Travels with the father of history
When Herodotus sat down to write his epic history of the Persian Wars sometime in the second half of the fifth century BC, he can hardly have thought he would still be required reading 2,500 years later.
It’s unlikely he had any inkling that future generations would celebrate him as the ‘Father of History’, as well as a pioneering geographer and anthropologist, not to mention the world’s first travel writer and foreign correspondent, a fearless explorer, irrepressible storyteller, madcap dramatist, author of the first prose epic and an enlightened multiculturalist before the word even existed. It’s particularly doubtful he ever anticipated David Hogarth addressing the Royal Geographical Society as its president in 1927, saying he was looking forward to ‘spending quite a respectable portion of Eternity in talking to Herodotus’.
His ambition, set out in the opening lines of The Histories, seemed more modest: ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other.’
This was a radical blueprint for a study of the past; the first time such a concept had ever been formulated. On one level, it was a straightforward narrative chronology of the cataclysmic conflict between the Greeks and the Persians – from the invasions of Cyrus in the middle of the sixth century through those of his successors Cambyses and Darius, culminating in the drama of the vast expeditionary force launched by Great King Xerxes, King of Kings, worshipper of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Light, and the rousing, history-changing finale marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea in 480–79 BC. It was from this tumultuous encounter and Greek victory that the West was born, and Herodotus was on hand to record its dramatic birth.
Yet The Histories is much, much more than that. The history Herodotus envisages – and indeed writes so triumphantly – is something far grander in scale, as universal as it’s possible to be. He deliberately awards himself the widest possible remit. Declaring his interest in ‘great and marvellous deeds’ provides him with the stepping stones from which to spring the most elaborate digressions, from a penetrating study of the Nile to a survey of the strange sexual practices of the Scythians, from a genealogy of the Egyptian pharaohs to eyebrow-raising stories of eunuchs castrating the man who removed their testicles.
History and lies
Born sometime around 490 BC, our Greek historian and geographer celebrates the wonders of the world with a life-grabbing energy that is never less than infectious. The weird and wonderful roam like wild animals through his pages. He introduces us to dog-headed men that live in mountains; the gold-digging ants of India, bigger than a fox, smaller than a dog; and the fabulous flying snakes of Arabia.
Herodotus delights in the glory of human diversity with a vigour that infuriated the parochial Plutarch, who rather uncharitably dubbed him the ‘Father of Lies’ for some of his taller stories. Like a 19th-century explorer kicking off African dust from his boots as he lectures in the hallowed halls of the RGS on some far-off tribe unknown to his audience, Herodotus takes us into the peculiar world of the Libyans and Lydians, Egyptians and Ethiopians, the Massagetae and the Scythians, Thracians, Persians, Babylonians and Indians. Who are these people, he asks; what are they like, where do they come from, and what makes them tick? How do their customs and traditions – political, social, sexual, architectural, religious, commercial – differ from our own?
These sorts of interests placed him far ahead of his time. It was little wonder that dreary old Plutarch should find Herodotus’ fascination with Egyptian culture and fathomless antiquity so threatening. Most Greeks believed, with some justification, in the inherent superiority of their civilisation. Plutarch felt so strongly about it that he penned one of history’s most stinking reviews, the spitefully entitled On the Malice of Herodotus, in which he accused Herodotus of being a dangerous ‘barbarian lover’ who praises foreigners and denigrates ‘the most solemn and holy truths of Greek religion with Egyptian humbug and fairytale’.
In fact, much as he loved a good story, Herodotus was pretty scrupulous by the standards of his time. He relates all sorts of information and invariably tells us whether he believes what he’s being told. There is much of the pragmatic explorer about him. To give just one example, rubbishing the tales of ‘feathers’ falling from the Scythian sky so thickly that people can neither see nor travel, he advances his own, eminently sensible explanation. ‘My own opinion is that to the north of this country it snows continually, though less in summer than winter, as you would expect; anyone, for example, who has seen a blizzard of snow at close quarters knows what I mean: the snow is very like feathers.’
