The Rest Is History: 330: Herodotus: The Birth of History

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Hear me! My name is Gorgo. I am a Spartan Queen. I come to tell you a story. A story unlike any that has been told before. It is the story of the greatest war ever fought.

Years had lasted. Famous cities went up in flames. Mighty heroes, the pride of Greece and Asia, won undying glory for themselves.

Some died before their time and their shades fled down to the underworld. Others, when the war was done, met with equally unhappy fates.

One returning from the war was murdered in his own palace. Another, a man of tricks and turns, the great schema who did more than anyone else to secure victory for the Greeks, roams the world this day. Who knows if he will ever make it home?

I, too, in the years since the war have roamed the world. I have spoken to those who fought and survived. I have toured the fields and sailed the waters where the battles were decided. I have sought to understand everything that happened.

How it was that east and west came to go to war. I played my own small part. I will tell you how. But this is not just my story. It is the story of everyone who played a part. Gods as well as men. A story unlike any you will ever have read.

So that Tom Holland, as you well know, is the beginning of the book, The Wolf Girl, the Greeks and the Gods. By, would you believe Tom Holland yourself? You've basically, you've persuaded me to read out your own book to you.

I did.

This is a podcast about Herodotus, the father of history. We could have started with Herodotus, but you've chosen to start with Holland. Explain yourself, Tom.

Shameless self-promotion.

Yes. So the premise of this book is that Gorgor is mentioned in Herodotus, the first great historian. In fact, the first historian full stop. There was no Herodotus before Herodotus is the famous maxim.

And in this book, he introduces a Spartan princess called Gorgor, who is the daughter of a Spartan king called Cleomenes, and who will go on to marry another Spartan king called Leonidas, the king who in due course will die at the Battle of Thermopylae.

And she is the heroine in my children's book and plays key parts in various parts of the story, but she's also embodying this desire to explain what happened in the war, but also why the war happened and even more than that.

The kind of the infinite quality of the world in which she's living. So the world of the Greeks, but also the world of the Persians who are invading Greece.

There's a twofold echo in that introduction. So the first echo is an echo of Homer. So the story of great cities being burnt, of kings coming back from the wars and being murdered and...

The trickster who wanders the...

Coming tricksters, yes. So you might think that that's Troy, you might think that that's Agamemnon, the Greek king who comes back to Mycenaean is murdered by Clytemnester, you might think that that's Odysseus.

But in fact, the cities in my version that gets burnt is Athens, gets burnt by the Persians in 480 BC. The king who returns home and is murdered is Xerxes, the Persian king who gets killed in a palace coup.

And the man of many tricks and parts who secures victory for the Greeks is Themistocles, the great Athenian admiral of the Battle of Salamis who basically wins that decisive naval engagement.

So there is that echo, but there is also an echo of Herodotus who at the beginning of his great work kind of talks in similar terms to Gorgon in the version that I've just given.

So I will read the first line of the first work of history ever written where Herodotus announces himself and his purpose.

You're not really in Greek, are you, are you, Tom? You're going to read it in a lovely translation. Who's the author of this translation, may I ask?

Me.

Me, so this is the Penguin Classics.

The most egotistical podcast ever recorded this episode.

I know, I know, I know, I know. But it is quite a good translation though, I said it myself.

So here we go. Herodotus from Halakamasus here displays his inquiries that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time and that everything great and astounding and all the glory of those exploits which serve to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect be kept alive and additionally and most importantly to give the reason they went to war.

So Tom, when he talks about the glory of those exploits, am I right in saying, I read that you had in your translation of that, you have given a little nod to Homer there, that you could have translated that differently.

But because the talk of glory and all that sort of stuff is some kind of nod to the Iliad, is that right?

Yes, so Herodotus there is absolutely echoing the Iliad. So Troy is mentioned, but actually Herodotus, you know, when he's trying to explain how it is that the peoples of Asia and the peoples of Europe have gone to war,

he lists the Trojan War, but he goes back even further and he says that according to the Persians, it's the fault of the Phoenicians who are the naval power in what's now Lebanon,

who are subjects of the Persians who form the kind of the core of the Great Fleet that gets defeated at Salamis.

And the Persians say that the Phoenicians came and they abducted a princess of Argos and that this led to a kind of tit for tat princess rustling.

That the Trojans then come and Nick Helen and so it goes on and it's just kind of escalated and escalated and escalated.

Basically Herodotus' account, his inquiries and that's what history means. The word history comes from, it means researches, it means inquiries.

It's an enormous shaggy dog story because just when you think that he's going to go into kind of details about how it is that say the Persians become part of the story, he doesn't.

He's going off on an absolute kind of, going massively off piece and he starts to talk about a king who wants his bodyguard to have a peak at his queen while she's naked.

Yeah, very famous.

And the consequences of that are fatal. And then before you know it, you've got a story about a guy who's been a musician, who's been captured by pirates and he escapes them by jumping into a sea while he's playing his loot

and he lands on a dolphin and gets taken to dry land.

