Indeed some of Carson’s choices seem to adhere to a subtle agenda. This is evident particularly in her introduction and notes, which consist of an array of asides about the sources of the fragments, comments on the meaning of the Greek, and general observations that, while often amusing, fail to provide a consistently informative addendum to the fragments laid out in these pages. Much of this is most likely a matter of personal quirkiness in someone who can be rather mandarin. (The author’s note at the back of her books famously declares that she “lives in Canada”—and that’s it.) Yet it seems to me that, for instance, her account of what she calls the “marks and lacks” in the extant fragments is not wholly free from playing to the prejudices of her likely audience. This serious scholar assumes an air of disdain for the “ancient scholiasts, grammarians, metricians, etc., who want a dab of poetry to decorate some proposition of their own and so adduce exempla without context”; she then goes on to cite these exempla while dryly chiding those ancient philologues for not giving us more of the precious fragments we want:
It would be nice to know whether this question comes from a wedding song.… Apollonius Dyskolos is not interested in such matters.… And who is this girl? And why is Sappho praising her? Chrysippos is not concerned with anything except Sappho’s sequence of negative adverbs.… Who would not like to know more about this garment? But the curiosity of Pollux is strictly lexical.
Here again, we are confronted, implicitly, with the two poles of the old Sappho debate: on the one side stand the desiccated scholars with their narrow, airless interests, and on the other the sensitive advocates of passionate feeling. There’s little doubt about which group Carson’s readers are meant to identify with.
But it’s surely unjust (although it will just as surely gratify some readers) to deride ancient commentators for not realizing that the poetry they took for granted would eventually vanish, and for merely doing their scholarly jobs; just as it would be unfair for us to expect our contemporary poets to be like second-century Alexandrian scholars with their dry, scholarly concerns. (Concerns, for instance, about the difference between singular and plural pronouns.) Carson’s goal of letting Sappho “show through” is an admirable one; less so her presentation of this vexed body of poetry as transparent, as being about what most readers are already likely to assume it’s about. “It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music,” she writes in her introduction. “Can we leave the matter there?”
Well, no, we can’t. Carson’s new book is, in the end, as fragmentary and frustrating as the object of its highly idiosyncratic scrutiny. Like so many other products of the recent school of Sappho commentaries, it leaves us with a strange and unsettling feeling that to some, at least, will be familiar: that there, over there, is a woman of beauty, saying enchanting things to someone; but in our excitement at being in her presence, we can’t quite make out her meaning.
—The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2003
ARMS AND THE MAN
HISTORY—THE RATIONAL and methodical study of the human past—was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in classics, some of us could be pretty condescending about the man who invented it and (we would joke) his penchant for flowered Hawaiian shirts.
The risible figure in question was Herodotus, known since Roman times as the “Father of History.” The sobriquet, conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus’ Histories—a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 BC, in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-1980s the word “father” seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned “good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists (a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire) was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global realpolitik.
Herodotus, by contrast, always seemed a bit of a sucker. Whatever his desire, stated in his preface, to pinpoint the “root cause” of the Persian Wars (the rather abstract word he uses, aitie, savors of contemporary science and philosophy), what you take away from an initial encounter with the Histories is not, to put it mildly, a strong sense of methodical rigor. With his garrulous first-person intrusions (“I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an opinion that will cause offense to many people”), his notorious tendency to digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail (“And so the Athenians were the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus”), his apparently infinite susceptibility to the imaginative flights of tour guides in locales as distant as Egypt (“Women urinate standing up, men sitting down”), reading him was like—well, like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt.
A major theme of the Histories is the way in which time can effect surprising changes in the fortunes and reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more appropriate, then, that Herodotus’ reputation has once again been riding very high. In the academy, his technique, once derided as haphazard, has earned newfound respect, while his popularity among ordinary readers will likely get a boost from the publication of perhaps the most densely annotated, richly illustrated, and user-friendly edition of his Histories ever to appear: The Landmark Herodotus, edited by Robert B. Strassler and bristling with appendices by a phalanx of experts on everything from the design of Athenian warships to ancient units of liquid measure. (Readers interested in throwing a wine tasting à la grecque will be grateful to know that one amphora was equal to a hundred and forty-four kotyles.) The underlying cause—the aitie—of both the scholarly and the popular revival is worth wondering about just now. It seems that, since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Internet (and of a new kind of war), the moment has come, once again, for Herodotus’ dazzlingly associative style and, perhaps even more, for his subject: implacable conflict between East and West.
