1 Introduction: Glory and ἀιτίη (§1)

Herodotus lays out his purposes with two negatives in the opening sentence. He publishes his history (ἱστορία)^[1] so that the things that have come into being from men not become extinct (μήτε … ἐξίτηλα) and so that the great and wonderful works shown by the Greeks and barbarians not be without fame (μήτε …κλεᾶ); as an example of the latter he specifies that he will discuss why they waged war with one another (τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δ᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι).^[2]

It is clear from the start that Herodotus intends his history to include more than the Persian Wars, though of course they will be an important part of the work.^[3] “The things that have come into being from men” (τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώτων) is an expansive term and allows Herodotus a great deal of latitude. ἐξίτηλα (extinct) is a rare word in the History, occurring in only one other place, at 5.39, when at Sparta the Ephori told Anaxandrides that since he had a barren wife and no relatives his race was in danger of becoming extinct. What Herodotus suggests is in fact the case, for if it had not been for his writing, many, many human accomplishments would have been erased from human memory.

Herodotus’s purpose stirs the reader to ask whether memory is necessary for historical events to have meaning. History depends, certainly, on memory; indeed, it constitutes the shared cultural memory of what has gone before. If, however, events are forgotten, if they are erased by time, does the erasure eliminate meaning from the events? The term “meaning” may be considered in two ways, as “causal meaning” and what we might call, for want of a better term, “independent meaning.” Causal meaning is the significance an event has because it ‘initiates or causes an effect. All events, remembered or not, have meaning because they somehow initiated or influenced other events. Independent meaning is the significance that a remote or seemingly isolated event has for the person who hears of it because it has value for him in his own life, an educative, entertainment, or other value. The actions of our Cro-Magnon ancestors had meaning in the first sense, because the things they did, their migrations and their discoveries, influenced and generated our world. Their actions had causal meaning even though no particular action is recorded or remembered. The events of the Trojan War, on the other hand, have both causal meaning and independent meaning. The causal meaning lies in whatever historical events followed as a result, the migration of certain Trojans to Italy, the various political repercussions of the war in the Hellenic world, and so on. The independent meaning of the Trojan War lies mostly in the artistic representations and historical and philosophical discussions that the war provoked. If the Iliad is the defining work of Western consciousness, and if the poem owes its inspiration to the Trojan War, and if the Trojan War therefore has meaning for us in our own lives, this would be independent meaning.^[4]

Events, then, have causal meaning whether or not a historian discusses them. Independent meaning, however, that is, meaning for those who are separated in time or space from the events, depends on the recorders. Who would know of Arion or of Gorgo or of Polycrates if Herodotus had not told us of them? Herodotus’s motive, expressed in the proem, is, then, to create independent meaning.

Why does independent meaning matter? It matters, I think, because it forces us to abstract from every historical event general guiding lessons or principles;^[5] it also forces us to look at every event as somehow worthwhile in itself and as worth remembering. The less causally dependent we are on the event, the more reflective, the more philosophical we can be about it; in other words, the more we can look at it for its “independent meaning.” For this reason Aristotle’s comments in the Poetics (145161-12) about history and about Herodotus in particular are not valid. Aristotle says that History deals with what a particular man did, poetry with what a kind of man did; hence poetry is more philosophical than history. As Herodotus’s History shows, however, poetry does not deal with types any more than history does, for all individuals are composites of characteristics, and characteristics are general features. Moreover, the less we are immediately affected by the personages, the more we will tend to see them as types. Thus, a man like Themistocles could stand for any shrewd, self-serving, yet patriotic individual; Croesus, for anyone who confuses a present prosperity for true happiness. It will be my aim in the pages that follow to explore the universal point that Herodotus makes in the various stories, in the events whose memory he saves from extinction. For in those memories will lie the meaning for the readers, not a remote meaning disassociated from the reader’s own life and trials, but a meaning exploding with immediate relevance. That there be no mistake about this, Herodotus very often points to the paradigmatic nature of his stories: he draws the universal lesson for us.^[6]