And so it goes on and so it goes on. And you realise that this is a kind of great compilation of stories and wonders.

And if it looks forward to history, it also looks forward to, I don't know, the Arabian Knights or great collections of short stories.

So that's the wonderful thing about Herodotus and why he is not just my favourite historian, but I think my favourite writer is that he is both a great historian and infinitely entertaining.

All right, well, Tom, before we get into the weeds, so let's take a step back and look at the sort of broad context. So you said there's no Herodotus before Herodotus.

So the father of history, we are in the fifth century BC. Herodotus is obviously writing in Greek and sees himself as Greek, but he's not from what we would conventionally see as Greece, is he?

He is from Halikarnassus, which is now Bodrum in Turkey.

Yes, the great yachting centre.

Yes, exactly.

So give us a sense of what we know about Herodotus, the man and his times.

Well, we know very little about his biography because people in his age simply weren't interested in recording details like that.

Herodotus is essentially the first person who is putting down penned biographies of people, and he doesn't do it for himself.

So we have to, we can tell from that opening that he does come from this place, Halikarnassus, which was founded by settlers from the Peloponnese.

So that's the little, you know, the kind of the fork that constitutes southern Greece.

And they cross the Aegean to the Asian side of the Aegean, and they come to the Asian side of the Aegean and they come to a place called Keria, which is basically the kind of the southwest corner of what's now Turkey.

Yeah.

If we want any kind of information about biographical information about Herodotus, we actually have to go to the 10th century AD.

So there's a Byzantine encyclopedia.

Oh, yes, the Suda.

The Suda, the fortress as it's called.

So this is a millennium and a half after Herodotus lives.

And there we get the detail that his father was called Lyxes and his uncle was called Paniacis.

And apparently these are names with that are essentially Kerian, which imply either that Herodotus is kind of Greiko Kerian, or that the Greeks have become sufficiently Kerianized that they're adopting Kerian names.

Right.

Either way, it points to a sense that Herodotus is inherently cosmopolitan.

He is Greek.

He is part of the Kerian world.

More broadly, he's part of the world of Anatolia.

And Anatolia and Halicannassus with it has been conquered by the Persians.

So when Herodotus is born, presumably sometime in the 480s BC, he's born a subject of the Persian king.

And to be a subject of the Persian king is to be aware of yourself as part of a dominion that is huge beyond the dreams of any previous conqueror.

So Herodotus is born on the westernmost edge of an empire that stretches all the way to India and the Hindu Kush.

And that means, I think, that say, compared to Thucydides, the other great historian who will follow Herodotus, Thucydides is born in Athens and his perspective is a very Greek one.

He's not really interested in anything beyond the Perlews of Greece.

Herodotus has an inherently more kind of global scale of interests and his history when he says that his aim is to record the glory of those exploits which serve to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect.

Because the Persians essentially rule the whole of Asia and from Herodotus' perspective, much of Africa, that means that Herodotus' subject is basically the entire world because he sees it as a world war.

And for the Persians, it's a kind of peripheral border skirmish, really.

But Herodotus frames it as being this great war between Europe and Asia and this therefore justifies him in writing not just history but, you know, accounts of the kind of the animals or the products or the wealth or the customs of places up in what's now Ukraine or in India or in Arabia or in Egypt.

So it's not just the first great work of history, it's also the first gazetteer, it's the first work of ethnography.

I mean, essentially, it's the first work of nonfiction and it is the acorn from which to say the great oak of what's now the internet comes.

The desire to comprehend the totality of human experience and kind of record its Wikipedia.

So let me ask a couple of practical questions. Do we have any vague sense of a date when Herodotus wrote the histories?

Yes, several decades after the failure of the Persian invasion.

So the great invasion that's led by Xerxes is 480, it ends at the Battle of Pletea in 479.

We know that Herodotus speaks to people who had taken part in those events.

And that's kind of incredibly thrilling because you're witnessing the birth there of historical method.

Or all history.

So talking of the Battle of Pletea, this great land battle between the Greeks and the Persians which ends in Greek victory and finishes effectively the Persian wars.

Herodotus speaks to a guy called Thessanda who comes from a city of Orchaminus which is kind of allied with Thebes and Thebes is the great rival of Athens and so the Thebans are on the Persian side.

And shortly before the battle, the Persian general hosts a banquet at which people from Thebes, people from Orchaminus, Greeks who are allied to the Persians share in this banquet with the Persians.

And Thessanda has a conversation with a Persian talking about the prospects for the battle ahead and the Persian is actually a bit pessimistic about them.

And Thessanda remembers this and he then talks to Herodotus.

Yes.

So this is as close to hearing a voice of someone who fought at the battle as we're ever going to get and it's the first time you have that.

It's the first time in recorded history that this is being done.

So in a sense, this is the creation of history.

Yeah.

And that's what makes reading Herodotus so thrilling is the sense that, you know, Schopenhauer said that everything that history will become is already there in Herodotus.

And that's the fascination of it, I think.

Okay.