Herodotus travelled across much of the known world to conduct his research, making groundbreaking journeys through much of Asia Minor, Babylon, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine and Greece, venturing as far north as the Black Sea. It’s thought he was one of the first settlers to found the Greek colony of Thurii in the heel of Italy in about 443 BC, where he devoted the remainder of his days to writing his one-volume masterpiece.
Yet of all the places he visited, one country captivated him more than any other. Egypt proved his greatest passion, so much so that almost a third of The Histories – ostensibly the story of Greeks versus Persians – is devoted to it. It’s as if he was so overcome by the place he just couldn’t help himself. Many Greeks had made the journey to Egypt before him. But no traveller had returned from Egypt with so much information about the country’s history, geography, religion, politics, culture and customs, sacrificial rituals, manners and morals, flora and fauna, architecture, agriculture and diet, sexual practices, burial practices and the mummification process – and then written about it. Herodotus’ landmark research here, unchallenged in its scope and detail, was one of the most remarkable achievements of his life. To put it into perspective, he provided the world with the greatest store of information on Egypt until the 19th century.
He sailed up the Nile as far south as the island of Elephantine (part of modern-day Aswan) at the first cataract, mesmerised by the great river’s mysterious ebb and flow, its seasonal flooding and, of course, its source. He writes with commendable accuracy about taking soundings a day’s sail off the mouth of the Nile: ‘You will get eleven fathoms, muddy bottom, which shows how far out the silt from the river extends,’ he notes, developing from this observation a theory that the entire Nile valley was once an arm of the Red Sea. Egypt was therefore a giant alluvial deposit, ‘the gift of the Nile’. No mean deduction two millennia before the birth of geology.
The source of the Nile proved more elusive. ‘Concerning the sources of the Nile, nobody I have spoken with, Egyptian, Libyan or Greek, professed to have any knowledge, except the scribe who kept the register of the treasures of Athene in the Egyptian city of Sais. But even this person,’ Herodotus adds in a caustic aside, ‘though he pretended to exact knowledge, seemed to me hardly serious’ with his declaration that the springs of the Nile flowed from between two conical mountains between Syene, near Thebes (Luxor), and Elephantine.
‘On this subject I could get no further information from anybody,’ he concludes regretfully. It’s hardly surprising given that the source of the Nile, one of the great riddles of exploration, eluded the world for centuries. The quest for the ‘true source’ of the Nile has continued in the early 21st century with expeditions to the ‘remote source’ of the Blue Nile deep in the Nyungwe rainforest of Rwanda. So our itinerant Greek didn’t do too badly for his time.
A Herodotean odyssey
During four years researching a history of Herodotus, I had the pleasure of travelling with him in the Mediterranean, Aegean, North Africa and the Middle East. We began on the Aegean coast and his hometown of Halicarnassus, what is today the sun-kissed Turkish resort of Bodrum, where the historical highlight was the discovery of the world’s oldest book in the world’s oldest shipwreck.
From there, we segued strangely into a year in Iraq, home to his bewitching stories of Babylon and an eloquent reminder, during the most recent conflict, of the wisdom of his famous line: ‘No-one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’ Hubris, Herodotus believed, tended to lead to nemesis. Imperial overstretch was likewise wont to lead to disaster. Twenty-first century Iraq seemed to offer a tragic endorsement of his vision.
After witnessing at first hand this latter-day encounter between East and West, we left to immerse ourselves in the wonders of Egypt. Some of these marvels, such as the necropolis of Thebes (Luxor), the pyramids of Giza and the ancient, desert-bound oasis of Ammon (Siwa) were strictly historical. Others were more social and cultural. With Herodotus’ boundless interest in the sexual customs of foreign peoples, it was impossible to resist investigating lurid tales of outwardly religious girls in veils performing fellatio in unlit carparks and the local boom in hymen-repair surgery. An interview with the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, provided a more respectably Islamic perspective on modern Egypt, while maintaining Herodotus’ tradition of consulting priests for information.