Modern editors, attracted by the epic war story, have been as likely as not to call the work The Persian Wars, but Herodotus himself refers to his text simply as the publication of his historie—his “research” or “inquiry.” The (to us) familiar-looking word historie would to Herodotus’ audience have had a vaguely clinical air, coming, as it did, from the vocabulary of the newborn field of natural science. Not coincidentally, the cradle of this scientific ferment was Ionia, a swath of Greek communities in coastal Asia Minor, just to the north of Halicarnassus, where the historian was born around 484 BC. (He died at about sixty, having spent a number of years, starting in his late thirties, in Athens, a city for which he expressed great admiration.) The word only came to mean “history” in our sense because of the impact of Herodotus’ text.
The Greek cities of Ionia were where Herodotus’ war story began, too. These thriving settlements, which maintained close ties with their mother cities across the Aegean to the west, began, in the early sixth century BC, to fall under the dominion of the rulers of the Asiatic kingdoms to the east; by the middle of the century, however, those kingdoms were themselves being swallowed up in the seemingly inexorable westward expansion of Persia, led by the charism
atic empire-builder Cyrus the Great. The Histories begins with a tale that illustrates this process of imperialist digestion: the story of Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia. For Herodotus, Croesus was a satisfyingly pivotal figure, “the first barbarian known to us who subjugated and demanded tribute from some Hellenes” who nonetheless ended up subjugated himself, blinded by his success to the dangers around him. (Before the great battle that cost him his kingdom, he had arrogantly misinterpreted a pronouncement of the Delphic oracle that should have been a warning: “If you attack Persia, you will destroy a great empire.” And he did—his own.) The fable-like arc of Croesus’ story, from a deceptive and short-lived happiness to a tragic fall arising from smug self-confidence, admirably serves what will turn out to be Herodotus’ overarching theme: the seemingly ineviable movement from imperial hubris to catastrophic retribution.
The fall of Croesus, on May 28, 585 BC—we know the date because the battle he lost to Cyrus took place on the day of a solar eclipse that had been predicted by the Ionian scientist Thales of Miletus—marked the beginning of the absorption of the Ionian Greeks into the Persian Empire. Almost a century later, starting in 499, these Greeks began a succession of open rebellions against their Persian overlords; it was this “Ionian Revolt” that triggered what we now call the Persian Wars, the Asian invasions of the Greek mainland in 490 and 480. Some of the rebellious cities had appealed to Athens and Sparta for military aid, and Athens, at least, had responded. Herodotus tells us that the Great King Darius was so infuriated by this that he instructed a servant to repeat to him the injunction “Master, remember the Athenians!” three times whenever he sat down to dinner. Contemporary historians see a different, less personal motive at the root of the war that was to follow: the inevitable, centrifugal logic of imperialist expansion.
Darius’ campaign against the Greeks in 490 and, after his death, that of his son Xerxes in 480–479 constituted the largest military undertakings in history up to that point. Herodotus’ lavish descriptions of the statistic-shattering preparations—he numbers Xerxes’ fighting force at 2,317,610 men, a figure that includes infantry, marines, and camel-riders—are among the most memorable passages of his, or any, history. Like all great storytellers, he takes his sweet time with the details, letting the dread momentum build as he ticks off each stage of the invasion: the gathering of the armies, their slow procession across continents, the rivers drunk dry, the astonishing feats of engineering—bridging the Hellespont, cutting channels through whole peninsulas—that more than live up to his promise, in the preface, to describe erga thomasta, “deeds that inspire wonder.” All this, recounted in a tone of epic grandeur that self-consciously recalls Homer, suggests why most Greek cities, confronted with the approaching hordes, readily acceded to Darius’ demand for symbolic tokens of submission—“earth and water.” (In a nice twist, the defiant Athenians, a great naval power, threw the Persian emissaries into a pit, and the Spartans, a great land force, threw them down a well—earth and water, indeed.)
And yet, for all their might, both Persian expeditions came to grief. The first, under Darius, was plagued by a series of military and natural disasters and finally defeated at the Battle of Marathon, where a overwhelmingly outnumbered coalition of Athenians and Plataeans held the day, losing only 192 men to the Persians’ 6,400. (The achievement was such that the Greeks, breaking with their tradition of taking their dead back to their cities, buried them on the battlefield and erected a grave mound over the spot. It can still be seen today.) Ten years later, Darius’ son Xerxes returned to Greece, having taken over the preparations for an even vaster invasion. Against all odds, the scrappy Greek coalition—this one including ultraconservative Sparta, usually loath to get involved in Panhellenic doings—managed to resist yet again.
