Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Let us pause a moment at this scene.

  We are in democratic Greece, proud of its freedom of speech and of thought. One of its citizens publicly expresses his views—and what happens? There is an instant outcry. Lycides simply forgot that there was a war going on, and that in wartime all democratic freedoms, including the freedom of speech, are typically put on the shelf. War engenders its own, distinct laws, and the normally complex code of governing principles is reduced to a single fundamental imperative: victory at any cost!

  Lycides has barely finished his speech when he is put to death. One can imagine how rattled, agitated, and near hysteria the crowd listening to him must have been. The Persian army is hot on their heels, they have already lost half their country, they have lost their city. It is not difficult to find stones in the spot where the council deliberated and the onlookers gathered. Greece is a country of stones; they are everywhere. Everyone walks on them. You need only bend down. And that is exactly what happens. People reach for the nearest stone, the one closest at hand, and hurl it at Lycides. At first, he probably shouts in terror; later, already dripping with blood, he moans from pain, cowers, wheezes, begs for mercy. In vain. The throng, furious, in a state of mad frenzy, no longer hears, no longer thinks, and is incapable of stopping itself. It will come to its senses only after the last stone has extinguished the life of Lycides, turned him to pulp, silenced him forever.

  But that is not the end of it!

  Herodotus writes that the uproar in Salamis over Lycides alerted the Athenian women to what was happening. With every woman arousing and enlisting the support of her neighbor, they spontaneously flocked to Lycides’ house, where they stoned his wife and his children to death.

  His wife and children! How were the Athenian tots guilty of their daddy’s advocacy of a compromise with the Persians? Did they even know anything about these Persians, much less that the mere suggestion of talking to them was punishable by death?

  Were the youngest among them even able to imagine what death looks like? How terrible it is? At what point did they realize that the grandmothers and aunts whom they suddenly saw in front of their house were not bringing them sweets and grapes, but rather stones, with which they would now start to crack open their heads?

  Lycides’ fate demonstrates the Greeks’ deeply felt pain of even contemplating collaboration with the invader, what great angst it aroused. What should one do? How should one behave? What choice should one make? Cooperate or resist? Enter into talks or boycott? Come to an arrangement and try to survive, or opt for heroism and go out in a blaze of glory? Difficult, rankling questions, tormenting dilemmas.

  The Greeks are divided over these alternatives, and their disagreements are not confined to discussions and verbal sparring. They fight one another with weapons, on battlefields—the Athenians with the Thebans, the Phocians with the Thessalians; they go for one another’s throats, gouge out one another’s eyes, cut off one another’s heads. No Persian provokes so much hatred in a Greek as another Greek does—just so long as he is from an opposing camp or from a tribe that is at odds with his. Perhaps various complexes contribute to this, feelings of guilt, disloyalties, treacheries? Hidden fears, terror at the thought of a divine curse?

  A fresh confrontation is about to take place, in the last two battles of this war, which will be fought at Plataea and Mycale.

  First, Plataea. After Mardonius determined that the Athenians and the Spartans would not bend to come to terms with him, he leveled Athens and withdrew to the north, to the territories of the Thebans, who were collaborating with the Persians and whose flat, even lands were well suited to heavy cavalry, the signature Persian military formation. The pursuing Athenians and Spartans now also arrived at this plain in the vicinity of Plataea. Both armies took up positions facing each other, formed into lines—and waited. All sensed that a great moment was approaching, a decisive and deadly one. Days passed, and both sides remained in a disconcerting and enervating motionlessness, asking the gods—each side its own—if the time was right to begin the battle. But the answers were no and no.