Our journey together ended in Greece, birthplace of the West. From Athens, cradle of democracy, we sailed to Samos, where Herodotus was probably exiled in about 457 BC after conspiring against Lygdamis, tyrant ruler of Halicarnassus. Here it was possible to revisit the three archaeological monuments that most impressed him, including the stunning Tunnel of Eupalinos, a triumph of engineering innovation bored through a mountain from both ends simultaneously. How the two tunnels met so accurately in the middle remains a mystery to this day.
Then there were trips to divine Delphi, jaded Sparta, faded Olympia and the tumbled columns of Corinth and Mycenae. Taking my cue from Herodotus, who was forever hopping engagingly from one subject to the next (‘I need not apologise for the digression,’ he tells us at one point. ‘It has been my habit throughout this work.’), we made a detour to the Outer Mani in the Peloponnese to enjoy a deliciously retsina-fuelled lunch with Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. Perhaps the highlight of the Herodotean odyssey was my first sight of the nonagenarian hero poring over a venerable Loeb edition of The Histories, engrossed in the story of the battle of Marathon.
For a man who died in about 425 BC, Herodotus is profoundly, breathtakingly modern, his messages just as timely and relevant today as they were two and a half millennia ago. Respect other cultures. Stay within one’s natural limits. Beware the inevitable pitfalls of hubris. Avoid war unless absolutely necessary. Defend one’s freedoms. Whatever one’s religious faith, many of us would recognise the wisdom of his belief in the arbitrariness of fate and fortune: ‘Often enough, God gives man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him,’ he warns.
Above all, however, and this is one of the most important things to remember, Herodotus is huge fun. This is no fusty armchair historian. He’s the man you would want to have a drink with, sit next to on a train or aeroplane, chat with into the early hours over a bottle of whisky.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, just listen to Salima Ikram, the high-spirited professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. ‘I think he’s quite wonderful, charming; he’s an absolute riot, a great storyteller, the best way to get people to read history,’ she says. ‘The thing I love about Herodotus is that you can take him to the beach and he’s a rollicking good read. He’s so human. He’s like a cheerful pal going off on this great trip and telling you about it with all these wonderful stories, getting confused along the way.’
What better companion could you possibly wish for?
Justin Marozzi’s The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (John Murray, £25) is out now
January 2009
It’s unlikely he had any inkling that future generations would celebrate him as the ‘Father of History’, as well as a pioneering geographer and anthropologist, not to mention the world’s first travel writer and foreign correspondent, a fearless explorer, irrepressible storyteller, madcap dramatist, author of the first prose epic and an enlightened multiculturalist before the word even existed. It’s particularly doubtful he ever anticipated David Hogarth addressing the Royal Geographical Society as its president in 1927, saying he was looking forward to ‘spending quite a respectable portion of Eternity in talking to Herodotus’.
His ambition, set out in the opening lines of The Histories, seemed more modest: ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other.’
This was a radical blueprint for a study of the past; the first time such a concept had ever been formulated. On one level, it was a straightforward narrative chronology of the cataclysmic conflict between the Greeks and the Persians – from the invasions of Cyrus in the middle of the sixth century through those of his successors Cambyses and Darius, culminating in the drama of the vast expeditionary force launched by Great King Xerxes, King of Kings, worshipper of Ahura Mazda, Lord of Light, and the rousing, history-changing finale marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea in 480–79 BC. It was from this tumultuous encounter and Greek victory that the West was born, and Herodotus was on hand to record its dramatic birth.
Yet The Histories is much, much more than that. The history Herodotus envisages – and indeed writes so triumphantly – is something far grander in scale, as universal as it’s possible to be. He deliberately awards himself the widest possible remit. Declaring his interest in ‘great and marvellous deeds’ provides him with the stepping stones from which to spring the most elaborate digressions, from a penetrating study of the Nile to a survey of the strange sexual practices of the Scythians, from a genealogy of the Egyptian pharaohs to eyebrow-raising stories of eunuchs castrating the man who removed their testicles.
History and lies
Born sometime around 490 BC, our Greek historian and geographer celebrates the wonders of the world with a life-grabbing energy that is never less than infectious. The weird and wonderful roam like wild animals through his pages. He introduces us to dog-headed men that live in mountains; the gold-digging ants of India, bigger than a fox, smaller than a dog; and the fabulous flying snakes of Arabia.