This is a bit like talking to Herodotus because you've got a Herodotian method of answering the questions where you're going to shoot off and tell me anecdotes and stories.

Yeah.

Which is great.

Which is exactly how Herodotus was.

Which is what he's all about.

Yes.

Exactly.

So that's when it's written.

Next.

How is it written?

I.e. what's it written with and on?

I mean, that seems like a very banal question, but I mean, does he write it with, he doesn't write on wax tablets or something, surely?

Well, he's writing it in Greek.

It seems to be written for oral consumption.

Yeah.

So he's probably giving, he's reading it at festivals.

The Greeks are inherently competitive.

They cannot do anything without kind of organizing a competition.

So probably that's what he's doing.

And then he's writing it down as well.

On paper?

On papyrus, I guess.

On papyrus.

And yes, this was my other question.

Why is he writing it?

Who's he writing it for?

Because if this hasn't existed before, what's the point of doing it?

So it's for recitals.

It's for competitions.

So there's another tradition that he leaves Alachanasus.

He gets exiled and he ends up in a colony that's been founded by the Athenians called Thuria in Italy, in southern Italy.

Right.

And if there's any truth to that tradition, then it suggests that he is being backed by the Athenians there.

And he apologizes at one point for his argument that it's the Athenians who play the key role in defeating the Persians.

So he constructs the first ever counterfactual, the first ever what if.

He says, what if the Athenians had sided with the Persians rather than with the Spartans and the Peloponnesians?

What would then have happened?

And he says, well, without the Athenian fleet, the Spartans would have been unable to stop the Persians from landing troops all across the Peloponnes.

And doubtless, the Spartans would have held out, but they would have been overwhelmed.

They would have gone down.

And so all of Greece would have been conquered.

He's nervous about making this argument because by this point, the Athenians have become themselves an imperial power.

So in the wake of the Persian Wars, they are the great, you know, the savior of Greece.

And so they leverage this to make themselves basically the mistress of what initially is a kind of defensive alliance, but very soon becomes an empire.

And it's this that leads to them in the end fighting with the Spartans, their erstwhile allies.

And so the sense that the Athenians who have seen off the despotism of Persia have now themselves become despotic is part of the narrative.

And it is also a theme that is woven into Herodotus' own history.

The fact that he is standing up for the Athenians and the role that they've played in the war, and the fact that there's this tradition that he ends up in an Athenian sponsored colony,

you know, there's a tantalizing hint there that perhaps he's consciously writing it for an Athenian audience.

Because by this point, Athens has become the great centre of literary culture of all kinds of things.

And in the terms of how people would, as it were, consume this work.

So he would read extracts at festivals and things like that.

But would copies be made of his original?

Yes.

It would be distributed among Athenian nobles?

Yes.

So Herodotus has survived because obviously people copied it.

Classical texts by and large, if they survive, it's due to their popularity.

And it's evident that even in, you know, his own lifetime, copies of the histories are starting to spread and spread.

And the evidence for that is Thucydides, who never mentions Herodotus, but it's an absent presence.

Right.

The very fact he's not talking about Herodotus, and yet he's so clearly influenced by him.

And again and again, he is making points that are clearly aimed at Herodotus.

It suggests that this has become part of the literary culture of Athens by the time Thucydides is writing.

You know, a decade or so, probably after Herodotus has finished it.

So right from the start, the world's first two historians are sniping at each other.

Absolutely.

Yes.

And so it begins.

But Herodotus himself, I mean, so the question then is, if there's no Herodotus before Herodotus,

how has he got the idea for this kind of incredible project?

Yeah.

And I think the answer to that lies in another region of the Aegean, which is the region called Ionia,

of which the greater city is Miletus, but there are other cities as well.

And they also have been conquered by the Persians.

But they are the centers of what I guess could legitimately be called the first great enlightenment.

And this is the birthplace of philosophy in Greece.

Yeah.

People who are looking at the universe and trying to construct laws that would explain

the functioning of the universe.

And it's interesting that Herodotus chooses to write in prose because the first texts

in Greek that are written in prose are laws, bodies of laws.

And there's a sense, I think, in which the philosophers are trying to speak in the same

way about the entire universe.

So just as you would have a body of laws that structure how people should behave, say, in

a city, what the philosophers are doing are trying to apply those laws to explain why

there's thunder, why there are seas, how the world began, is the world the center of the

universe, all that kind of thing, is it round, all this kind of stuff.

But that's what they're doing.

And I think that Herodotus is kind of applying that measure, that approach to the dimension

of recent affairs, of recent events.

Although he's a kind of great narrative historian, loves anecdotes, loves stories, he is also

writing his history to try and kind of work out if there are rules that govern the patterns

of human behavior.

Yeah.

And you said there was no Herodotus before Herodotus.

But there are accounts, aren't there, of writers who had done nonfiction before.

So I'm just looking at a list, Dionysius of Miletus, Acateus of Miletus.

So Miletus is a center of, as you said, sort of a proto-enlightenment.

And there are people, there are other people whose works are now lost, I assume, who are

sort of writing nonfiction works.