  During one of those days, a Theban, the Greek collaborator Attaginus, organizes a banquet for Mardonius to which he invites fifty of the most eminent Persians and as many of the most distinguished Thebans, seating each Persian-Theban pair on a separate couch. One of the couches is occupied by Thersander, a Greek, and a Persian whose name Herodotus does not provide. They eat and drink together, and at a certain moment the Persian, clearly in a reflective mood, says to Thersander, “Look at these Persians here at the banquet, and consider also the army which we have left encamped on the river.” He has been tormented by premonitions, as is clear from what he says next: “Before much time has passed you’ll see few of them left alive.” The Persian was weeping as he spoke. Thersander, still sober, tries to end the sobbing of his dejected and drunk couchmate by saying, quite sensibly: “Shouldn’t you be telling this to Mardonius and the next highest-ranking Persians?” To which the Persian replies with a tragic-sounding wisdom: “My friend, an event which has been decreed by the god cannot be averted by man, for no one is willing to believe even those who tell the truth. A great many Persians are well aware of what I’ve just said, but we follow our leaders because we have no choice. There’s no more terrible pain a man can endure than to see clearly and be able to do nothing.”

  The great battle of Plataea, which will end with the defeat of the Persians and will establish Europe’s long-lasting hegemony over Asia, is preceded by minor skirmishes in which the Persian cavalry attacks the defending Greeks. In one of them, the de facto commanding officer of the Persian army, Masistius, perishes. Masistius’ horse, which was out in front of the rest, was hit in the side by an arrow, and the pain of the wound made it rear up and unseat him. As soon as Masistius landed on the ground, the Athenians sprang forward, seized the horse and killed Masistius, although he fought back. At first, in fact, they failed to kill him: next to his skin he was wearing a breastplate made of gold scales, with a red tunic on top, so the Athenians’ blows kept hitting the breastplate and achieving nothing. Eventually, however, one of them realized what was happening and struck Masistius in the eye. Only then did he fall to the ground and die.

  A fierce struggle then erupted over the body. The corpse of a leader is a sacred thing. The fleeing Persians fought for its possession as they retreated. But they fought in vain, returning in empty-handed defeat to their camp. When the cavalry got back to the Persian encampment, Mardonius and the whole of his army were deeply upset to hear of Masistius’ death. They shaved off not only their own hair, but also that of their horses and their yoke-animals, and gave themselves over to unending lamentation. The whole of Boeotia echoed with the sound of mourning, since, after Mardonius, there was no one in Persia who was more highly respected by the Persians in general and the king in particular.

  Whereas the first thing the Greeks did, having managed to hold on to Masistius’s body, was to load the corpse on to a cart and parade it past their lines. Masistius had been remarkably tall and good-looking (which is in fact why they did this with the body), and the men broke ranks to go and see him.

  All this takes place several days before the great and conclusive battle, which neither side dares initiate because the omens continue to be unfavorable. On the Persian side, the fortune-teller is a certain Hegesistratus, a Greek from the Peloponnese but an enemy of the Spartans and the Athenians. Hegesistratus had once been arrested and imprisoned by the Spartiates to await execution for the terrible and horrific treatment they had suffered at his hands. In this desperate situation, because his life was in danger and he was prepared to suffer gruesome agonies rather than die, he did something that defies description. He was being kept in stocks made of wood bound with iron, and somehow got hold of a blade which had been smuggled into the prison. What he then immediately set about doing must have taken more courage than anything else we have ever heard of. He worked out that the rest of his foot would get free of the st
ocks if he cut off the bulk of his foot, so he proceeded to do so. Then since he was under guard, he dug a hole through the wall and ran away to Tegea, travelling by night and resting by day under the cover of woodland. Although the Lacedaemonians were out looking for him in full force, he managed to reach Tegea two nights after escaping. The Lacedaemonians were amazed by his courage when they found half of his foot lying there, but they could not find him.

  How did he do that?

  Cutting off one’s own foot is hard work indeed.

  It is not enough to sever the muscles. One also has to saw through the tendons and bones. Self-mutilations have occurred in our times as well: witnesses claim that in the gulags people occasionally cut off their own hands or pierced their stomachs with knives. An incident is even described in which a prisoner nailed his member to a wooden board. The goal was always to free oneself at any cost from the backbreaking labor, to go to the hospital, and there to be able to lie down awhile, to rest. But to cut off one’s foot and then run off immediately?

  To escape?

  To hurry?

