Preface
In recent years Herodotus has enjoyed a book in scholarly attention. Despite his title as “Father of History,” for a long time he was considered a distant second to the brilliant Thucydides, but as scholars have observed and analyzed his sophistication, particularly the structure of his History of the Persian Wars, with its interweaving of numerous themes, Herodotus is no longer judged a mere compiler of arcana and folk tales but stands honored as a complex and profound moral historian of the first rank.
This book attempts to contribute to the appreciation of Herodotus. It develops out of a class I taught twenty-two years ago for freshmen at Stanford University, one of those “classics in translation” courses whose goal was to inspire students to take up the study of antiquity. The class was devoted exclusively to an intensive reading, in English, of Book One of Herodotus’s History. The method and purpose were to be analogous to Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon: an examination of Greek thought and culture by focusing on just the one work. From an administrator’s point of view, the class was a big success, as more than half of the students enrolled in classical Greek the following year. It was also a success from a pedagogical point of view, for it stirred the students to read widely in Greek literature, despite the fact that the actual assignments required only a few pages (in English) per class.
My reading of Herodotus’s Book One is, like the History itself, eclectic. It examines primarily philosophical, literary, and historical matters, leaving aside, for the most part, archaeology. It attempts to do two things: first, to discover, as far as possible, what might have been Herodotus’s purpose in writing for his contemporaries; second, to discover what lessons the historian teaches that are of enduring significance for us and for all future readers, for if a work is to be truly a classic it must speak to all peoples in all times.
Whatever hopes Herodotus might have had for the immortality of his writing, he surely had in mind a contemporaneous audience. If, as seems likely, he is writing before and during the early part of the Peloponnesian Wars, there were many lessons for his generation to learn from the experiences of the Greeks and Persians in the preceding century and a half. It is sometimes said nowadays that our military leaders plan their strategy to fight the last war. This procedure, it is claimed, leads to outmoded maneuvers and defeat. But if the previous war can be examined for its universal historical principles rather than for the strategy used in particular engagements or for its use of particular weapons, perhaps there really are valuable lessons to be learned. It is Herodotus’s genius to have found such principles, and it is his glory to have tried to teach them to his contemporaries. That they did not learn or carry out those teachings is—alas—another testimony to the stubbornness of humans in resisting the truths that would benefit them.
Herodotus’s principal lessons, stressed again and again throughout his pages, are the principle of human life’s uncertainty and the somewhat inconsistent principle that the divine power will see to it that injustice receives—eventually—-its due punishment. He applies these principles to everyone, making no distinction between individuals and nations. Those who believe that they can escape the vicissitudes of this world or that somehow they will be able to get away with their crimes are doomed, doomed to reversal of fortune, to failure, to disgrace. The lamentable history of the world confirms these ancient insights. There are many other lessons with which Book One and the whole History deal, but these two are never far from the historian’s attention. One of my aims has been to speculate on how Herodotus’s contemporary audience would receive these and the other insights.
But, of course, Herodotus’s History is a classic, a work great because its significance applies to human enterprises everywhere. Scholars too often absorb themselves in the arcane details of a text and neglect the qualities that have bestowed upon the text its enduring brilliance. One of my aims has been to keep the spotlight on the greatness of the work.
I should like to acknowledge several colleagues whose careful reading of my manuscript has resulted in innumerable improvements. Though I have tried to follow nearly all their suggestions, they are nevertheless blameless as to the defects that remain. These are Professors Charles Chiasson, Donald Lateiner, and Diana Rhoads, and to them I give my warmest thanks. I should like also to thank Professor Stewart F1ory for his encouragement. Finally, I should like to thank Hampden-Sydney College, which granted me a sabbatical leave and several summer fellowships to pursue this work.
Hampden-Sydney December 1994