Is that fair?

So Thucydides' bitch is about Herodotus.

And Herodotus, who generally from his work seems to have been a very genial man, people

seem to have talked to him very readily.

Yeah.

He's a delightful man, but he has this hecatias he clearly hates and is endlessly dissing him.

Right.

It's hecatias who goes to Egypt and a bit like Plato's account in Atlantis where Solon goes

and is laughed at by the priests and he says, you know, you Greeks are children.

A similar thing happens to hecatias that he goes to the priests and he talks about his

interest in genealogy and the priest just laugh in his face because the Greeks have no understanding

of the past at all.

Right.

So Thucydides kind of says primly that I take no interest in genealogy, even though he does.

So his envy and dislike of hecatias clearly as a kind of predecessor and arrival is something

that's animating him.

But there's no Herodotus before Herodotus because no one is applying this to the dimension

of the past.

That's the key innovation.

So what Herodotus is doing, he's not, you know, as it were, an archival historian staying

in one place and pouring over the records because you mentioned hecatias traveling to

Egypt.

The remarkable thing about Herodotus is that he's not merely the first historian.

Am I right in thinking he's also either the first or one of the first travel writers because

he's combining his history with ethnography, with anthropology, with travel writing, all

these kinds of things because off he goes to Egypt and all these places.

It does seem that hecatias had as well, but Herodotus is, I mean, he's exceptional as

far as we can tell because hecatias' works haven't really survived, exceptional in the

breadth of his interest in other places.

So Herodotus was called by Cicero, the father of history, but more recently he's been called

the father of lies and a bit like with Marco Polo, did Marco Polo go to China?

There are people who argue he didn't.

There was a kind of a trend to argue that essentially Herodotus hadn't been anywhere

and that the whole book is really a meditation on Greece and that what he writes about the

Egyptians or the Persians or whatever are simply rifts on the Greeks.

He knows about the Greeks and the Persians and the Egyptians are constructed as people

who are not like the Persians or the Egyptians.

I think that that is clearly not true because what's happened over recent decades is that

again and again evidence has been found that kind of backs up what Herodotus is saying.

And I think it's pretty universally accepted now that Herodotus did go to Egypt.

So what Herodotus will do is he'll be telling you a story, he'll be telling you about the

kingdom of Lydia and then he'll go off on one about Lydia, the kind of clothes they wear,

the most amazing things to be seen in their kingdom, that kind of thing.

The biggest one of all is Egypt.

So he's describing how the Persians are invading Egypt.

Canbaises, the son of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, he's leading

this great army.

They're invading Egypt.

It's an incredible drama.

And then Herodotus says, Egypt is a land which boasts an inordinate number of wonders and

possesses more monuments, surpassing description than any other in the world.

Reason enough then, I think, to describe it at some length.

And when he says some length, he actually means enormous length.

Because it's hundreds of pages, but you don't in any way begrudge it because it's Herodotus

who for instance, who tells us about the process of mummification.

It's Herodotus who talks to us about the kings who built the pyramids.

He gives us all kinds of mad details about the obsession the Egyptians have with cats.

He claims that Egyptian women stand up to pee, Egyptian men sit down to pee.

It's full of this kind of mixture of clearly credible reportage and mad stuff.

But he's making some stuff is made up, is just hearsay.

So again and again, he says, so again, I'll quote him, those who find such things credible

must make what they will of the stories told by the Egyptians.

My own responsibility, however, as it has been throughout my writing, this entire narrative

is simply to record whatever I may be told by my sources.

And in Egypt, it seems that his sources are the priests.

And what you have to wonder when you get stories about how the daughter of Cheops, who built

the great pyramid, set herself up as a prostitute and raised enough money to build a kind of

small pyramid that stands in front of Cheops's pyramid, or when you get tales about how there

are flying snakes that try and break into Egypt, and they get beaten off by stalks.

And Herodotus claims that he's seen the bones for himself of these flying lizards.

What exactly is going on there?

We can't be sure.

And I suspect that it's a mixture of words getting lost in the translation.

Herodotus doesn't seem to have spoken any language apart from Greek.

Maybe the priests pulling his leg.

Certainly having some fun with the Greek, they've seen him as a barbaric kind of primitive

and they're teasing him.

Or maybe the priests themselves don't know, or maybe Herodotus, as with the skeletons

of the flying snakes.

I mean, I don't know what he saw there, but maybe some weird graveyard of animals or something

mummified animals.

I mean, it's hard to know.

Or maybe it's Chinese whispers.

He's picking up reports of reports of reports of reports.

But that idea that he says again and again, you may not believe what I'm saying, but this

is what I was told and my duty is to report what I was told.

I'm just the messenger.

Don't shoot the messenger.

That's what he's saying, right?

I mean,

Absolutely.

But again, I mean, that is the historical method at work.

He's reporting his sources.

Okay.

Very good.

So, Tom, we will come back after the break with some of the most colorful and as it were,

the funnest details and anecdotes and stories from Herodotus and you can pick out maybe

some of your highlights for us and we can delve a bit deeper into the mystery of the

histories.

