Ideas - First historian Herodotus knew the power of story

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

For someone who died more than 2,400 years ago, Herodotus's voice is still very much alive. "He knows the way [a good story] can elevate but also corrupt and destroy our thinking," says professor Lindsay Mahon Rathnam in this IDEAS episode. The ancient Greek writer observed different cultures first-hand, while capturing the stories they share in an attempt to better understand how they came into being, and why they came into conflict with each other. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 16, 2023.

This is a CBC podcast. The directness of his voice sometimes feels like he is speaking directly to you. I'm obliged to record the things I'm told, but I'm certainly not required to believe them. I'm Nala Ayyed. Welcome to ideas, ideas featuring the wit, whimsy, and wisdom of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Throughout this history, it's my underlying principle that I must write down precisely what people tell me. So it is my eyes, my judgment, and my searching that speak these words to you. He shows how we can become blind to our own cultural lenses in ways that go far beyond the obvious.

We live in this moment of enormous crisis and challenge. I think Herodotus is showing how people can cooperate and understand each other across difference and fail to understand each other and fall into conflict across difference. Writing in the 5th century B.C.E. Herodotus understood the power of a good story. His mammoth-sized opus has a deceptively simple title, The History. But it's profoundly complex. And teams with vivid story upon story, upon story, upon story. upon story.

Furnthest to the south of all the world is Arabia, where bushes grow frankincense, which are guarded by tiny winged snakes. The east part of Libya is full of wild beasts, monstrously large snakes and lions, besides dog-faced beasts and headless ones that have eyes in their chests. At least that's how the Libyans describe them.

You lurch, as it were, from one fascinating story to another, and you tend to get lost in the tales of each of the stories, because each story is so wonderful. But again, there actually is a very rigorous intelligence underlying all of this and a very serious intention. And ultimately, the intention is to expose that the diversity of narratives mirror the diversity of human life. And he suggests that the stories we believe to be true are just as important, maybe if not more so, than the facts themselves.

Yes. Ideas producer Nicola Luxchitz brings us Herodotus, the power and peril of story. And I think that's one thing that actually we really do need to attend to today. Herodotus says that even if these stories are wrong and some of the stories he shows are clearly false, clearly fanciful, clearly self-aggrandizing, or paranoid or fearful, we learned something about the nature of the political world

from listening to them. Conveniently, Herodotus clearly states his mission in his very first line. Herodotus Herodotus Helicarnasios, historiase, Apodexus herde. I Herodotus, am here setting forth my history. Mehtaer megala te catomaster, but men Helenei, Tade Babauri, Apodextenta.

I, Herodotus of Helicarnassus, am here setting forth my history. That time may not draw the color from what man is brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and barbarians fail of their report and, together with all this,

the reason why they fought each other. There's a huge amount to unpack in this section. So I'm Rosalind Thomas. I'm professor of Greek history at the University of Oxford. For a start, he calls his work histori, which is the Greek word which has given us our word history, but it doesn't yet mean history. At the point where he's writing, it means inquiry. So historiere means inquiry. And really interestingly, it doesn't just mean any old inquiry. It's a sort of word, almost technical

word of art in the second half of the fifth century, which belongs to the inquiries of sort of proto-science, the early medical writers, the Hippocratics, and the inquiry into nature of the second half of the 5th century BC. So in other words, it's a rather high level, quite special word. And so when he says, his story is apodex is the display of my inquiry, he is signaling that this is modern, this is up to date, and he's doing a high level critical inquiry. His approach was unprecedented. Herodotus is the earliest surviving example of Greek literary prose, and we have no reason to think that there were any earlier ones. I'm Clifford Orwin. I'm a professor of political science at the University of Toronto,

and I'm an historian of political thought. Prose, of course, had existed for much longer than poetry, but prose, as we have records of it in antiquity, was entirely utilitarian. We have all these cuneiform tablets from Sumeria, which are filled with what? Commercial transactions. I so-and-so sold a bushel of such and such to so-and-so for so many dollars and cents. That's the character of most prose writing that comes down from remote antiquity. So this is a completely different thing. And I think this would have astonished Herodotus' readers, because Herodotus' readers would have been used to reading about accounts of great deeds, embellished, you know, presented

in, you know, beautiful verse. But to get this telephone book, that's an anachronism, of course, telephone book-sized work of prose, which deals with these highest subjects, that would have been a, complete novelty for them. Before Herodotus, the great epics were poetry, supposedly inspired and endorsed by the gods. And is this the first then attempt that we know of that aims to claim some objective truth? Yes, I think that's something of what's going on here, right? That somehow prose is the objective medium as opposed to poetry. Poetry necessarily embellishes, makes beautiful, everything it touches because every line aspires to be beautiful. What prose is at first is writing

something down so it's not to forget it and so that others won't either. We really are bringing things down to earth. We're bringing things down to a merely human level. Both of these emphasize that this is a work of unassisted human reason, which as such aims not at the beautiful, but at the accurate or true. That time may not draw the colour from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and barbarians feel of their report. He's wanting to preserve the memories so that the memories so that the memories of human events won't be erased by time. And then he's even handed.