Things great and wonderful (μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά) deserve, he says, more than survival. They also deserve “fame” (κλέος)—a fine Homeric term (used four times by Herodotus)—the aspiration of the great heroes of old.^[7] The basic meaning of great is “large magnitude,” and the term may refer to works great physically, morally, or in their temporal effects.^[8] Magnitude is not always sufficient in itself to evoke wonder, though in some cases, like the Grand Canyon or the lunar voyages, it may be. It is possible for things, like Arion’s rescue from the wicked Corinthian sailors, to evoke wonder even if they are not of extraordinary magnitude. Here the greatness derives from the intensity, uniqueness, and miraculous nature of the experience rather than from its grandeur. Inasmuch as Herodotus discusses matters of all three kinds of greatness, it is likely that he means the phrase to refer to the qualities taken separately and taken together.

Among the great and wonderful works, he promises to take up especially why the Greeks and barbarians warred with one another. The key word here is “why’’—my translation for ἀιτίη. ἀιτίη, though often translated “cause,” means chiefly “the thing that is responsible.” Now, for us, a cause tends to be impersonal. For example, if the carburetor of our car is not working, we take the car to a mechanic. If he says “the cause” of the malfunctioning is sand in the carburetor, we have two responses: first, we think that we know the cause of the malfunctioning; second, we are not satisfied with the cause, for we think it only a partial explanation. We want to know how the sand got into the carburetor. In that desire for further knowledge we begin to approach the Greek idea of ἀιτίη, for we do not rest until we are satisfied. And what will give us the satisfaction we want is this: tracing “the causal connection” until we get to a point at which no further explanation is possible. Now by this point I do not mean that further explanation exists but that we cannot get at it; I mean, instead, that we think we have reached a beginning. And a beginning, as Aristotle tells us, is “that which has nothing necessarily before it but something necessarily after it” (Poetics 1450 b27). This notion of a definite cause is very different from some modern notions that seem to want to trace everything back to the beginning of the universe. For example, some people would insist that we cannot know the causes of the Second World War unless we go back to a history of the First World War; that we cannot understand the causes of the First World War unless we go back to the Franco-Prussian War; of the Franco-Prussian War unless we go back to the Napoleonic Wars, and so on back—I suppose—to wars in the dawn of history. College history courses show the same difficulty. A course on, say, the American Civil War, cannot go back into prehistory. Yet where to start? When were the first shots fired on Fort Sumter? At the Second Missouri Compromise? At the First Missouri Compromise? At the Constitutional Convention? It is obvious that every history must choose some moment after the Big Bang to begin. Yet any chosen moment will involve some assessment of the appropriate starting place, some interpretation of the event.

Let me give another example. Suppose a mother comes into a room where her small son and some friends are playing. She finds a broken lamp on the floor. Now she may ask one of the following questions: (1) what caused it to break? (2) who is responsible? The second question is Greek, and the Greek word ἀιτίη, especially in Herodotus, implies responsibility, as the English word “cause” does not. We hold a person responsible for something if we think that he initiated the action. If I reach out my leg and kick someone, I am responsible; if, however, a doctor is testing the reflex action of my knee and hits that spot that forces my leg to kick out, I am not held responsible even if I do hurt somebody.

Hence, when Herodotus says, “I know the man who was the ἀιτίη of the Persian Wars,” he means that he can locate the beginning of the war and place the responsibility. He locates the source in a man—not, as we tend to do today, in “environmental conditions” or “forces” or “the unconscious” or some other mysterious power and concept. In attempting to locate the ἀιτίη, Herodotus is at one with the great Ionian thinkers—philosophers and scientists—who were his countrymen: such men as Thales, who predicted the first eclipse and who argued that all things were made out of water.^[9] Democritus, the inventor of the atomic theory, once said, “I would rather show one ἀιτίη than rule over the Persian Empire” (Diels fr. 118). That attitude is the essence of Greek culture, and it is a part of the essence of our own culture.

