Perhaps Herodotus first intended to improve on the work of Hecataeus by writing a kind of critical travel guide, focusing on geography and monuments. His chapter on Egypt shows how rich that book might have been. Fragments of his Lydiaca, Aegyptiaca, and Scythica survived as digressions in his History. Herodotus gave himself a more novel assignment, which put him in the vanguard of Seekers for the past. He would not merely collect interesting facts about the known world in his time. He would reach into the dark continent of memory, hoping by his “researches” to “preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” This enterprise in his new spirit of inquiry (history) was a venture without precedent and without end. For he set Western thinkers on a quest for the true past.
Today we delight in the fruits of Herodotus’ omnivorous curiosity. In his one volume he opened for us a panorama of the ancient Mediterranean world—its beliefs, manners, customs, and institutions. While we enjoy his charming miscellany of fact and legend, we must not overlook his spirit—discriminating between what he is told by different informants and what he himself sees. He makes his own guesses and inferences. Extravagant beliefs seemed to him as much worth reporting as the commonplace facts of everyday life. Because of his sympathetic interest in the ways of all peoples, he is now sometimes recognized as the father of anthropology. Alongside his admiration of Athenian institutions he is not afraid to praise the great deeds of the Persians, and his reputation as an authentic reporter has risen as we have learned more about the people he described.
The enduring human issues, which before had been explored by the imagination of poets and the speculations of philosophers, Herodotus would now examine in the prosaic facts of experience. The Persian Wars—the conflict between Asia and Greece from the time of Cyrus the Great (c. 585-529 B.C.) and his conquest of Croesus, king of Lydia (reigned c. 560-546 B.C.), was a grand theme covering the whole eastern Mediterranean, the whole world known to Herodotus. It was the world war of his age. Extensive travels had acquainted him with the lands and peoples of the conflict. His achievement was to produce a vivid and coherent account when there were virtually no written records and nearly a generation had passed since the end of the war. Herodotus had interviewed survivors of the war, and he asked men of the next generation to recount the tales they had heard. So he has not inappropriately been described as “a journalist in search of a story that had been cold for thirty years.” This was an amazing triumph of what has recently come to be called “oral history.” Still, his rescue of the past from oral tradition had to be accomplished with the spoken word. With all its limitations, his account has remained the basis of all later histories of the war.
Herodotus had a mixed reception in his time. While Athenians applauded his celebration of their virtues, other Greeks who felt slighted called him “Father of Lies.” Plutarch (c. A.D. 46-120) actually documented this slander in his essay “On the Malice of Herodotus.” Herodotus’ unsavory reputation has not entirely disappeared; it survives in the praise of those who call him a fanciful storyteller. The classic Greek doubt of the value of transient human events was long in dying.
The example of Homer may have stirred Herodotus, for the Trojan War, too, was a war between West and East. The Persian War, longer in duration and on a vastly wider stage, also showed the great deeds of men.
The History by Herodotus that we read was divided into nine “books” by Alexandrian editors who named each after one of the Muses. The first two books, in the manner of the logographers, give the history of Croesus and the early history of Lydia and the exploits and empire of Cyrus, followed by the geography, manners, customs, and monuments of Egypt. In his detailed account of the building of the pyramids, Herodotus reports:
The wickedness of Cheops reached to such a pitch that, lacking funds, he placed his own daughter in a brothel, with orders to procure him a certain sum—how much I cannot say, for I was not told; she procured it, however, and at the same time, bent on leaving a monument which should perpetuate her own memory, she required each man to make her a present of a stone. With these stones she built the pyramid which stands midmost of the three that are in front of the great pyramid, measuring along each side a hundred and fifty feet.
The following seven books recount the expeditions of Darius against the Scythians and Libyans, the Ionian revolt, the burning of Sardis, the subdual of the Ionians, the battle of Marathon, and the wreck of the Persian fleet at Mount Athos, the exploits and death of Darius, the battles of Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis, the battle of Plataea, and the retreat of the Persians. The work appears to have been unfinished. The other books he may have written have not survived. Herodotus’ History remains a miracle of lively narrative, vivid in the details of life and legend he had gathered in his years of travel.
The birth of history—inquiry into the human past—came with the shift of focus away from the will of God or the deeds of gods. The story moved from remote primordial time, the time of myths, to recent events in human time. While myths explained origins—how things began—history would explain consequences. Historical thinking is teleological. “For history,” J. H. Huizinga suggests, “the question is always ‘Whither?’ ” This momentous shift is vivid in Herodotus.