he says the great and the wonderful deeds of both the Greeks and the non-Greeks. So he's not just elevating and eulogizing the Greeks. Here it is the Greeks and the non-Greeks. And then finally, for what cause they came into conflict with each other, you could take that as basically come describing the whole of the histories because it's probably not just the immediate run-up to the Persian wars, but it is the conflict between the Greeks and the non-Greeks, which he takes right back to the 8th, to the 7th century BC.

Cause can also mean all sorts of deep-seated conflicts of custom, conflicts of lifestyle, geography. So in a way, the poem is it can encapsulates almost all of what he actually then goes on to say. All these events, all these achievements can come in. Back in the 5th century, when Herodotus was composing his life's work, he was living through the aftermath of the biggest and most destructive war his world had ever seen. The massive Persian army, which by some accounts had nearly two million soldiers on land and sea,

had conquered most of the known world, from what's now Iran to the east, all the way west to Ethiopia and Libya, with Turkey and Egypt in between. Yet the Persians failed spectacularly in their attempt to take over the small but mighty Greek city states that rallied together to defend themselves. Herodotus wanted to understand why, what led to the war. He wanted to look deeply into its root causes, so he dug into hundreds of years of collective memory, mythology, and first-person accounts from a plethora of sources. And at the core of it all was his profound curiosity and spirit of inquiry.

An inquiry into the nature of humankind, the inquiry into war, the inquiry into the relationship of human beings in their natural world. My name is Lindsay Mahan Ratham, and I'm an assistant professor of political theory at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. He tells a story because he calls what he does a performance of his inquiry. It's a wonderful, fascinating. a thought-provoking story that asks its readers to judge it and think along with him as he goes. The stories that he tells reveal the sorts of things that people think about their political world.

And in that can tell us something about the nature of politics today. This work that he's trying to get us to do as it co-inquires into these really contested things, cultural differences, war, clash. To do that well, you have to be moved to do it. We think of inquiry as something that you should be neutral. You should be disengaged. You should be abstract. But for Herodotus, if you're neutral and abstract, you're going to be doing it wrong. You have to be able to enter inside these stories to feel when these mistakes go badly, to feel when inquiry has gone awry or when people have misunderstood one another and it's ended tragically to really get this kind of vicarious experience of something that has happened to him. I mean, undoubtedly, there is a vantage point. He does think that it's possible for human beings to rise. above the parochialism in which each of us is born because each of us is educated as

one thing, you know, rather than another, living in one period of time and another in one place rather than another. So all of us have perspectives which are inevitably both particular and ultimately narrow. And again, I think that the great project for Rodotus is to enable his readers to rise above the parochialism of their upbringings and just see human life from a higher and therefore also wider vantage point. North of the Baldies, no one can say that he knows anything exactly. For high, impassable mountains bar the way, and no one has scaled them. The Baldies themselves declare, though I personally don't believe it,

that these mountains are the dwelling of goat-footed men. And beyond these, they say there are people. who sleep six months a year. This I cannot accept at all. As for the stories told by the Egyptians, that whoever finds them credible use them. Throughout this history, it's my underlying principle that I must write down precisely what people tell me. his knowledge. He very often makes it clear, a few times makes it clear, but he makes it clear that it applies to the whole narrative, that he doesn't vouch for all of these stories, that he's retelling the stories as he receive them. And so in a way, we're getting his

synthesis of the versions that each culture, as we would say, gives of itself. But he does also practice what the Greeks call autopsis, viewing something oneself. So he, for instance, has viewed the great monuments of Egypt himself and gives an account of them. He's viewed various what we would call natural phenomena himself, right, and gives firsthand accounts of them. So it's a mixture of the firsthand for which Herodot is a successful responsibility and second or third hand or fourth hand accounts, accounts of events lost in the midst of time, for which, in a way, the reader is called upon to decide as to the plausibility or lack of plausibility. of the accounting question. One of the very first stories he tells is the story of Arian.

