The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  “All men,” he writes, “if asked to choose the best ways of ordering life would choose their own.” Darius once asked some Greeks what would induce them to devour the dead bodies of their parents, and when they answered in horror that nothing could make them do an act so atrocious, he had some men from India brought in whose custom it was to do this very thing. He asked them how they could be persuaded to burn their dead instead of eating them. They cried out in abhorrence and begged him not to utter such abominable words. “As Pindar says,” concludes Herodotus, “custom is king.” The story is characteristic of his indulgent attitude toward all men’s ways, however queer. He was that rare person, a lover of mankind. He liked people, all of them. But he liked them more than he admired them, and he never idealized them. Plutarch even accuses him, so markedly kind and fairminded as he was, of actual malignity because heroes in his book are not consistently heroical. It is true that he lived in an age of heroism and never really believed in heroes. But his gentle scepticism worked both ways. He never judged or condemned. The weakness and fallibility of the human kind aroused only his sympathy. If his heroes are imperfectly great, his villains are never perfectly villainous. He looked at them all with dispassionate and equal interest.

  Everything everywhere in the world of men was of interest to him. He tells us how the homely girls in Illyria get husbands, how the lake dwellers keep their children from falling into the water, what Egyptian mosquito nets are like, that the King of Persia when travelling drinks only boiled water, what the Adrymachidæ do to fleas, how the Arabians cut their hair, that the Danube islanders get drunk on smells, how the Scythians milk their mares, that in Libya the woman with the most lovers is honored, how the streets of Babylon are laid out, that physicians in Egypt specialize in diseases, and so on, and so on. Bits of information that have nothing to do with what he is writing about keep straying in; but he is so intensely interested in them himself, the reader’s interest is caught too. Is not that really extraordinary? he says to us—or extremely diverting—or remarkably sensible? And we follow him; we are surprised and diverted and approving. Of course this is only to say that he has the sine qua non of a writer—he is never dull; but to avoid dullness in what is often a guidebook is an achievement. Some part of it is due to his perfect, his unsurpassed, ease in writing. He has no mannerisms, not a particle of self-consciousness; he is always simple, direct, and lucid, always easy to read. His countryman, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, said he was the first to give Greece the idea that an expression in prose could have the worth of a verse of poetry.

  He is often accused of being credulous even to the point of silliness. It is said that he accepted with the naïve simplicity of a child everything he was told, no matter how preposterous. There is no truth whatsoever in the charge. Precisely the contrary is true: his turn of mind was sceptical; he was a born investigator. The word history, which was first used in our sense by him, means investigation in Greek. His book begins, “This is an account of the investigations [historia] made by Herodotus of Halicarnassus.” He started on them prepared to scrutinize everything he heard. When different and equally probable accounts of an event were given him he wrote them all down and left the final judgment to his reader. “I cannot positively state whether this was done or that,” he will say. “For myself,” he remarks in a notable passage, “my duty is to report all that is said, but I am not obliged to believe it all—a remark which applies to my whole History.”

  Even these few quotations show the temper of his mind, his sense of responsibility as a reporter, and his care in weighing evidence. But of course in his day the unknown was so great, what was actually known was so limited, no borderline had yet been drawn between the credible and the incredible. It is often impossible to make out why Herodotus accepts one thing and rejects another purely on the ground of what can and cannot happen. Doves, he says firmly, do not ever speak even though the holy women at Dodona declare that they do, but he does not question the story that a mare gave birth to a rabbit. He is sure that no matter what the Egyptian priests assert, it is not true that the phoenix wraps up the dead body of his parent in a mass of myrrh and carries it from Arabia to the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis where he buries it. On the other hand it seems to him quite reasonable that there are headless creatures in Libya with eyes in their breasts, and that cats in Egypt have the singular habit of jumping into the fire. He had a standard of what was possible and what was not, but it was so different from ours it escapes us. After all, wherever he went he saw so many strange things, it was easy to believe there were even stranger ones in the vast beyond.

  But when he was on ground he knew he was a shrewd judge of the improbable. He writes:

  In the highest tower in Babylon, in the topmost chamber, there is a great couch on which the god himself is reported to sleep. So the priests told me, but I do not believe it.

  I cannot say with confidence how the man escaped, for the account given me made me wonder. They say he jumped into the sea and swam eighty stadia under water, never rising to the top. If I may give my own opinion, it is that he got off in a boat.

  But he is always mildly tolerant of other people’s explanations and never dogmatic about his own. Of the storm that wrecked Xerxes’ fleet he writes:

  It lasted three days. At length the Magi charming the wind and sacrificing to the Nereids succeeded in laying the tempest—or perhaps it ceased of itself.

  When he was sight-seeing in Thessaly he was told that a famous gorge he visited was caused by Neptune, and he remarks:

  It seemed plain to me that it was the result of an earthquake. Many people think earthquakes are the work of Neptune.

