What gives this tale its unforgettable tone and character—what makes the narrative even more leisurely than the subject warrants—are those infamous, looping digressions: the endless asides, ranging in length from one line to an entire book (Egypt), about the flora and fauna, the lands and the customs and cultures, of the various peoples the Persian state tried to absorb. And within these digressions there are further digressions, an infinite regress of fascinating tidbits whose apparent value for “history” may be negligible but whose power to fascinate and charm is as strong today as it so clearly was for the author, whose narrative modus operandi often seems suspiciously like free association. Hence a discussion of Darius’ tax-gathering procedures in Book 3 leads to an attempt to calculate the value of Persia’s annual tribute, which leads to a discussion of how gold is melted into usable ingots, which leads to an inquiry into where the gold comes from (India), which, in turn (after a brief detour into a discussion of what Herodotus insists is the Indian practice of cannibalism), leads to the revelation of where the Indians gather their gold dust. Which is to say, from piles of sand rich in gold dust, created by a species of—what else?—“huge ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes.” (In this case, at least, Herodotus’ guides weren’t necessarily pulling his leg: in 1996, a team of explorers in northern Pakistan discovered that a species of marmot throws up piles of gold-rich earth as it burrows.)
One reason that what often looks like narrative Rorschach is so much fun to read is Herodotus’ prose style. Since ancient times, all readers of Herodotus, whatever their complaints about his reliability, have acknowledged him as a master of language. Four centuries after Herodotus died, Cicero wondered rhetorically “what was sweeter than Herodotus.” In Herodotus’ own time, it’s worth remembering, the idea of “beautiful prose” would have been a revolutionary one: the ancient Greeks considered prose so debased in comparison to verse that they didn’t even have a word for it until decades after the historian wrote, when they started referring to it simply as psilos logos, “naked language,” or pedzos logos, “walking language” (as opposed to the dancing, or even airborne, language of poetry). Herodotus’ remarkable accomplishment was to incorporate, in extended prose narrative, the fluid rhythms familiar from the earlier, oral culture of Homer and Hesiod. The lulling cadences and hypnotically spiraling clauses in each of his sentences—which replicate, on the microcosmic level, the ambling, appetitive nature of the work as a whole—suggest how hard Herodotus worked to bring literary artistry, for the first time, to prose. One twentieth-century translator of the Histories put it succinctly: “Herodotus’s prose has the flexibility, ease and grace of a man superbly talking.”
All the more unfortunate, then, that this and pretty much every other sign of Herodotus’ prose style is absent from The Landmark Herodotus, whose new translation, by Andrea L. Purvis, is both naked and pedestrian. A revealing example is her translation of the work’s Preface, which, as many scholars have observed, cannily appropriates the high-flown language of Homeric epic to a revolutionary new project: to record the fabulous deeds not of gods and legendary heroes but of real men in real historical time. In the original, the entire preface is one long, winding, quasi-poetic sentence, a nice taste of what’s to come; and in the still-useful 1858 translation of George Rawlinson (which Lawrence of Arabia thought “respectable”), reproduced in the Everyman’s Library edition, this syntax is replicated while faithfully reproducing the rich array of tonal registers:
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving 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 feuds.
“Researches” (rather than the blander “inquiry,” one possible alternative) nicely gets the slight whiff of chloroform and lab chemicals that, as it were, still clung to the word historie a full century after the Ionian Enlightenment; perhaps even more importantly, the archaic flavoring of “losing their due meed of glory” brilliantly evokes Herotodus’s use of a crucial buzzword of Homeric epic, the adjective aklea, “without kleos”—kleos being the heroic renown for which the heroes at Troy fought and died. In appropriating this word, Herodotus was announcing in a single stroke that the Persian Wars were every bit a match for the Trojan War as a subject of an extended literary work.
Robin Waterfield’s 1999 translation for the Oxford World Classics series, by contrast, breaks up the syntax a little but is beautifully sensitive to what you might call the “scientific” flavor of Herodotus’s prose in this all-important opening—his invocation of the vocabulary of the Ionian Enlightenment in order to bring intellectual legitimacy to his project:
Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.
And here, finally, is Purvis:
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians—not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.
Apart from breaking up Herodotus’s one flowing sentence into three clanking parts, the rather vague “may the great and wonderful deeds … not go unsung” is disastrously severed from Herodotus’s activity as a researcher; Purvis makes it sound as if the historian is committing the project into the hands of Allah, whereas the point of the original is that his rational inquiry is what’s going to “sing” those deeds—his prose is now doing what Homer’s poetry once did. This flat-footedness makes itself felt throughout the new text.