Once upon a time, there was a handsome musician from Corinth. His name was Arian. He could play the lyre more beautifully than anyone else in the world. So this is one of those stories. that Herodotus tells, but as he says at one point, I'm bound to tell what is said. I'm not at all required to believe it,

and this goes to my whole history. So he doesn't tell us to absolutely believe this story. But it's a story that people believe. He says the Corinthians believe it, and the people from the Isle of Lesbos believe it. And so the story of Arian is a great story, because it is so unbelievable. He was seized with a longing to sail to Italy and Sicily,

And since he trusted no one more than the Corinthians, he hired a boat of Corinthians. He was seized with a longing to sail, right? Seized with an arrow. It's another phrase that recurs in the histories. And he goes and makes a lot of money, and then he's homesick. He wants to go home.

So he hires these people from his own island and thinks he can trust them more because they're from his own island. But these people, once they're out at sea, he realized that this guy had a lot of money. When they were out sea, those Corinthians plotted to throw Aryan overboard and take his money. And so they decided that they were going to steal it from him and drown him while they were sailing. And he heard of this plot and begged for his life and said,

well, if you're not going to spare me, allow me to play one more song before I go to my death in the ocean. My name is Joel Alden Schlosser. I'm the chair and associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. He promised that as soon as his song ended, he would kill himself. And so he put on all of his ceremonial gear because he was a rhapsodist and would sing Ditharam's sort of religious songs. Which, let's be frank, was heavy, right? This is elaborate ritual clothing. And stood on the prow of the boat and plucked his kithra or strummed it. I'm not sure of the verb.

And the men enjoyed it, even though they were this unsavory lot, even they were touched by the song. Arrian took his liar in his hand, and taking the stand on the deck, he went through the high shrill song and then cast himself into the sea. And then jumped into the sea. jumped into the water to his death.

But he didn't die. He's saved by a dolphin. I love this. It's this magic dolphin coming out of nowhere to save him. Yeah, here's the Delphina. The way they sail to Corinth. The way they sail to Corinth. But, says the tale, a dolphin picked Aryan up.

on his back and brought him back home. And delivered him to Corinth, which was their destination. And he arrived at the king's palace, wearing still his full ceremonial attire, and told the king this story, and the king said, okay, well, we'll see what happens when they come. And so the men came with the boat, and the king said, well, where's Arian? And they said, oh, we left him in Tarantam to enjoy all of his wealth. and then Arian jumps out and says,

I've caught you in the act. And so then the unsavory men are executed. I think it's suggestive that in this moment of great peril, he was saved by his art. Like there's a suggestion that the reason the dolphin, which has connections to Delphi the gods, came to save him after he sang his shrill tune. There's something about suggestive of the saving power of beauty, right?

That this horrible, dire situation can somehow call forth this, like, miraculous response and save his life, right? So in situations of desperation, when people can do anything, Arian is most truly himself, most truly dedicated to his art, and that saves him. But that's a fanciful fairy tale. But what else is there is look at the Corinthian pirates. Arrian thought he could trust his own people He preferred his own people to all others And they betrayed him

These are people who had become corrupted They didn't believe in anything more So much that they would destroy this person Even as they're doing this Their fellow countrymen Even as he's doing this beautiful performance They were unable to be moved by art There's a kind of cautionary tale

About just not just assuming that your own people Are the best people And not just blindly trusting That your neighbors will have your back You can't just belie that the people that are yours are there for the best. And so what is the story doing here? Herodda isn't claiming that it's true.

First of all, it's a fun story. Like, I'm paying attention, a magic dolphin. What? But it tells something that people believe this, right? That something, there's something that appeals to his audience about the idea that art can save them, that art can elevate. But I think there's a way in which,

Herodotus himself is going to be going into deep waters, so to speak, with his inquiries. Because he is an outsider who will praise the Hellenes and condemn them. He's going to praise the Athenians who weren't always very popular, but also point out how stupid they could be. He is going to be going into some very deep waters themselves. And there's a way in which I think Herodotus is calling him down, calling at the dolphin to save him too, by telling this great story, which has us hooked as readers, which has us a little bit charmed, even if we know it's silly. While his writing is evocative and vivid, the details of Herodotus' own life are largely unknown. Well, as with so many ancient writers, we know very little about him. In fact, we don't know much more about him than he tells us about himself.