So, we will see you after the break.

During Darius's reign, he invited some Greeks who were present to a conference and asked

them how much money it would take for them to be prepared to eat the corpses of their

fathers.

They replied that they would not do that for any amount of money.

Next, Darius summons some members of the Indian tribe known as Kalatiai, who eat their parents

and asked them in the presence of the Greeks with an interpreter presence so that they

could understand what was being said, how much money it would take for them to be willing

to cremate their father's corpses.

And they cried out in horror and told him not to say such appalling things.

So, Tom, that's from Herodotus.

Right from the start, he's a relativist, right?

He's got the story about the Greeks who won't eat their father's corpses, the Indians who

won't cremate them and he's having some fun with that.

I think it's so brilliant that you go for that because I think that that anecdote is

the absolute heart of his methodology.

So the context for this story is Cambyses, after the enormous digression Herodotus has

done about the Egyptians, has finally invaded Egypt and he's conquered it.

And then according to Herodotus, who in turn has got it from the priests, he goes mad and

he goes around insulting all the Egyptian gods, a divine bull is born and Cambyses

kills it and Herodotus is really shocked by this.

The reason that he's shocked, he says that everyone believes their own customs to be

by far and away the best and from this it follows that only a madman would think to

jeer at such matters and this is Herodotus' coordinating assumption that everybody's

customs are precious to them and that they all have different ways of seeing the world

and that people take for granted their own way of seeing the world and it's only when

they're kind of brought up against other ways of seeing the world that you can see how relative

they are, how culturally contingent.

And he illustrates this point with exactly the story that you told about, it's Darius

summoning Greeks who burn their parents when they die and an Indian tribe who supposedly

eat them and both are appalled by the idea that they might adopt the custom of the other

and the lesson that Herodotus draws from this, he cites Pinda the great poet, he says this

shows that custom is all.

But I think that there's a further dimension that makes this an astonishing moment because

what Herodotus is doing there is he is placing Darius the great at the center of the story

and Darius the great, he's the king who follows on from Canvaesis and he is the man who will

send the expedition that gets defeated by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 BC so in

a sense Darius is for the Athenians the bogeyman but what Herodotus is doing is making Darius

the Persian king the kind of the center of the story from his perspective the customs

of both the Greeks and the Indians are kind of weird, it's the person who stands geographically

at the center of the story, he's chosen Greeks and the Indians because they're both on the

periphery of his empire so there Herodotus can recognize that to a Persian king it's

the Greeks who are the barbarians and it's an absolutely kind of stunning insight.

I hate to use the word liminal, but Herodotus is he comes from a place that is on the edge

of the Persian world but also on the edge of the Greek world so is he uniquely placed

to be able to deliver these insights, to be able to understand context and stuff in a

way that somebody born in Athens would not have seen this because they'd have said how

dare you question our customs.

I think that must be the explanation for it, I mean we don't know but it seems to me the

likeliest explanation for this ability to kind of basically think himself or at least

attempt to think himself into the shoes of other peoples because I had an Iranian friend

who was very kind of nationalist, you know his family had gone into exile in the revolution

and he had changed his name to Cyrus as a kind of mark of respect for the founder of

the Iranian monarchy and he hated Herodotus and refused to read him and I keep saying

oh you must read him, he's wonderful and he say no he's just you know he's a terrible

Greek who reduces the Persians but he's wrong because Herodotus is hugely respectful of

the Persians, he admires them as a people, it's Herodotus who records the Persian maxim

that boys should be taught to ride to shoot a bow and to tell the truth and he records

this as kind of very admirable principle and even Xerxes the Persian king who you know

builds great bridges of boats across the helispont and lashes the waters when a storm breaks

them and often behaves in a kind of hubristic way a man who is so convinced of his power

that he is committing the crime of going where he shouldn't i.e. invading Europe as Herodotus

sees it. Nevertheless portrayal of Xerxes is often quite positive so Herodotus describes

the vast scale of the Persian expedition all the soldiers who are going on the invasion

and then he says that in all the millions of people on this expedition there was no

one more handsome nor better fitted to wield supreme power than Xerxes himself and there's

a very famous account when Xerxes just before the invasion he's still on the Asian shores

before crossing to Europe. He is looking at his army, he's looking at his fleet, he feels

this great surge of pride that he is the king of kings, the king of the world and then suddenly

he starts to weep and his uncle who's standing by him says well why are you weeping, why

these tears and Xerxes answers according to Herodotus that he had been musing on how short

his human life and the pity of it pierced me through all these multitudes here and yet

in a hundred years time not one of them will be alive. So that is a very Greek perspective.

It's evident that Xerxes never said that. That is a perspective of tragedy. It's something

that you know Athenian audiences watching Euripides or Sophocles would would appreciate

but it is an attempt by Herodotus to sit on Xerxes throne and to imagine well what would

he think, how would he feel. So there is a kind of a motive effort there.