But in almost every other way The Landmark Herodotus is an ideal package for this multifaceted work. Much thought has been given to easing the reader’s journey through the narrative: running heads along the top of each page provide the number of the book, the year and geographical location of the action described, and a brief description of that action (“A few Athenians remain in the Acropolis”). Particularly helpful are notes running down the side of each page, each one comprising a short gloss on the small “chapters” into which Herodotus’ text is traditionally divided. Just skimming these is a good way of getting a quick tour of the vast work: “The Persians hate falsehoods and leprosy but revere rivers”; “The Taurians practice human sacrifice with Hellenes and shipwreck survivors”; “The story of Artemisia, and how she cleverly evades pursuit by ramming a friendly ship and sinking it, leading her pursuer to think her a friendly ship or a defector.” And The Landmark Herodotus not only provides the most thorough array of maps of any edition but is also dense with illustrations and (sometimes rather amateurish) photographs—a lovely thing to have in a work so rich in vivid descriptions of strange lands, objects, and customs. In this edition, Herodotus’ description of the Egyptians’ fondness for pet cats is paired with a photograph of a neatly embalmed feline.
As both a narrator and a stylist, then, Herodotus is supremely sophisticated. A synoptic view of the Histories reveals, if anything, that for all the ostensible detours, the first four and a half books of the work—the “Rise of Persia” half—lay a crucial foundation for the reader’s experience of the war between Persia and Greece. The latter is not the “real” story that Herodotus has to tell, saddled with a ponderous, if amusing, preamble, but, rather, the carefully prepared culmination of a tale that grows organically from the distant origins of Persia’s expansionism to its unimaginable defeat. In the light of this structure, it occurs to you that Herodotus’ subject is not simply the improbable Greek victory but, just as much, the foreordained Persian defeat. But why foreordained? What, exactly, did the Persian Empi
re do wrong?
The answer has less to do with some Greek sense of the inevitability of Western individualism triumphing over Eastern authoritarianism—an attractive reading to various constituencies at various times—than it does with the scientific milieu out of which Herodotus drew his idea of historie. For Herodotus, the Persian Empire was, literally, “unnatural.” He was writing at a moment of great intellectual interest in the difference between what we today (referring to a similarly fraught cultural debate) call “nature versus nurture,” and what the Greeks thought of as the tension between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “custom” or “law” or “convention.” Like other thinkers of his time, he was particularly interested in the ways in which natural habitat determined cultural conventions: hence the many so-called “ethnographic” digressions. This is why, with certain exceptions, he seems, perhaps surprisingly to us, to view the growth of the Persian Empire as more or less organic, more or less “natural”—at least, until it tries to exceed the natural boundaries of the Asian continent. A fact well known to Greek Civ students is that the word barbaros, “barbarian,” did not necessarily have the pejorative connotations that it does for us: barbaroi were simply people who didn’t speak Greek and whose speech sounded, to Greek ears, like bar-bar-bar. So it’s suggestive that one of the very few times in the Histories that Herodotus uses “barbarian” in our sense is when he’s describing Xerxes’ behavior at the Hellespont. As the classicist James Romm argues, in his lively short study Herodotus, for this historian there is something inherently wrong and bad with the idea of trying to bleed over the boundaries of one continent into another. It’s no accident that the account of the career of Cyrus, the empire’s founder, is filled with pointed references to his heedless treatment of rivers, the most natural of boundaries. Cyrus dies, in fact, after ill-advisedly crossing the river Araxes, considered a boundary between Asia and Europe.
What’s wrong with Persia, then, isn’t its autocratic form of government but its size, which in the grand cycle of things is doomed one day to be diminished. Early in the Histories, Herodotus makes reference to the way in which cities and states rise and fall, suddenly giving an ostensibly natural principle a moralizing twist:
I shall … proceed with the rest of my story recounting cities both lesser and greater, since many of those that were great long ago have become inferior, and some that are great in my own time were inferior before. And so, resting on my knowledge that human prosperity never remains constant, I shall make mention of both without discrimination.
The passage suggests that, both for states and for individuals, a coherent order operates in the universe. In this sense, history turns out to be not so different from that other great Greek invention—tragedy. The debt owed by Herodotus to Athenian tragedy, with its implacable trajectories from grandeur to abjection, has been much commented on by classicists, some of whom even attribute his evolution from a mere notetaker to a grand moralist of human affairs to the years spent in Athens, when he is said to have been a friend of Sophocles. (As one scholar has put it, “Athens was his Damascus.”)
Athens itself, of course, was to become the protagonist of one such tragico-historical “plot”: during Herodotus’ lifetime, the preeminent Greek city-state traveled a Sophoclean road from the heady triumph of the Persian Wars to the onset of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict during which it lost both its political and its moral authority. This is why it’s tempting to think, with certain classical historians, that the Histories was composed as a kind of friendly warning about the perils of imperial ambition. If the fate of the Persians could be intended as an object lesson for the Athenians, Herodotus’ ethical point is much larger than the superiority of the West to the East.