So we know that he was from Halakarnassus, a Greek city in Asia Minor. His hometown was on an island that's now part of modern-day Turkey. But at the time it was. an outpost in another culture that was under Persian rule, but was also a bustling international port city with a lot of connections to Egypt and the whole near Mediterranean world, a kind of jumping off place for him to do his travels. We know that he was a great traveler

because he tells us the places that he's visited. We have to presume that he was wealthy because only a wealthy man could have afforded such travels. From Babylonia to Egypt, to the whole kind of near-eastern world and spent a lot of his adult life belonging to cities to which he did not belong. We know that he spent part of his life at Athens,

and we know that he spent part of his life at a new city in Italy that was founded as the first ever Panhellenic city where people from all different parts of the Greek world and all different parts of the Greek race who were rivals in the broader world would live together in harmony. the fact that he availed himself of that opportunity, I think, tells us something about him.

I think that it gave him that sense of being in the midst of history, but also a familiarity and a willingness to imagine and to sort of visit in his mind with, and then, in fact, with people who are very different. So one of the things that's so remarkable about him is his cross-cultural understanding or awareness, as we put it today, his ability to really put himself in the shoes of other people who lived radically different lives. And I think growing up in that polyglottal, liminal border space of the sort of edge of the Greek-speaking world

and the edge of the Persian world, on the other hand, gave him that vantage point. Through his travels, Herodotus was really interested in origin stories and the vantage point they provide, how a culture mythologizes its beginnings and the beginnings of their real-life heroes. Like the legendary leader who kick-started the Persian conquest of the known world then,

Cyrus the Great. Epidaeziahe, the day to Ethelten, hemen, hologos, tonicluron, hostis aon, den, Croisier. Hostis aon ten. Croissant Croisciu are Ken Catero, our Azei's. Our story must now go on to inquiree who took control of the empire from Cres.

And how it came about that the Persians became the leaders of all Asia. I will write my account, according to the evidence of those Persians who desire not to make solemn miracles of all that concerns Cyrus, but to tell the very truth. But I know three other ways to tell the story of Cyrus. So this opening is quite famous because Cyrus was the great founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, and obviously quite. a few stories surrounded his origins and Herodos gives us the story that he thinks is the most

plausible, but he's signaling to us that he's leaving out the other stories. What we're getting is, if you like, the purely human account of Cyrus by those Persians who present it as a merely human story.

It's a great passage because, you know, in the Greek you realize how he's very specific that this is what he's doing. Kaitta Grapso, like I'm going to write, but these things I'm going to write for those Persians that want the truth. So, yeah, it's, again, emphatic about his position, his perspective and his vantage point. And it's a way, I think, of marking his role as a sort of sorter of stories and as making some authorial choices about which story he wants. And creating this, the value.

I mean, again, we sort of assume, oh, people who write history are concerned with the facts. Herodotus is the first person to give Historia. He's the first person to show us what inquiry is. And so he's saying the purpose of inquiry is not to make solemn miracles of all the concerned Cyrus, but to tell the truth. We're not just about saying Cyrus is the next Achilles, this great hero, but instead we're concerned with the true account. And that's why I'm choosing the true one, and I may not tell some of the stories that you expect to hear. On Ideas, you're listening to Herodotus, the power and peril of story. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. public radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cBC.ca.ca slash ideas.

Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you can. Get Your Podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, Herodotus traveled far and wide in the ancient world, gathering stories, some true, some not. His account is famous for what seemed to be diversions, stories about magical dolphins, flying snakes, giant gold-digging ants. in the Indian desert there are ants that are in bigness lesser than dogs

but larger than foxes but his ultimate quest was to understand how different cultures understand themselves and what fundamentally leads to the flourishing of empire and causes of war the result of his inquiry

is simply called the history and the stories he captured carry enduring insights for us Today. Ideas producer Nicola Luxchich. The story of Cyrus, who led the first wave of Persian conquests, comes with a good dose of spin that Herodotus had to sort through. Everyone likes a compelling origin story. And Herodotus does his best to capture the details of Cyrus's origin story. The story that he then proceeds to tell has some slightly unbelievable things and things that

I don't know what a true reporter report, but he reports it because it's integral to the story. The story of Cyrus begins with a strange dream Cyrus's grandfather had, way before Cyrus was even born. He dreamed that his daughter urinated so copiously that she filled up his city and flooded all of Asia. And not long after the king's daughter got married, the king had another really strange dream. He saw a vine growing from his daughter's genitals, covering all of Asia. As the story goes, these dreams terrified the king so much that he felt he had no choice but to make sure his grandson was killed as soon as he was born. So he hands his grandson to a trusted servant with orders to kill the baby.