But this change had not come all at once. The logographers had begun to gather current facts. Nor did the rise of history spell the disappearance of myth. Homer lived on in Western literature. And later the Romans, too, feeling their need for myth found their Virgil, who followed the paths of Homer. We continue to follow and enjoy all paths to the vanished past. Newton would displace Aristotle’s physics; Harvey, Galen’s physiology. Though Herodotus survived in countless modern varieties of “scientific” history, he did not displace Homer, and he himself was never displaced.
Heroes led the way out of primordial to human time. In literature, myths survive as heroic epics—sagas of Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Odysseus, Beowulf and Roland. Heroes appear to be the first human beings in world literature. They reveal the shift in focus from immortal gods to mortal men—the wrath of Achilles, or “of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.” Myths of the heroic age would live on in written literature as epic and tragedy.
Herodotus, though he wrote to recapture memory, opened our minds to the eternity that is the past. To view the historian’s effort as “inquiry” transformed the past from an object into an ever-receding focus of activity, reaching through memory and monuments into a vanished eternity. So, too, he transformed the recounting of the past from an annual ritual into a perpetual adventure.
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Thucydides Creates a Political Science
But Herodotus did not found a “school.” The prevailing mood of Greek thought still favored the search for the unchanging. Plato, prophet of the search for the unchanging, wrote as if Herodotus had never lived. Greek philosophy and Greek science continued to flourish in the Academy.
Herodotus did have one great Greek successor. Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 B.C.) read his work and carried on the pursuit of history, with his own style of inquiry. After the late fifth century B.C. Greek art declined, and so did the pursuit of history. The philosophers’ and scientists’ pursuits of changeless ideas went on. But in Greek historical writing the successors to Herodotus and Thucydides were not their equals.
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While the epic spirit survives in Herodotus, his successor Thucydides writes in quite another spirit. Although we know few details of Thucydides’ life we do know that he was a citizen of Periclean Athens who was active in its politics and was elected one of its ten generals. It was in 424 B.C., when he failed in his assignment to relieve Amphipolis in Thrace against the Spartan general Brasidas, that he was exiled from Athens. Thucydides’ twenty years of travel gave him the opportunity to observe the rest of Greece and
to write the work that he describes in his opening words:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history.
Though he read and seems to have admired Herodotus, he had his own way with the past. Herodotus had not entirely abandoned the Homeric heroic tradition. For, as we have seen, he aimed by his “researches” at “preserving the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” He, too, hoped to rescue glorious deeds from the dark continent of memory, giving the historian the role that had been long filled by Homeric bards.
Thucydides added a new dimension to the historian’s role. While he feared that “the absence of romance from my history will . . . detract somewhat from its interest,” he would be content “if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” As a leading Athenian citizen, he gave a high priority to the interests of the polis. And, naturally enough, when he came to recount the decisive events of his time, what he wrote was political history. In the famous passage where he says he has written his work “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time,” he is not merely hoping for literary immortality. He expects his book to provide political lessons for the future. In his Athens, knowledge was valued because it led to right action. And in “the greatest movement yet known in history,” he sought lessons for everyday politics and the building and keeping of empire.
Thucydides could draw these lessons—the principles of political science—from the war in which he took part, and which was still going on as he wrote. The events of his own time illustrated the unchanging human nature for all future times. Perhaps, as R. G. Collingwood suggests, Thucydides was trying to justify himself for writing history at all, by turning it into something else—a new kind of political and psychological science. For him the present was a mirror of past and future in the careers of politics and empire. His concern for the meaning of events sometimes dominates his view of events. He is generally scrupulous in getting the facts. “And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions.” He tested the accuracy of reports “by the most severe and detailed tests possible.” This demanded “some labor from the want of coincidence between accounts of different eye-witnesses.”
But when it comes to general ideas and stating the principles behind each course of action, Thucydides himself remains in control. The speeches he includes by conflicting leaders at critical moments, he explains, are not “word for word” what they said. “My habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.” So all the speeches are in Thucydides’ own style. As he pairs them to speak the words he put in their mouths, they offer a symposium in political philosophy on the problem of that moment.
So, when Athens faces the question of whether to put to death the whole male population of Mytilene, a former ally who has turned against them, we hear the debate with the demagogue Cleon demanding the condign punishment because of his fear “that a democracy is incapable of empire.” He urges his listeners to be wary of “the three failings most fatal to empire—pity, sentiment, and indulgence.” Against Cleon, the large-spirited Diodotus says that “we are deliberating for the future more than for the present . . . we are not in a court of justice, but in a political assembly; and the question is not justice, but how to make the Mytilenians useful to Athens.” Diodotus carried the day. And Thucydides has taken this opportunity to survey the arguments between firmness and compassion in a democracy’s management of an empire. So, too, he uses the occasion of Pericles’ funeral oration for his unexcelled eloquence in stating the patriotic ideals of Athens.