But some people listen to this Tom will say I love history because history you know tells me truth

because history is a search for you know it's a quest for the truth and they would say you know

in a post-modern relative his age it's really important to cling on to these principles that

there is a difference between truth and lies and the idea of Herodotus the father of lies

you know seems to run counter to that and the story that you're just telling there. Herodotus

is his writing his book is not merely an account of you know following in his sources but it's an

act of imagination as well isn't it? As I think it has to be because the effort of trying to think

yourself into the shoes of different peoples for a Greek I mean I think for anyone does require an

effort of imagination. The reason that Herodotus is writing what we would now call history non-fiction

rather than fiction is absolutely because he's not writing myth so he is you know at the beginning

of his work he's distinguished very clearly between the dimension of what we would call myth.

So basically unverifiable accounts that are often contradictory from a very remote past

that can't be checked up on and he essentially is confining himself to you know what the the

sons of sons have reported so basically within that you know he's not writing about anything that's

not a hundred years before when he's writing it yeah so to that extent you know he can't be certain

that you know as you keep saying maybe it's not true what he's being told but he's reporting what

he's been told and when it comes to reporting what other peoples have said obviously he's on

slightly shakier ground because he he often you know he wouldn't be speaking their language and he

can't always understand the kind of the cultural frameworks and contexts within which they they

might be operating but what's intriguing is that there are times where he will express doubts about

something that he's been told but at the same time reveal something that suggests that actually it's

true so the classic account of this is where he reports the claim by Phoenicians that they have

been on an expedition sailing down the the east coast of Africa and rounded it and come all the

way back up and sail through pillars of Heracles the Straits of Tripulta and come all the way back

that they've been commissioned by a pharaoh to do this and Herodotus says that he doesn't believe

this for a minute he says that that one of their claims which I personally find unbelievable although

others may not was that while sailing around Libya so which is what he calls Africa they had had the

sun on their right hand side and this of course is precisely the detail which enables us to know

that the Phoenicians had crossed the equator yeah fascinating yeah so that suggests that

when Herodotus is reporting stuff that he believes to be mad it needn't necessarily be mad and it

also explains why when he reports the stuff that clearly is mad I think we should cut him some slack

so the most notorious example of Herodotus reporting something that clearly sounds mad

is when he talks about how people in a desert in India source gold and they say that the gold is

dug up by giant ants and that the ants go down and they dig up the gold but they're very kind of

ferocious and predatory so you wouldn't want to you know they're dangerous and so what what the

Indians do is they go out in the heat of the day when the ants are all sleeping they grab the gold

and then they you know they come back and the ants chase them and they have to kind of let go a camel

so that the ants go chasing after the camel and this is absolutely the kind of story that

has led Herodotus to being called the father of lies but I think what so what's going on there

India is part of the Persian world and so therefore it's part of Herodotus's world but it is amazing

to think that someone in the Greek world in the 5th century BC could report anything about India

which is you know unfathomable distances away and so it must be I mean what are these ants

there's a brilliant theory that maybe they are marmots because there are marmots in certain

regions of the Himalayas that go down and dig up holes and reveal gold dust and the locals apparently

did gather the gold and you can imagine that maybe the the word that is being used for marmot over

the process of transliteration as this story has reached the the far end of the Persian empire

that it's become ant and maybe it's been improved by the telling so that these marmots have been turned

kind of giant predators and things but I think that you have to cover Herodotus some slack for that

yeah I think that's I mean he's doing something unprecedented he is taking an interest in reaches

of the world that are by the standards of someone in you know a pre-industrial world

unbelievably distant and what about the actual what what we would call the sort of the straight

history so the high political stroke military history because obviously there he's competing

with Thucydides isn't he and does Herodotus stand up well do you think because is he really

interested in that or is he too interested in his marmots and his ants and stuff he is interested

so he gives basically most of what we know about the narrative history of what's called archaic

Greece so pre-classical Greece derives from Herodotus he focuses particularly on Athens and Sparta

because they will play the key role in the defense of Greece against the Persian invasion

so our records of the dual kingship in Sparta early customs of Sparta the succession of kings

of whom Leonidas is the most famous but he's integrated into a family tree that we can reconstruct

thanks to Herodotus also the emergence of democracy in Athens so the career of Solon who is the

person according to Plato who tells the story of Atlantis the kind of great lawgiver then there's

a tyranny we'll be talking about this in a later episode how democracy comes to Athens

but Herodotus is really our key source for that and then you have the details of the wars themselves

and I remember when I when I was a child Herodotus was the first classic I ever read because I wanted

to read about the Persian wars I've become obsessed by them and I realized that Herodotus is ultimately

you know this is if I want to know about the Persian wars I'm going to have to read Herodotus

himself and I spent the first four books of this vast work he doesn't get to the Persian wars at

all no they don't happen for ages do they yeah absolutely and then I got to the wars the counts

of the Ionian revolt when the Ionians rebel against the the Persians the Athenian support them