But the servant just couldn't bring himself to do it. He wept on his way home, and when he entered his house, he told his wife, I can't possibly commit such a murder. He then hands the baby to a poor herdsman with orders to abandon Cyrus on a deserted mountainside. He tells the herdsman that someone will come to inspect the infant's body in a few days. The distressed herdsman brings baby Cyrus home, whereupon the herdsman unwrapped the child and showed him to his wife, and when she saw the child and how beautiful he was, she burst into tears

and took hold of her husband's knees imploring him not to expose the baby. But he told her he had no choice. He would be killed if he did not kill the baby. Let me propose another course we could take, she said. For I too have just given birth but to a stillborn child. Take the dead child and expose it outside, and we can raise this child as our own. And that's what they did.

They leave the stillborn corpse on the mountain-sense. to trick the king's men, and they raise Cyrus as their own. The years go by, the baby grows into a strong toddler and into an even stronger child, and shows himself to be an exemplary leader and fighter. Eventually, when Cyrus is just over 10 years old, the king finds out he's still alive. The king was thunderstruck, and for a while could not say anything at all. and he's livid that his trusted servant disobeyed his orders to kill him. So he has his servant's son killed.

The king cut his throat and chopped him limb by limb, and some of him he roasted and some he stewed. Which he then served to his servant at a lavish banquet as punishment for his betrayal. Then after much deliberation, the king decided to send young Cyrus back to his birth parents in Persia. And that's where his leadership, strengths, and strategic fighting skills become all the more refined. Cyrus grew into manhood and was the most stalwart of his peers, as well as the most popular. He quickly climbed the ranks. The Persians enthusiastically accepted Cyrus's offer to be their leader. Cyrus said, I appeal to you now, obey me and be free. I believe that it was by

divine providence I was born, and this opportunity was meant to fall into my hands. And as the story goes, Cyrus went on to take over his grandfather's throne. But Herodotus lets us know that there were other stories circulating about Cyrus. Herodotus wants to tell the very truth. He really wants to get to the core of what happened because Cyrus reveals a lot about the nature of power, the nature of empire, and so he wants to tell the truth. But part of that, telling the truth, is to record these other stories and to highlight them as false stories, to show how Cyrus is a master of spin, to show how Cyrus is aware of his image and knows how perception matters and how performance matters. Because it's very clear that

Cyrus, in his massaging of his own story and his self-presentation, is somebody who knows the optics of politics. And so for us, you know, that's a warning. Cyrus was astute enough to recognize that his own origin story would be all the more powerful if it had an epic component, something involving superhuman or divine intervention. He landed on one,

that he was raised by wild dogs. His birth parents helped spin the story. Oh yes, so these are all, you know, these great mythological details. So Cyrus's adopted mother had the Persian name of dog. His parents exploited this woman's name in order to spread the rumor that when Cyrus had been exposed in the wild,

a female dog had suckled and raised him, so that their son's survival would seem more divinely miraculous to the Persians. Certainly, from this beginning, that rumor has spread far and wide. So the story goes that Cyrus was raised and suckled by a dog. So that's a myth that recalls later, you know, the Romulus and Riemus and the she-wolf, right?

So there is, in that world, there's something but the divine ascent of, like, raised by an animal that makes you seem to be more than human to be something somehow ordained. And I think that just adds to the extraordinaryness. So that story burnishes the extraordinarilyness of Cyrus for an unsuspecting audience, that Herodotus tells us that Cyrus shaped this story, tells us just how good he was at manipulation. And so Herodotus is both using a good story to warn us about the power of story, I think. And that's what we get in his treatment of Cyrus.

While Herodotus warns us about the power of a good story, he's careful not to pass harsh judgment on those who happen to believe unbelievable stories. I find his approach in this kind, you know. He doesn't call people out for being ridiculous for having believed the dog's story. He dismisses it gently and he presents his version of facts. Would you describe Herodotus's approach? as compassionate in any way? Yes. He looks around. He sees that all human peoples believe in some kind of divine presence in the world. And I think he thinks that this is a permanent fact of human life, that there are good reasons for it, that we all have longings that only the divine can satisfy. And also, I mean, Kharodotis thinks that the gods are very useful. The presumed divine enforcement of justice is very useful in a world in which the human enforcement of justice is always and always

will be so defective. So I think that it's not Herodotus's business to banish this element from human life. On the other hand, he does want readers to become at least somewhat self-critical in these matters. And also, he doesn't want good men to become the victim of the wiles of bad men. So for that reason, too, it's very important to emphasize that however beneficent the role in human life of what we might call religion, it also offers these opportunities for manipulation. And he doesn't necessarily condemn such manipulation, by the way. Just as he doesn't condemn those who are credulous with regard to Cyrus, so he doesn't blame Cyrus for presuming on their credulity.