  What he himself thought about the gods is not easy to make out. The heavenly powers play a leading part in his history, and omens, oracles, prayers, and prophets are very important to him. Yet it would be hard to find a more coldly rationalistic statement than the one he makes early in his book:

  Where the gods come from, whether they always existed, what they looked like, was, so to speak, unknown till yesterday. Homer and Hesiod lived not more than four hundred years ago and it was they who made the gods for the Greeks and gave them their names and shapes.

  His book is really a bridge from one era to another. He was born in an age of deep religious feeling, just after the Persian Wars; he lived on into the scepticism of the age of Pericles; and by virtue of his kindly tolerance and keen intellectual interest he was equally at home in both.

  Historians often forget that the proper study of history is men. Marshalled facts and reasoned analyses tend to cover up human nature. That was not Herodotus’ way. People are always to the fore in his book. It is fortunate for us that he is the reporter of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, names which shine like stars through the endless, senseless wars that make up most of the world’s history. In his hands they are the scenes of a great drama written in plain human terms. The disposing causes are men’s arrogance and greed for conquest and their power to defend what is dear to them against overwhelming odds.

  Only the last part of the History has to do with the Persian Wars. Two thirds of the book are taken up with Herodotus’ journeys and what he learned on them. These earlier chapters have the effect, more and more as one reads on, of a slowly unrolling stage setting. The whole of the known world is presented as the fitting background to the tremendous conflict that is to decide whether freedom or tyranny is the stronger, whether the West is to be enslaved by the East. Darius, the Great King, makes his appearance. He is ruler of most of the world. Myriads of men serve him; his wealth is limitless; his magnificence fabulous; his cruelty fantastic. He is the Orient in person, its barbaric pearl and gold, its helpless millions, its disregard for human life and suffering. Over against him stands Greece, “a rocky land and poor,” a speaker in Herodotus tells Darius, where, as Pericles put it, the people “love beauty with economy” economy, the very opposite to the lavishness and exaggeration of the grandiose East.

  Herodotus descri
bes the amused astonishment of the Persian Army at learning that the prize for an Olympic victory was a crown of wild olives. He tells about a pillar he saw, one of the many the Great King set up to mark his approbation when he passed a place that pleased him. It was inscribed: “These springs are the best and most beautiful of waters. They were visited by Darius, the best and most beautiful of men.” By sheer force of contrast the words recall the epitaph on the dead at Thermopylæ: “Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here in obedience to their words.”

  The contrast is never stressed by Herodotus, but in one story after another it comes out so clearly that it needs no emphasis. “The immortals are near to men to watch over deeds of justice and kindliness,” wrote Hesiod, and so all Greeks believed. Whatever the strange deities of the East required, it was not justice nor kindliness. “It is a Persian custom to bury people alive,” says Herodotus. “One of Darius’ daughters-in-law had fourteen young children of the best Persian families buried alive.” Imperial Rome, always inclined to Oriental ways, took over this custom of killing the young with the old. Little boys and girls were, if not buried alive, at any rate put to death with a guilty father. But Greece was different. When the young sons of a man who had betrayed his city to the Persians were brought to the general commanding the Spartan forces after Leonidas fell at Thermopylæ, he dismissed them. “They are boys,” Herodotus reports him as saying. “What part could boys have in the guilt of siding with the Persians?”

  What underlay the Spartan general’s action was not only the belief that the innocent must not suffer with the guilty; even more basic was the conviction of the value of each individual, no matter how defenseless. This idea never touched even the surface of Oriental life. No law or custom there lent it support. In Greece it was based on something deeper than law or custom. Once, Herodotus says, ten of the ruling party in Corinth went to a house with the purpose of killing a little boy there who an oracle had declared would grow up to destroy the city.

  The mother, thinking it a friendly visit, brought her son when they asked to see him, and put him in the arms of one of them. Now they had agreed on the way there that whoever first received the child should dash it to the ground. But it happened that the baby smiled at the man who took it and so he was unable to kill it and handed it to another. Thus it passed through the hands of all the ten and no one of them would kill it. Then they gave it back to the mother and went away and began to blame each other, but especially him who had first held the child.

  “A tyrant disturbs ancient laws,” Herodotus writes, “violates women, kills men without trial. But a people ruling—first, the very name of it is so beautiful; and secondly, a people does none of these things.” Only the tyrant was known throughout the East. When the Great King was on his march to Greece a very rich noble of Lydia entertained not only him and his courtiers, but his multitudinous host of soldiers as well. He set sumptuous feasts before all, Herodotus says, and in return begged humbly that one of his five sons, all in the army, might remain with him. “You make such a request?” said the king. “You who are my slave and bound to give me all that is yours, even to your wife?” He ordered the body of the eldest youth to be cut in two and placed on either side of the road where the army was to pass. The Persians were slaves, so called and so treated; the richest and most powerful claimed nothing as their right; they were completely at the disposal of the king. Herodotus tells another story. A noble, who had for years enjoyed the royal favor and then had lost it, was invited to dine with the king. After he had feasted on the meat placed before him, he was presented with a covered basket. Lifting the lid he saw the head and hands and feet of his only son. “Do you know now,” the king asked pleasantly, “the kind of animal you have been eating?” The father had learned the lesson slaves must master, self-control. He answered with perfect composure, “I do know, indeed—and whatever the king is pleased to do pleases me.” That was the spirit of the East from time immemorial, first clearly recorded for the world in Herodotus’ book. Little, poor, barren Greece was free. “You know perfectly what it is to be a slave,” Herodotus reports some Greeks as saying to a Persian official who was urging them to submit to Xerxes. “Freedom you have never tried, to know how sweet it is. If you had you would urge us to fight for it not with our spears only, but even with hatchets.” As the war with the Persians draws nearer in Herodotus, it is seen more and more clearly as a contest not of flesh and blood only, but of spiritual forces which are incompatible.