Thucydides’ search for the large lesson, the general idea, explains, too, his economy of style. For a study of civil disturbance (stasis), since the detailed experience of Corcyra will suffice, he need not recount the numerous other such civil disorders during the war. And in Athens after Pericles he elides many others to put the spotlight on Cleon, in whom we can see clearly enough the character of the demagogue. He gives similar leading roles to Pericles (his model statesman), Themistocles, and Brasidas. This selectivity troubles the modern historian who relentlessly chronicles the whole succession of characters and events; for Thucydides it makes an economy of style focusing on lessons of politics and empire.
Some, denying the title to Herodotus, have called Thucydides the first “scientific” historian for abandoning all supernatural causes and finding a human cause for every event. His history of the Peloponnesian War, Maurice Bowra observes, is written in a “clinical” spirit—showing how an Athens in good health suffers the corruptions that bring its downfall. Perhaps his approach to political events owed something to the medical science of Hippocrates. Himself a victim of the plague of 430-429, he was lucky enough to survive and to describe the symptoms and course of the disease with a medical precision that still impresses clinicians. Still, Thucydides’ momentous influence was as the creator of political history—a by-product of the Athenian polis. He interpreted his whole known world with a view to those political interests. That emphasis was not entirely wholesome, but has never ceased to dominate the writing of history in the West. And that same political obsession helps explain why, compared with other classic Greek forms of inquiry, Thucydides’ kind of history in Greece was not fertile of successors.
But he did earn a high place among modern political theorists. Of all the Greek historians, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) “loved Thucydides best.” In fact, he loved Thucydides so much that he gave his leisure hours to translating the History of the Peloponnesian War (1628) “in order that the follies of the Athenian Democrats should be revealed to his compatriots.” “He made me realize,” Hobbes notes in his autobiography, “how silly is democracy, and how much wiser a single man is than a multitude; I translated this author who would tell Englishmen to beware of trusting orators.” Thucydides himself was wary of such simplicities. Athens under Pericles, he noted, was “nominally a democracy, but actually a monarchy under the foremost man.” Yet there was never a more eloquent or more idealized picture of Athenian democracy than that Thucydides paints in his version of the funeral oration of Pericles. The constitution of Athens, he insists, is an original, a pattern for others to imitate. “Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” While all are equal before the law, in politics Athens is an aristocracy of merit. “As a city,” he boasts, “we are the school of Hellas.” So Thucydides fueled a debate that has never ceased.
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From Myth to Literature: Virgil
While the Ionian spirit of inquiry added new ways of thinking about the past, it did not destroy the perennial appeal of ancient myth. In later centuries across the West, schoolchildren would be charmed by the Homeric epics, and especially by the adventures of Ulysses, though they had scant interest in Herodotus and Thucydides. While Homer survived in ancient Greece, the new spirit of history brought ways of giving myth and religion the plausibility of history. What was the relation between the gods, the traditional heroes of the epic bards, and the real events of history?
One of the most influential of those who asked this interesting question was Euhemerus of Messene (flourished c. 300 B.C.) on the southwest Peloponnese in the century after Thucydides’ death. He must have been a bold imaginer, for he devised his own myth to give a historical basis for the traditional myths. He recorded his imaginary voyage to the mysterious island of Panchaea in the Indian Ocean. This fantasy was called “Sacred Scripture” from the inscriptions on a golden column at the center of the island. Inscriptions recorded the great deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus, who had once been benevolent kings of the island. The grateful people then worshiped them as gods.
This was a welcome precedent for Hellenistic rulers claiming worship from their subjects. Euhemerus’ ingenious work had wide implications for Greek heroic traditions. It suggested that the Greek gods were originally heroic kings—later deified for their service to their people—and seemed to justify the ruler cults of Euhemerus’ own time. The original work now surviving only in fragments was summarized by Eusebius, then translated and adapted by Ennius (born 239 B.C.). His Latin work Euhemerus had wide influence. Some saw it as rationalizing atheism, but Christian apologists like Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320) argued that Euhemerus had exposed the real foundation of Greek gods. The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind. But Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine and Lactantius turned it to their purpose. The divinity assigned to human rulers, they said, came not from their virtues but from their demonic vices, which inspired fear in humankind. Then popular worship of them was not from adoration but for propitiation. The Roman author Statius (A.D. c. 40-96) had similarly observed, “The first reason in the world for the existence of the gods was fear.”
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