It is to this second, far grander conflict that the most famous Herodotean tales of the Persian Wars belong; not for nothing do the names Thermopylae and Salamis still mean something today. In particular, the heroically suicidal stand of the three hundred Spartans—who, backed by only a couple of thousand allied troops, held the pass at Thermopylae against tens of thousands of Persians, long enough for their allies to escape and regroup farther to the south—has continued to resonate. Partly, this has to do with Herodotus’ vivid description of the Greeks’ feisty insouciance, a quality that all freedom fighters like to be able to claim. When Xerxes demanded that the Greeks turn over their arms, the Spartan king, Leonidas, famously replied, “Come and get them”; on hearing that the Persians were so numerous that their arrows would “blot out the sun,” another Spartan quipped that this was good news, as it meant that the Greeks would fight in the shade. “In the shade” is the motto of an armored division in the present-day Greek army.
But the persistent appeal of such scenes, in which the outnumbered Greeks unexpectedly triumph over the masses of Persian invaders, is ultimately less a matter of storytelling than of politics. Although Herodotus is unwilling to be anything but neutral on the relative merits of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy (in a passage known as the “Debate on Government,” he has critical things to say about all three), he structures his presentation of the war as a kind of parable about the conflict between free Western societies and Eastern despotism. (The Persians are associated with motifs of lashing, binding, and punishment.) While he isn’t shy about portraying the shortcomings of the fractious Greek city-states and their leaders, all of them, from the luxury-loving Ionians to the dour Spartans, clearly share a desire not to answer to anyone but their own leaders.
Anyone, at any rate, was preferable to the Persian overlord Xerxes, who in Herodotus’ narrative is the subject of a magisterial portrait of corrupted power. No one who has read the Histories is likely to forget the passage describing the impotent rage of Xerxes when his engineers’ first attempt to create a bridge from Asia to Europe across the Hellespont was washed away by a storm: after commanding that the body of water be lashed three hundred times and symbolically fettered (a pair of shackles was tossed in), he chastised the “bitter water” for wronging him, and denounced it as “a turbid and briny river.” More practically, he went on to have the project supervisors beheaded.
And yet Herodotus’ Xerxes is a character of persuasive complexity, the swaggering cruelty alternating with childish petulance and sudden, sentimental paroxysms of tears, a personality likely to remind contemporary audiences of a whole panoply of dangerous dictators from Nero to Hitler. One of the great, unexpected moments in the Histories, evoking the emotional finesse of the best fiction, comes when Xerxes, reviewing the ocean of forces he has assembled for the invasion, suddenly breaks down, “overcome,” as he puts it to his uncle Artabanus (who has warned against the enterprise), “by pity as I considered the brevity of human life.” Such feeling for human life, in a dictator whose casual indifference to it is made clear throughout the narrative, is a brilliant and persuasive psychological touch. And indeed, the unstable leader of a ruthlessly centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it.
Gripping and colorful as the invasions and their aftermaths are, the Greco-Persian Wars themselves make up just half of the Histories—from the middle of Book 5 to the end of the ninth, and final, book. This strongly suggests that Herodotus’ preoccupation was with something larger still.
The first four and a half books of the Histories make up the first panel of what is, in fact, a diptych: they provide a leisurely account of the rise of the empire that will fall so spectacularly in the second part. Typically, Herodotus gives you everything you could conceivably want to know about Persia, from the semi-mythical, Oedipuslike childhood of Cyrus (he’s condemned to exposure as a baby but returns as a young man, disastrously for those who wanted him to die), to the imperial zenith under Darius, a scant two generations later. (Darius, who had a talent for unglamorous but useful administrative matters—he introduced coined money, a reliable postal system, and the division of
the empire into manageable provinces called satrapies—was known as “the shopkeeper.”) From book to book, the Histories lets you track Persia’s expansion, mapped by its conflicts with whomever it is trying to subjugate at the time.
In Book 1 for instance, you get the Massagetae, who were apparently strangers to the use, and abuse, of wine. (The Persians—like Odysseus with the Cyclops—get them drunk and then trounce them.) In Book 2 come the Egyptians, with their architectural immensities, their crocodiles, and their mummified pets, a nation whose curiosities are so numerous that the entire book is devoted to its history, culture, and monuments. In Book 3, the Persians come up against the Ethiopians, who (Herodotus has heard) are the tallest and most beautiful of all peoples, and bury their dead in crystal coffins. In Book 4, we get the mysterious, nomadic Scythians, who cannily use their lack of “civilization” to confound their would-be overlords. (Every time the Persians set up a fortified encampment, the Scythians simply pack up their portable dwellings and leave.) By the time of Darius’ reign, Persia had become something that had never been seen before: a multinational empire covering most of the known world, from India in the east to the Aegean Sea in the west and Egypt in the south. The real hero of Herodotus’ Histories, as grandiose, as admirable yet doomed, as any character you get in Greek tragedy, is Persia itself.
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