Only a sense of the cosmic scale of Herodotus’ moral vision, of the way it grafts the political onto the natural schema, can make sense of that distinctive style, of all the seemingly random detours and diversions—the narrative equivalents of the gimcrack souvenirs and brightly colored guidebooks and the flowered shirts. If you wonder, at the beginning of the story of Persia’s rise, whether you really need twenty chapters about the distant origins of the dynasty to which Croesus belongs, think again: that famous story of how Croesus’ ancestor Gyges assassinated the rightful king and took the throne (to say nothing of the beautiful queen) provides information that allows you to fit Croesus’ miserable ending into the natural scheme of things. His fall, it turns out, is the cosmic payback for his ancestor’s crime: “Retribution would come,” Herodotus says, quoting the Delphic oracle, “to the fourth descendant of Gyges.”
These neat symmetries, you begin to realize, turn up everywhere, as a well-known passage from Book 3 makes clear:
Divine providence in its wisdom created all creatures that are cowardly and that serve as food for others to reproduce in great numbers so as to assure that some would be left despite the constant consumption of them, while it has made sure that those animals which are brutal and aggressive predators reproduce very few offspring. The hare, for example, is hunted by every kind of beast, bird, and man, and so reproduces prolifically. Of all animals, she is the only one that conceives while she is already pregnant.… But the lioness, since she is the strongest and boldest of animals, gives birth to only one offspring in her entire life, for when she gives birth she expels her womb along with her young.… Likewise, if vipers and the Arabian winged serpents were to live out their natural life spans, humans could not survive at all.
For Herodotus, virtually everything can be assimilated into a kind of natural cycle of checks and balances. (In the case of the vipers and snakes he refers to, the male is killed by the female during copulation, but the male is “avenged” by the fact that the female is killed by her young.) Because his moral theme is universal, and because his historical “plot” involves a world war, Herodotus is trying to give you a picture of the world entire, of how everything in it is, essentially, linked.
“Link,” as it happens, is not a bad word to have in mind as you make your way through a text that is at once compellingly linear and disorientingly tangential, in which an information-packed aside can take the form of a three-thousand-word narrative or a one-line summary. It only looks confusing or “digressive” because Herodotus, far from being an old fuddy-duddy, not nearly as sophisticated as (say) Thucydides, was two and a half millennia ahead of the technology that would have ideally suited his mentality and style. It occurs to you, as you read The Landmark Herodotus—with its very Herodotean footnotes, maps, charts, and illustrations—that a truly adventurous new edition of the Histories would take the digressive bits and turn them into what Herodotus would have done if only they’d existed: hyperlinks.
Then again, Herodotus’ work may have presaged another genre altogether. The passage about lions, hares, and vipers reminds you of the other great objection to Herodotus—his unreliability. (For one thing, nearly everything he says about those animals is wrong.) And yet, as you make your way through this amazing document, “accuracy”—or, at least, what we normally think of as scientific or even journalistic accuracy, “the facts”—seems to get less and less important. Did Xerxes really weep when he reviewed his troops? Did the aged, corrupt Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens now in the service of Darius, really lose a tooth on the beach at Marathon before the great battle began, a sign that he interpreted (correctly) to mean that he would never take back his homeland? Perhaps not. But that startling closeup, in which the preparations for war focus, with poignant suddenness, on a single hopeless old has-been, has indelible power. Herodotus may not always give us the facts, but he unfailingly supplies something that is just as important in the study of what he calls ta genomena ex anthropon, or “things that result from human action”: he gives us the truth about the way things tend to work as a whole, in history, civics, personality, and, of course, psychology. (“Most of the visions visiting our dreams tend to be what one is thinking about during the day.”)
All of which is to say that while Herodotus
may or may not have anticipated hypertext, he certainly anticipated the novel. Or at least one kind of novel. Something about the Histories, indeed, feels eerily familiar. Think of a novel, written fifty years after a cataclysmic encounter between Europe and Asia, containing both real and imagined characters, and expressing a grand vision of the way history works in a highly tendentious, but quite plausible, narrative of epic verve and sweep. Add an irresistible antihero eager for a conquest that eludes him precisely because he understands nothing, in the end, about the people he dreams of subduing; a hapless yet winning indigenous population that, almost by accident, successfully resists him; and digressions powerfully evoking the cultures whose fates are at stake in these grand conflicts. Whatever its debt to the Ionian scientists of the sixth century BC and to Athenian tragedy of the fifth, the work that the Histories may most remind you of is War and Peace.
And so, in the end, the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the Histories may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.
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