Herodotus delights in the glory of human diversity with a vigour that infuriated the parochial Plutarch, who rather uncharitably dubbed him the ‘Father of Lies’ for some of his taller stories. Like a 19th-century explorer kicking off African dust from his boots as he lectures in the hallowed halls of the RGS on some far-off tribe unknown to his audience, Herodotus takes us into the peculiar world of the Libyans and Lydians, Egyptians and Ethiopians, the Massagetae and the Scythians, Thracians, Persians, Babylonians and Indians. Who are these people, he asks; what are they like, where do they come from, and what makes them tick? How do their customs and traditions – political, social, sexual, architectural, religious, commercial – differ from our own?
These sorts of interests placed him far ahead of his time. It was little wonder that dreary old Plutarch should find Herodotus’ fascination with Egyptian culture and fathomless antiquity so threatening. Most Greeks believed, with some justification, in the inherent superiority of their civilisation. Plutarch felt so strongly about it that he penned one of history’s most stinking reviews, the spitefully entitled On the Malice of Herodotus, in which he accused Herodotus of being a dangerous ‘barbarian lover’ who praises foreigners and denigrates ‘the most solemn and holy truths of Greek religion with Egyptian humbug and fairytale’.
In fact, much as he loved a good story, Herodotus was pretty scrupulous by the standards of his time. He relates all sorts of information and invariably tells us whether he believes what he’s being told. There is much of the pragmatic explorer about him. To give just one example, rubbishing the tales of ‘feathers’ falling from the Scythian sky so thickly that people can neither see nor travel, he advances his own, eminently sensible explanation. ‘My own opinion is that to the north of this country it snows continually, though less in summer than winter, as you would expect; anyone, for example, who has seen a blizzard of snow at close quarters knows what I mean: the snow is very like feathers.’
Herodotus travelled across much of the known world to conduct his research, making groundbreaking journeys through much of Asia Minor, Babylon, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine and Greece, venturing as far north as the Black Sea. It’s thought he was one of the first settlers to found the Greek colony of Thurii in the heel of Italy in about 443 BC, where he devoted the remainder of his days to writing his one-volume masterpiece.
Yet of all the places he visited, one country captivated him more than any other. Egypt proved his greatest passion, so much so that almost a third of The Histories – ostensibly the story of Greeks versus Persians – is devoted to it. It’s as if he was so overcome by the place he just couldn’t help himself. Many Greeks had made the journey to Egypt before him. But no traveller had returned from Egypt with so much information about the country’s history, geography, religion, politics, culture and customs, sacrificial rituals, manners and morals, flora and fauna, architecture, agriculture and diet, sexual practices, burial practices and the mummification process – and then written about it. Herodotus’ landmark research here, unchallenged in its scope and detail, was one of the most remarkable achievements of his life. To put it into perspective, he provided the world with the greatest store of information on Egypt until the 19th century.
He sailed up the Nile as far south as the island of Elephantine (part of modern-day Aswan) at the first cataract, mesmerised by the great river’s mysterious ebb and flow, its seasonal flooding and, of course, its source. He writes with commendable accuracy about taking soundings a day’s sail off the mouth of the Nile: ‘You will get eleven fathoms, muddy bottom, which shows how far out the silt from the river extends,’ he notes, developing from this observation a theory that the entire Nile valley was once an arm of the Red Sea. Egypt was therefore a giant alluvial deposit, ‘the gift of the Nile’. No mean deduction two millennia before the birth of geology.
The source of the Nile proved more elusive. ‘Concerning the sources of the Nile, nobody I have spoken with, Egyptian, Libyan or Greek, professed to have any knowledge, except the scribe who kept the register of the treasures of Athene in the Egyptian city of Sais. But even this person,’ Herodotus adds in a caustic aside, ‘though he pretended to exact knowledge, seemed to me hardly serious’ with his declaration that the springs of the Nile flowed from between two conical mountains between Syene, near Thebes (Luxor), and Elephantine.