  How was this even possible? Most likely by crawling on one’s hands and the other leg. But that mutilated leg must have hurt fiendishly and bled profusely. How did he stanch the blood? Did he not faint from exhaustion during the flight? From thirst? From pain? Did he not feel himself on the verge of madness? Would he not have seen ghosts? Was he not plagued by hallucinations? Apparitions? Vampires? And did the wound not get infected? After all, he had to scrape that stump over the ground, through dust and dirt—for how else could he drag it along? Did that leg therefore not start to swell? Fill with pus? Turn blue?

  And yet despite all this he escapes the Spartans, recovers, whittles himself a wooden prosthesis, and even becomes the soothsayer of Mardonius, commander of the Persians.

  Tensions mount near Plataea. After a dozen days of fruitless offerings to the gods, the signs become slightly more favorable and Mardonius decides to commence hostilities. It is an ordinary human weakness: he is in a hurry to rout the enemy, wants to become the satrap of Athens and of all of Greece as quickly as possible. Now every unit of the Greek army took casualties from the javelins and arrows of the Persian cavalry as they bore down on them. And when the quivers are emptied, the two armies resort to terrifying hand-to-hand combat. Several hundred thousand men wrestle with one another, grip one another in murderous holds, choke one another in deadly embraces. Whoever has something at hand pounds his opponent over the head with it, or sticks a knife between his ribs, or kicks him in the shins. One can almost hear the collective panting and groaning, the moans and wheezes, the curses and cries!

  In this bloody tumult, the most courageous man, according to Herodotus, turned out to be the Spartan Aristodamus. He had been the last of the three hundred soldiers of Leonidas’s regiment, which perished defending Thermopylae. Aristodamus, no one really knows how, survived, but for that piece of luck he suffered shame and contempt. According to the code of Sparta, one could not have honorably survived Thermopylae: whoever was there, and truly fought in the defense of his homeland, would surely have died. Hence the inscription on the collective tombstone of Leonidas’s regiment: “Passerby, tell Sparta that we who perished here were faithful to its laws.”

  Evidently, Sparta’s strict laws did not envisage different categories of combatants on the losing side. Whoever went into battle could survive only if he were victorious; defeated, one had to die. And here was Aristodamus, sole survivor. This distinction plunges him into infamy and ignominy. No one wants to speak to him, everyone turns away with disdain. His miraculous salvation soon starts to rankle, smother him, burn. It weighs upon him, becoming increasingly difficult to bear. He searches for a solution, for some relief. And along comes a chance to remove the humiliating brand, or, rather, to end heroically the life so branded: the battle of Plataea. Aristodamus accomplishes miracles of bravery: he had clearly wanted to die, because of the slur against his name, and so had recklessly broken rank and achieved such heroic exploits.

  In vain. The laws of Sparta are implacable. There is no pity in them, no human feeling. A fault once committed remains a fault forever, and whoever tainted himself can never be cleansed. And so Aristodamus’s name is not among the heroes of this battle recognized by the Greeks—among those who fell in this battle, all the men I mentioned, apart from Aristodamus, received special honours. Aristodamus did not, for the reason already mentioned—that he wanted to die.

  The outcome of the battle of Plataea was decided by the death of the Persian commander, Mardonius. In those times, commanders did not hide behind the lines in camouflaged bunkers, but went into battle at the head of their armies. When a commander died, however, his troops would disperse and flee the field. The commander therefore had to be visible from afar (most frequently, he sat on a horse), because the conduct of his soldiers depended on what he himself was doing. And so it was at Plataea—Mardonius rode into battle on his white horse… But after he had been killed and the men of his battalion, the most effective troops on the Persian side, had been cut down, all the others turned and fled before the Lacedaemonians.

  Herodotus notes that one man on the Greek side stood out because of his exemplary inflexibility. He was an Athenian, Sophanes: he used to carry an iron anchor, attached with a bronze chain to the belt of his breastplate, and whenever he reached a spot near the enemy he would drop anchor, so that as the enemy charged at him from their ranks they could not make him move; if they turned and fled, however, it was his plan to pick up the anchor and go after them.