Darius is therefore determined to take vengeance on the Athenians sends the expedition to Marathon

that gets defeated 10 years later his son Xerxes leads this stupefyingly vast amphibious expedition

if Herodotus is to be trusted on the numbers which he may or may not be he certainly isn't

with reference to the manpower but maybe with the ships it's slightly more accurate and

the Spartans get defeated at Thermopylae the Persians then get defeated at Salamis and

the expedition is conclusively defeated at Plataea and Herodotus tells this story brilliantly

it's thrilling and stirring and that's why the glamour of Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis

endures to the present day no one has made a Hollywood film about anything that the

Ucidides wrote but they have 300 would be unthinkable without without without Herodotus

but it's not just the story this is the first war this is the first series of events

that we can analyze as historians before that we simply don't have the kind of the day-to-day

detail the day-to-day record so yeah I think it does hold up so two questions about that Tom

first of all you said it was a stirring account and of course it is it's incredibly stirring

and sort of rousing and that's you know that's why 300 exists or any of the many fictional

accounts of the Persian wars but we talked about Herodotus as a figure who on the edge

of the Greek and Persian worlds able to see it from both perspectives but these accounts

they are tinged aren't they with a kind of I don't know whether Greek chauvinism is the

right expression maybe that's too loaded but he wants the Greeks to win I mean there's very

partisan isn't it yes it is partisan but as I said that doesn't mean that you that you don't

try and get a Persian perspective which is what he's clearly doing when he's interviewing the

Sander of Ocaminas the significance of the Sander is that he can give the Persian perspective

on the battles so he's doing that and as I said also he is very aware of all the kind of the

military and moral qualities that the Persians have and even that Xerxes have the commander

of this great invasion so I think that he is actually unbelievably balanced and fair in his

account of the invasion to the degree that Plutarch who is a biographer writing much later

you know kind of in the age of Trajan and Hadrian he just he condemns Herodotus as a philo

barbarus a lover of barbarians a bleeding heart liberal basically because he thinks that Herodotus

has not been chauvinist enough so I said how Herodotus is a bit like the philosophers is trying

to look for patterns trying to look for laws that was my second question are the laws that

explain why the Persian wars turned out as they did so having having said that he may well have

been sponsored by the Athenians there is a kind of quite a dark take on Athens in the histories

because what Herodotus is describing over the course of his histories is a kind of cycle

that great empires rise and fall and the very last passage in the histories describes Cyrus

at an event and it goes back to the life of Cyrus the great the man who was founded the Persian

Empire and it describes a time where Cyrus has conquered his empire and delegates from his

subjects the Persians come to him and say now we're the rulers of the world why should we

subsist in this rough mountainous area where the Persians have their home why don't we go down into

the the rich flatlands of Mesopotamia and settle there and enjoy the fruits of our greatness and

Cyrus says well you can do that if you want to but if you do you're idiots because he says soft

lands breed soft men yes so there's this inherent idea that and it's one that the Diaban Caldoun

the great Muslim historian also fixes on that there's a kind of inherent cycle where greatness

results in softness and the people who have won this wealth are then unable to defend their wealth

against kind of immigrants newcomers people who are from poorer lands who want it and so the cycle

goes on but with Herodotus there's also an additional sense that powerful people are driven mad by power

and powerful empires are driven mad by power so Lord Acton power corrupts and absolute power

corrupts absolutely and so this is a lesson that is manifest in the histories because

the Persians win because they are morally superior to the people they defeat

they tell the truth they are not soft they learn to fire the bow and to ride horses

yeah but by the time you reach the reign of Xerxes his wealth is stupefying and although he is a

tough warrior he has also clearly been changed by the the fact that he can command the resources

of the entire world and it's this that leads him to his hubristic ambition to invade Greece and try

and conquer Europe and results in his overthrow which in turn has opened the door for Athens

to become a great power and I think inherent but unspoken in Herodotus's history is the idea that

Athens is following the Persian path so in his histories he's describing how Athens becomes a

democracy and he says that you know it's incredible how the change that democracy brings to Athens

the Athenians who'd never really done anything before suddenly are able to defeat their enemies

because they are free because they are true to the kind of the ideals of this heroic new form of

government but and it's this that enables them to defeat the Persians but what everybody who's

listening to Herodotus describe this knows is that even as Herodotus is reading out his

histories or writing them the Athenians themselves have become an imperial power

and although Herodotus probably doesn't live to see the defeat of Athens by Sparta that is kind

of baked into what he's writing so he's writing it's a warning yes I think he is and I think that

if he'd known that Sparta would defeat Athens he wouldn't have been surprised that very shortly

after that Sparta in turn gets defeated by the Thebans and then the Thebans in turn get defeated

by the Macedonians and so it goes on and then the Macedonians get defeated by the Romans that this

idea that greatness is a kind of treacherous thing for people to win so it's like Kipling's

home recessional that he did at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee or whatever it was one with

Nineveh entire one with Nineveh entire yeah it's the same idea but the the joy of Herodotus though