Now even in Aristotle, who distinguished four kinds of ἀιτίη or causes and who makes subtle and abstract and complex the simple notion of responsibility found in Herodotus, responsibility is fundamental, for his famous “four causes” are arranged in a hierarchy; and the most important element of that hierarchy is the “final cause,” that is, the purpose for which something was done. The concept of purpose implies someone or some­thing capable of having a purpose; and such a person or thing can be held responsible.

The idea of responsibility is complex. In Herodotus one is responsible if no outside force compels one to do what one does. A mistake (ἁμαρτάς) or an act of madness, originating within an individual, would not free one from responsibility, for there is no outside source. In this respect Herodotus is in the tradition we find in Plato (e.g., Phaedrus 245-46) and elsewhere of seeing the soul as a kind of unmoved mover or originator of its own actions. Indeed, this is how the Greeks accounted for free will. They did not concern themselves with what stirred the soul to have an irrational thought; for them it was simply a given. Thus, for example, we find that “this Candaules was erotically fixated (ἠράσθη τῆς ἑωυτοῦ γυναικός) on his wife,” and the whole story proceeds from Candaules’s condition of being overcome with ἔρως. The erotic fixation arises entirely in Candaules; Herodotus does not find it necessary to psychoanalyze Candaules, to look into his relationship with his mother, or to probe the depths of his unconsciousness, or even to find a biological aberration. The erotic fixation is the ἀιτίη of his actions. If no external cause is present, the responsibility and origination of the action can be attributed to the performer of the action. No further hunt for an ἀιτίη is necessary.

A good part of Herodotus’s genius consists in his ability to locate this very sort of ἀιτίη. Candaules’s erotic fixation is one of the many types of irrationality that yield the causes of history; others are those irrational impulses that manifest themselves as greed, malice, envy, and the whole range of human vices. And in general, as Gibbon observes (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 3), this collection of vices and follies is the stuff that history is made of.

Let us assume for a moment the contrary of what is actually the case. Let us assume that all people in the past had acted correctly on all occasions and that no wrong decisions had ever been made, neither those generated by ignorance nor those generated by mistakes or others forms of irrationality. There would be no tales of vengeance, of broken treaties, of greedy impul­ sive men, of vanity, of heroic battles, of anything, in short, of what we study when we study history. We often hear that the value of history is to teach the mistakes of the past so that we can avoid making them again. Of course, since mistakes are only one form of wrong-doing, we should perhaps correct our statement to read “to teach the various forms of wrong-doing to avoid them again in the future.” Where, if all actions had been correct (for we are continuing our fancy), would our history be? What would perhaps substitute for history would be long lists of rulers whose actions were right, whose words were golden, whose characters were sterling. If this had been the case, there would have been no wars motivated by the base passions; there would have been no opportunities for overcoming evil or spreading havoc. There would have been nothing that could not have been predicted, with the sole exception of natural disasters. (And, of course, if there had been perfect knowledge of nature, even these could have been predicted.) Thus human irrationality provides historical change: it causes, among other things, wars, and wars are the principal source of change in the human world. Eusebius wrote that dogma has no history; only heresy has a history, for dogma, according to Eusebius, is always right, always constant. Only heresy, false choice, can have a history. Truth is eternal and stands outside of time; falsity is glued to time, and the account of wrongdoing and falsity is history.^[10]

Over and over again Herodotus will discover for us the causes of the great events he narrates. Many of them are startling: a boil on Atossa’s breast, a sudden impulse of generosity on Syloson’s part, Croesus’s false assessment of his own happiness, Megabates’s rage at a careless act by Captain Scylax. From many such “causes”—and it is always possible to trace the chain of events from them—we may have the idea that human life and human history are chancy and capricious things. And, I think, this idea is one of the principal lessons Herodotus wants to teach. In a world such as this we have to take our glory where we can find it.