‘On this subject I could get no further information from anybody,’ he concludes regretfully. It’s hardly surprising given that the source of the Nile, one of the great riddles of exploration, eluded the world for centuries. The quest for the ‘true source’ of the Nile has continued in the early 21st century with expeditions to the ‘remote source’ of the Blue Nile deep in the Nyungwe rainforest of Rwanda. So our itinerant Greek didn’t do too badly for his time.
Start the slideshow (5 pictures)
A Herodotean odyssey
During four years researching a history of Herodotus, I had the pleasure of travelling with him in the Mediterranean, Aegean, North Africa and the Middle East. We began on the Aegean coast and his hometown of Halicarnassus, what is today the sun-kissed Turkish resort of Bodrum, where the historical highlight was the discovery of the world’s oldest book in the world’s oldest shipwreck.
From there, we segued strangely into a year in Iraq, home to his bewitching stories of Babylon and an eloquent reminder, during the most recent conflict, of the wisdom of his famous line: ‘No-one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’ Hubris, Herodotus believed, tended to lead to nemesis. Imperial overstretch was likewise wont to lead to disaster. Twenty-first century Iraq seemed to offer a tragic endorsement of his vision.
After witnessing at first hand this latter-day encounter between East and West, we left to immerse ourselves in the wonders of Egypt. Some of these marvels, such as the necropolis of Thebes (Luxor), the pyramids of Giza and the ancient, desert-bound oasis of Ammon (Siwa) were strictly historical. Others were more social and cultural. With Herodotus’ boundless interest in the sexual customs of foreign peoples, it was impossible to resist investigating lurid tales of outwardly religious girls in veils performing fellatio in unlit carparks and the local boom in hymen-repair surgery. An interview with the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, provided a more respectably Islamic perspective on modern Egypt, while maintaining Herodotus’ tradition of consulting priests for information.
Our journey together ended in Greece, birthplace of the West. From Athens, cradle of democracy, we sailed to Samos, where Herodotus was probably exiled in about 457 BC after conspiring against Lygdamis, tyrant ruler of Halicarnassus. Here it was possible to revisit the three archaeological monuments that most impressed him, including the stunning Tunnel of Eupalinos, a triumph of engineering innovation bored through a mountain from both ends simultaneously. How the two tunnels met so accurately in the middle remains a mystery to this day.
Then there were trips to divine Delphi, jaded Sparta, faded Olympia and the tumbled columns of Corinth and Mycenae. Taking my cue from Herodotus, who was forever hopping engagingly from one subject to the next (‘I need not apologise for the digression,’ he tells us at one point. ‘It has been my habit throughout this work.’), we made a detour to the Outer Mani in the Peloponnese to enjoy a deliciously retsina-fuelled lunch with Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. Perhaps the highlight of the Herodotean odyssey was my first sight of the nonagenarian hero poring over a venerable Loeb edition of The Histories, engrossed in the story of the battle of Marathon.
For a man who died in about 425 BC, Herodotus is profoundly, breathtakingly modern, his messages just as timely and relevant today as they were two and a half millennia ago. Respect other cultures. Stay within one’s natural limits. Beware the inevitable pitfalls of hubris. Avoid war unless absolutely necessary. Defend one’s freedoms. Whatever one’s religious faith, many of us would recognise the wisdom of his belief in the arbitrariness of fate and fortune: ‘Often enough, God gives man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him,’ he warns.
Above all, however, and this is one of the most important things to remember, Herodotus is huge fun. This is no fusty armchair historian. He’s the man you would want to have a drink with, sit next to on a train or aeroplane, chat with into the early hours over a bottle of whisky.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, just listen to Salima Ikram, the high-spirited professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. ‘I think he’s quite wonderful, charming; he’s an absolute riot, a great storyteller, the best way to get people to read history,’ she says. ‘The thing I love about Herodotus is that you can take him to the beach and he’s a rollicking good read. He’s so human. He’s like a cheerful pal going off on this great trip and telling you about it with all these wonderful stories, getting confused along the way.’
What better companion could you possibly wish for?
Justin Marozzi’s The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (John Murray, £25) is out now
January 2009
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