Herodotus and the birth of enquiry

History isn’t as old as time. It’s as old as the time someone stood up, got out in the world and did some historia – the Greek word for investigative journalism. And so it began:

“This is the publication of the history of Herodotus the Halicarnassian, in order that events not vanish from men through time, and that great and wondrous deeds done by both Greeks and barbarians [=all non-Greeks] not lack renown, especially the reason why they made war against each other.”

In a sense, this sentence is where history starts: Herodotus’ nine-book narrative is the oldest surviving attempt to gather information about different people’s history, to interrogate its trustworthiness, and to organise it in a coherent, interconnected form.

History – or, as Herodotus would say in the Ionic dialect, historiē – did not mean the past, or even writing about the past: it meant “enquiry”. The past wouldn’t reveal its secrets to you unbidden; you had to ask. And for Herodotus the great question was to understand the Greeks’ place in the oikoumenē – the inhabited (known) world.

His account runs from the fall of the infamously wealthy Lydian king Croesus in 546 BC through to the Peloponnesian War (431–404), during which he himself died of natural causes. And, by virtue of the age he lived in, Herodotus had skin in the game. Though born around 484 BC in Greek-speaking Halicarnassus – now Bodrum on the west coast of Turkey – he entered the world as a Persian subject, subsumed by the westward expansion of the Achaemenid empire, then the largest the world had known.

It was said, perhaps truthfully, that Herodotus fell out of political favour with Lygdamis II, the Persian-backed tyrant of Halicarnassus who executed his uncle, the epic poet Panyassis. He then fled to Samos, one of the most innovative and enterprising Greek islands in antiquity; thereafter he was vagrant, a man without a homeland on a quest to understand his inheritance. 

For if writing history meant asking questions, that meant travelling to find people worth talking to. His journeys by sea and (more challengingly) by land were not limited to the Greek-speaking world. Though apparently monoglot, he romped round the Black Sea, west to Carthage, east to Egypt, across to Tyre, and even down to Babylon, presumably aided throughout by interpreters. 

From these peoples – and indirectly from the even more remote Scythians and Indians – we do find plenty to wonder at: the winged snakes of Arabia, the seasonal transformation of the northern Neuri into wolves, the self-immolation of Egyptian cats, and, of course, the gold-digging ants of India (since these are larger than foxes – but smaller than dogs, mind – their work is well worth watching).

Not only do Herodotus’ enquiries cover a massive extent of space, they also traverse huge periods of time. To explain the contemporary antipathy between Greeks and Persians he wanders deep into the realm of what we now call myth: the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea and Helen are cited as early casus belli. No less importantly, however, he also expresses the view that his historical account can only reliably be told over the previous hundred years.

Herodotus viewed history as one long chain of events, mostly playing out via the pendulum swing of tit-for-tat reciprocity. Like most Greeks, he subscribed to the words he put in Solon’s mouth: “divinity is jealous of human prosperity and disruptive of our peace”. The gods oversee the inevitable cycle of human experience, that each and every one of us can rise and fall. It is astounding to read his report that the Persian king Xerxes, on the verge of attacking Greece, burst into tears at the realisation that no great warrior in his sight would be alive in a hundred years’ time; more astounding still is the response of his uncle Artabanus that human life is so short and wretched that every human wishes they had never been born.

But the kernel of Herodotus’ project – what cropped up in his very first sentence – was explaining the rise and fall of the Persian threat. We follow the great Persian rulers in the wake of Croesus: Cyrus the Great, his son Cambyses, his son Darius, and his son Xerxes. Herodotus explores how Cyrus’ hubristic ambition sought to bring Greece under his sway. It charts how Athenian support of the Ionian colonies’ revolt against Persian rule prompted the latter to conquer mainland Greece.

Despite all the odds stacked against them, we read of the Greeks’ heroic victory against Darius at Marathon (490) – what J.S. Mill called a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings; of the stand of the Spartan 300 against Xerxes at Thermopylae (480); of Themistocles’ tactical triumph on the sea by Salamis (480); and of the decisive destruction of Persian power at Plataea and Mycale (479). 

Herotodus’ historical method is, inevitably, a work in progress. He will often cite his sources, textual or personal, but the bread and butter of his material are the tales people tell about themselves. To say that their accounts aren’t true is rather to miss the point: if these are the stories that shaped how Greeks of Herodotus’ day thought and acted, they are invaluable evidence for understanding that era. While his younger succcessor Thucydides cast aspersions on Herodotus’ credulous methods, we do frequently find Herodotus describe a report as incredible, but thinking it important to pass on what he really had heard.

Although the alphabet arrived in Greece some three centuries before he wrote, Herodotus’ Histories is the oldest surviving Greek prose text. However, despite being lauded by Cicero among others as “the Father of History”, Herodotus followed several Greek figures who had attempted prose histories. Owing to fickle fortune, alas, the works of these pioneers – Cadmus and Hecataeus of Miletus, Pherecydes of Athens, Xanthus of Lydia – can only be very partially glimpsed in shattered fragments.

At some point deep into the Peloponnesian War Herodotus died, doubtless dismayed at how the Greek world was tearing itself apart. His resting place is unknown; some say he died in Thurii, the Greek colony of southern Italy; others say, rather more colourfully, that he was buried in the same grave as Thucydides. At any rate, it is one of those poignant ironies that the life story of the father of history has, for the most part, long been lost to it.