asian who treated the Greeks unjustly; it means that if there be such a one, he does not fall within Herodotus’s knowledge.

We might now expect the first to have accomplished unjust works on the Greeks to be a cruel, monstrous man, yet who is named? It is Croe­sus—an example not of extraordinary barbarian cruelty, but of misplaced values and ambitions. That Croesus’s actions are Herodotus’s starting place calls for some discussion.

The clearly evil personages in the Persian Wars are Cambyses and Xerxes, men whose capricious and insane behavior rightly makes them objects of civilized scorn. These are the kind of people Greeks could regard as almost another species of animal. But Croesus? Croesus could be one of us! Like so many of the Greeks, he thinks that happiness is money; like so many of the Greeks, he is religious, but intelligently so, taking the trouble to test the various oracles for their veracity; like the Greeks, he is prudent, trying to find the best allies; like the Greeks, he dotes on his children; like the Greeks, he is grasping. Croesus serves as the perfect figure for Herodotus to use to teach his lessons: though not a Greek, the genial and identifiable Croesus is the proof text of the most important lesson, the one stated here in the programmatic declaration: human happiness does not stay long in the same place. It is a lesson of the utmost importance for Herodotus’s generation, the generation of the 430s.^[2]

The claim that Croesus was the first to commence unjust deeds against the Greeks strikes the reader as very peculiar, especially in the light of what Herodotus says in the very paragraph where he identifies Croesus (1.6). To the statement of life’s uncertainty (that happiness does not continue long in the same place), Herodotus juxtaposes the name of Croesus, the first who made some Greek cities pay tribute and who entered into alliances with some of them. He also conquered quite a few Greeks-Aeolians, lonians, Dorians-and made a treaty with the Spartans. None of this would be peculiar except that Herodotus immediately rejects the Cimmerian attack on Ionia as the first barbarian injustice against the Greeks. Why does he reject it? Because, he says, it was a raid for plunder, not for subjection. Later on, Herodotus tells how Gyges attacked Miletus and Smyrna and took Colophon, and how Gyges’s son Ardys took Priene and made war on Miletus. Why then should Herodotus, knowing at least three conflicts between the Greeks and barbarians before Croesus, name Croesus as the first to commence injustices?^[3] Even if Gyges and Ardys were fighting defensively and were not guilty of injustice, how can we explain Cimmerians’ raids for plunder? Surely they cannot be explained as defensive.

Perhaps the raids of the Cimmerians had no lasting effects, for after some years of marauding they were driven out of Asia by Lydian Alyattes (1.15). They were the enemies of the Lydians as well as of the Greeks; it is possible that the Lydians and Milesians entered into an alliance to face the common enemy.^[4] What seems to me likely, then, is that Herodotus named Croesus as the first whose unjust behavior toward the Greeks mattered. If Gyges and Ardys preceded him in fighting with the Greeks, either they did not commence the aggression or they entered into friendly relations with their onetime enemies and so nothing came of the conflict.^[5] Yet, as others have pointed out, Herodotus does not devote very much attention to Croesus’s injustice against the Greeks.^[6] Why, then, does Herodotus choose to introduce the History with a very long story about him? The answer, I think, is not historical but philosophical. Herodotus is writing to warn the Greeks not to behave as though their present good fortune will last forever; he is writing to warn them by means of characters similar to themselves of the dangers of overconfidence, wealth, and greed. No one better than Croesus could provide the meat for the cautionary tale Herodotus has to present. The sad thing for Greek history is how unsuc­cessful Herodotus was: for all the loveliness and brilliance of his work, the Athenians and Spartans refused to learn the lessons he had to teach, and they were unable to avoid the Peloponnesian War.^[7]

Before naming Croesus and after declining to investigate further the stories of the Persians and Phoenicians, Herodotus promises—in recogni­tion of the vicissitudes of life—to discuss similarly (ὁμοίως) the cities that were once great and once small. Herodotus does not ultimately fulfill this promise, but the very statement of the program is indeed a stark warning to his readers.^[8]

That life is uncertain seems a truism hardly necessary to state; yet for the Greeks the truism became a refrain throughout their art.^[9] Surely it would not have had to be repeated were the truth settled in the daily consciousness of people. Like ourselves, the ancients engaged in such philosophical reflections only when driven to them by the misfortunes of life; the general tendency of human nature is to assume the continuance of present conditions into perpetuity, to make plans for the future assuming the constancy of the present moment, and never to assume change, especially change for the worse. As long as human nature remains the same, people will bemoan the uncertainty of life yet refuse to believe that it pertains to themselves. Most Greek wisdom achieves its effects by repetition rather than by startling novelty. What, after all, do we learn from Greek tragedy? To honor the gods, to refrain from hubris, to respect oracles—lessons valuable and useful indeed, but hardly ones that we could not think of by ourselves. Greek tragedy achieves its power by operating upon the emotions and by pounding them over and over again with the same lessons, for the emotions can be trained only through repetition. So too does Herodotus present instance after instance of the proposition that happiness does not continue long in the same place, hoping to penetrate the consciousness of his audience, a consciousness more adamantine than the skulls of the Egyptians (3.12).