  A brief prologue introduces the action. A revolt broke out in the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor which were subject to Darius. Athens sent help. The Athenians marched to Sardis, the capital of Lydia, and they burned the splendid town. To Darius it was incredible that any people on earth should so defy him. “Who are the Athenians?” he demanded; and he ordered that every time he dined, an attendant should say to him three times: “Sire, remember the Athenians.” There is no doubt that Herodotus understood dramatic requirements. The stage has been set for Marathon.

  When the curtain rises for the drama proper the nephew of Darius, who has been entrusted with the charge of carrying out the vengeance of the king, is leading the Persian Army into Greece, vast forces by sea and by land. Before him heralds come demanding from the Greek cities “earth and water,” the tokens of submission; and all as far south as Thebes give them. One, Eritræa, separated from Athens only by a narrow strait, refuses, but she is quickly captured and burned to the ground. Athens is next, seemingly a most trifling obstacle to that great host. She has no one in all Greece to help her except a little band of soldiers sent by Platæa, a town grateful for favors in the past. Away to the south the chief military power of Greece, Sparta, is no more ready to submit to Persia than Athens, and would be a strong ally. But, as democracies always do, Athens has waited too long to make her plans. The Persians are almost upon her when Pheidippides starts his race to enlist help for her. In Sparta the next day he urges: “Lacedæmonians, the Athenians entreat you. Do not suffer them to fall into bondage to barbarians.” But there are some days yet to the full moon, and until the moon was full the Spartans would not march. “We will come as soon after that as we can,” the herald is told. Events, however, do not wait on the moon. The Persian fleet is already at anchor in the curving bay of Marathon.

  Herodotus was born about that time. The fight must often have been described to him by men who had taken part in it. He explains the strategy very clearly. The Athenian formation was the exact reverse of the enemy’s who trusted to their centre, leaving their wings to inferior troops. Miltiades threw his chief strength into the wings. The centre was weak so that the Persians easily broke through it and rushed on in pursuit. Then the Athenian wings closed in behind, shutting the foe off from their ships and cutting them down. The defeat was complete. The fleet after sailing down the coast to within sight of Athens put out to sea. The Persians had gone. It was an incredible contest and an incredible victory. How could it happen like that—the little band of defenders victors over the mighty armament? We do not understand. But Herodotus understood, and so did all Greeks. A free democracy resisted a slave-supported tyranny. The Athenians at Marathon had advanced at a run; the enemy’s officers drove them into battle by scourging them. Mere numbers were powerless against the spirit of free men fighting to defend their freedom. Liberty proved her power. A wave of exultant courage and faith swept through the city, and Athens started on her career.

  Ten years passed before the curtain rose for the last act. Darius was kept from the terrible vengeance he vowed he would take by a war which occupied him until he died. He had to leave it to his son to revenge the Persian defeat. He too was to remember the Athenians. Xerxes was not eager for the enterprise, but in actual fact he was helpless. It was written in the decrees of Fate that he should undertake it. The power of the Persians had grown too great, their self-confidence too assured. The gods who hated beyond all else the arrogance of power had passed judgment upon them. The time had come when the g
reat empire should be broken and humbled. Insolent assurance will surely, soon or late, be brought low, Herodotus says, just as Æschylus wrote:

  All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears.

  God calls men to a heavy reckoning

  For overweening pride.

  False dreams sent by heaven to Xerxes aroused his ambition and he determined to conquer Greece. Herodotus marshals with solemnity the preparations for the invasion: the slow assembling of the vast army; a canal dug across a great isthmus and the Hellespont bridged for an easy passage by sea and land; food commandeered and water supplies sought out; enormous stores of provisions amassed along the route. Then the pomp and splendor of the start which was signalled by the very heavens. As the army began its march “the sun quit his seat in the sky and disappeared. And yet there were no clouds and the air was serene.” Science today says that that eclipse happened two years later, but the ten-year-old boy Herodotus was then could not be expected to mark the date accurately, and a sense for dramatic appropriateness is so general, the older men he depended on for his facts would never have failed to bring together the darkening of the sun and the fall of the Persian power.