  What a great metaphor! Rather than a lifeline, which allows us to float passively upon the surface, how much greater that which can chain us to our labors.

  BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

  It takes less than half an hour for the local ferry to sail from the dock of Dakar to the island of Goree. Standing at its stern, one can see the city, which seems to bob on the crests of the waves created by the propeller as it grows smaller and smaller, and finally is transformed into a bright, rocky bank stretching along the horizon. At just that moment, the ferry turns its stern toward the island and, amidst the din of rumbling engines and rattling iron, scrapes its side on the concrete edge of the marina.

  I walk first along a wooden pier, then a sandy beach, then a twisting, narrow little street until I reach the pension de famille, where I am awaited by Abdou, the watchman, and Mariem, the boardinghouse’s quiet, always busy landlady. Abdou and Mariem are married, and, judging by Mariem’s figure, will shortly have a child. Although they are both still very young, this will be their fourth. Abdou looks with satisfaction at his wife’s clearly protruding abdomen: it is proof that all is well in their home. If a woman walks about with a flat stomach, says Abdou—and Mariem nods in assent—it means that something untoward is happening, something contrary to the order of nature. Anxious family and friends start asking questions, prying, spinning various frightening and sometimes also malicious tales. Everything should take place in accordance with the world’s natural rhythms—and this means that a woman should once a year give visible proof of her generous and indefatigable fertility.

  Abdou and Mariem both belong to the Peul community, which is the largest ethnic group in Senegal. Peul speak the Wolof language and have a paler skin than other West Africans—which is why one theory has it that they arrived in this part of the continent from the banks of the Nile, from Egypt, long ago when the Sahara was awash in green and one could wander safely over what today is desert.

  From this stems a more general theory, developed in the 1950s by the Senegalese historian and linguist Cheih Anta Diop, about the Afro-Egyptian roots of Greek civilization and, by the same token, of European and Western civilization. Just as humankind arose physically in Africa, so European culture, too, he maintained, could trace its beginnings to this continent. For Anta Diop, who created a large comparative dictionary of the Egyptian and Wolof languages, the great authority was Herodotus, who had argued in his book that many elements of Gree
k culture were gathered and assimilated from Egypt and Libya—in other words, that European culture, especially its Mediterranean manifestations, had an African ancestry.

  Anta Diop’s thesis dovetailed with the popular movement of Négritude, developed in Paris at the end of the 1930s. Its authors were two young poets, the Senegalese Léopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, a descendant of slaves from Martinique. In their poetry and in their manifestos, they promulgated black pride—pride in their race, which for centuries had been humiliated by the white man—and praised the accomplishments and values of black people and their contributions to world culture.

  • • •

  All this occurred more or less in the middle of the twentieth century, when a non-European consciousness was awakening, when the people of Africa and of the so-called Third World in general were searching for their own identity, and the inhabitants of Africa in particular wished to rid themselves of the complex of slavery. Anta Diop’s thesis and Senghor and Césaire’s advocacy of Négritude—echoes of which can be found in the writings of Sartre, Camus, and Davidson—contributed to a European realization that our planet, dominated for centuries by Europe, was entering a new, multicultural epoch, and that non-European communities and cultures would have their own ambitions for dignity and respect in the family of man.

  This is the context in which the problem arises of the Otherness of the Other. Until now, when we pondered our relation with the Other, the Other was always from the same culture as us. Now, however, the Other belongs to an altogether foreign culture, an individual formed by and espousing its distinct customs and values.

  In 1960 Senegal gains its independence. The aforementioned poet, Léopold Senghor, a habitué of the clubs and cafés of the Latin Quarter in Paris, becomes its president. That which for years had been a theory, a plan, a dream harbored by him and by his friends from Africa, the Caribbean, and both Americas—the dream of a return to symbolic roots, to lost sources, to a world from which they had been brutally torn by hordes of slave traders and cast for entire generations into an alien, debasing, and hostile captivity—now for the first time can be put into practice, translated into ambitious projects, bold and far-reaching initiatives.