Tom is that it's not just that isn't it it's that I mean it's all the things you've talked about it's

the tangents and the mad stuff and the travelogues and the weird characters and the folktales and

the legends that he can never contain himself to the story but just kind of disappears off

down various rabbit holes not unlike the rest is history it has to be said so do you have

particular favorites my favorite story is a story that I was told years ago by the guy who

taught me Latin and he was a very good drawer illustrator and it's back when there were black

boards and you know he had chalk and he told the story of a man called Hippocliades who was a suitor

for the hand of the daughter of a very rich and powerful tyrant a kind of single ruler of a city

and because the daughter was so eligible suitors had come from across the Greek world so it was a

bit like people coming to win Helen in the in the story of the Trojan War they'd all gathered there

and Hippocliades was you know he's doing tremendously well he's basically out in the lead

so the tyrant the father of the of the daughter is he's requiring them to to wrestle to run to

fight to read poetry to do all the kind of things that an eligible Greek bachelor should be able to

do and then at the end he's about to announce that Hippocliades has won and he hosts a great

banquet and Hippocliades is so excited and happy that he gets incredibly pissed and starts to dance

on the table and this is very infra-dig and the tyrant says what are you doing and Hippocliades

says I'm having a great time then he starts to dance on his hands and kind of wiggle his ears

and shake his legs in the air and the tyrant says the way you're going you're going to lose

my daughter you know your bride is at risk and Hippocliades says and I paraphrase Hippocliades

couldn't give a toss couldn't care less and the thing and the and the tyrant says you have

danced away my daughter and Hippocliades just kind of collapses and a happy drunken heap

and he just tells the story so well that it's I think it's the earliest story that you can read

and actually smile it's it's funny the first funny story in history the first funny story in history

I mean presumably you know there are stories that were funny to whoever told them but yeah the

humor doesn't translate but I always remember the the kind of wonderful drawing on the blackboard

that the teacher did of Hippocliades dancing on his hands and waggling his ears and losing his

his girl and it's full of stories like that equally there are incredibly dark stories so

there's a terrifying story about a boy who gets kidnapped by a slave dealer gets castrated gets

sold to the the persian king he rises to become a powerful figure in the persian court comes back

and inflicts the most horrible revenge on the guy who had turned him into a unit consult him into

slavery what does he do don't leave us hanging tom now i'm gonna i'm gonna leave it hanging

you can read it in my penguin classics translation of eroticists I was just about to say that is a

that is brilliant salesmanship because if you want to find out the end of that story tom's

translation of eroticists an acclaimed translation it pains me to say uh hugely acclaimed tom well

done i say very grudgingly and i say that grudgingly not because i'm a mean spirited person but because

i've got to do another bit of salesmanship now uh because all of this tom is in aid of your

children's book the wolf girl the greeks and the gods it's not all in aid of it you i've been wanting

to do herodotus you know ever since we started you have to be fair now tell us so you decided to

basically set yourself up as a rival to herodotus because you're writing about the same period

you are toying with herodotus aren't you a little bit he's the father of history this book is called

the histories but uh your book as you have told our restless history club members already ends with

a feminist joke yeah her story because from a girl's perspective isn't it and did you do that

deliberately because herodotus is obviously you know a man's perspective on on history i did it

because and again i i told the um the members of the club this so they'll have had this story before

that when i went to greece to write persian fire it was my daughter's very young um so my

older daughter i think was was five at the time uh and so i had to try and make her interested in

all this stuff about battles and archaeological ruins and things not always the easiest thing

and gorge was the only young girl to feature in herodotus and so i made her the center of the

narratives and a bit like flashman pops up in all the key events in victorian history gorge in my

version popped up in all the battles and you know meets all the most significant people

and so the uh the the book the wolf girl the greeks and the gods a tale of the persian wars

is gorge is is the narrator for that reason just to end with not you but herodotus do you think

so is herodotus still is he the greatest historian i'm the father of history but is he the best

still tom after all these years the most readable the most fun i think he's definitely the most

readable i think he's the most entertaining and i think because he you know as to repeat shop

and house a pursue that all of history is contained within his work by that measure he

must be considered the greatest there you go the number one historian herodotus and the number two

tom holland together in one podcast at last and where i rank god knows so on that note you well

you're you're you're you're you're herodotian as well oh thank you tom because herodotus is

interested in the full sweep of human experience and yeah that's what your books are you know you

give the high politics but you also give space hoppers yeah i just would have loved angel delight

and space hoppers would he i don't think either of us as you said adion no that's the kind of

polarity high politics mad stuff about ants and i think it's very much on the side of mad ants

and i think this podcast is as well i think it's herodotian podcast herodotus would have enjoyed

the episode about pigeons wouldn't he or the disastrous parties are any of the other best dogs

yes you'd have loved the cost to reconcivil war right absolutely would i'm merely repeating what

i've been told yeah exactly right on that note we will we will return to greece and a little while

with the birth of democracy in athens but of course we've got much more than greece to come we

have things like the american war of independence coming in july we've got loads of fun things rather

like herodotus ranging widely and credulously and credulously across the world that's what the

rest is history specializes in so on that note we'll see you next time bye bye

thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening

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