Throughout the hundreds of stories he shares in his massive work, Herodotus is careful not to pass explicit judgment, and he's as transparent as he can be about his own limitations as narrator. I love the moments when he admits he doesn't know. His frankness about the things that just resist explanation is refreshing. And that humility also goes along with this profound openness to others and praise for others. Like he's always stopping to say, and you know the Phoenicians, they build great boats, right? Or to stop and to give praise where it is due, no matter what. where he finds, no matter how strange or different it might be to his experience or our experience,

he finds the wonder in what human beings have done and never fails to stop to record it. And so how would you describe his essence? His essence. Yeah, what pops through with his writing? I would say wonder, right? Wonder combined with the idea that wonder shouldn't be something that stops us or stifle. us, but that wonder invites, right? And so there is something very enticing about this work of inquiring, this work of discovery that he does insofar as it does make you look at the

world in a new way when you stop and sort of behold something that you hadn't noticed before or something that was previously strange or inscrutable to you. And it's not just, you know, the wonder of a tourist gawking at something and taking a picture and forgetting about it. The things that he uncovers, the things that his wonder allows him to explore, deepens our sense of who we are as a species, right? What man has brought into being? Well, you can't know that unless you have some sort of understanding what human beings are and what it is that we make these things. And the things that we make for Herodotus turns out to be nomos, right, all these, which is the Greek word for convention, for culture, for law. We are the culture

generating animal. We are the convention-making animal. And to understand the relationship between what human beings are and what we have generated goes a long way into understanding what it is to be human. There's one story that many experts say likely captures Herodotus' own views of what ultimately defines the good life. And it begins with an implausible account of an encounter between two powerful men.

Well, it's chronologically implausible. That is, we know that given the birth and death days, of Solon and Croesus, they could not have met in this way. But it's doubtful that Herodotus's readers would have had such a precise sense of the chronology of these two semi-legendary figures. Solon was famous for his wisdom and a well-respected lawmaker from Athens. And Cretius was famous for being the wealthiest man in the world and for being the first to lose his entire kingdom to the mighty Persian leader Cyrus. And yes, there's no record of the two ever being in a room together.

In fact, Solon was dead by the time Cretius assumed the throne. But to Herodotus and his audience, the suspension of disbelief that these two did meet would have made complete sense. Why would Herodotus present this interaction as something that actually happened? Well, this is a great story. Like, this is one of the greatest stories, I think, in all of the histories. So you can imagine he has this one in his pocket and he's thinking, okay, where can I tell this? I want to tell this early because it's going to get my reader.

And I can imagine that Herodotus is sitting around the fire, you know, passing the wine skin around, and people are like, Herodotus, tell that story about Solon increases. So I imagine, too, he's told it a lot of times. And I think in terms of the histories, there are a couple of reasons to think about why he's telling it. One is that Athens is an important figure in his inquiry. You can imagine he spent a lot of time in Athens.

It was the most literate place in the Greek-speaking world. he probably was in correspondence with people who were there. So he was imagining them as readers. And in his time when he was writing this text, Athens was also the most powerful city-state polis in the Mediterranean world. So Solon is the great lawgiver of Athens, and he was the sort of proud progenitor of Athens, and to show him questioning the Persian wealth and power

in this sort of very typical way, is a way of expanding on that and contributing to that mythology and also that power. But I think that the other thing is this is a kind of herodotian moment of reflection on what a good life is, which comes up again and again in the history. It's like, is it a good life to accumulate as much as you possibly can? Or is the good life living in community and fulfilling your duties and being recognized for those by the people who know you and dying happily surrounded by family and friends? And that's putting stark antithetical contrast in this story of Solon and Cresus.

Cretius invites Solon to visit him. Solon then hops on a boat and shows up as requested at Cretius' palace. On the third or fourth day, Cresus gave orders to his servants to give Solon a tour through the treasuries and point out all his great riches. He liked to show off his wealth to visitors, as wealthy men will do. And in return, he expected them to comment on how happy he was to possess all this wealth. Indeed, as he regards himself, the most blessed man in the world. Solon provides no such response.

When Solon had viewed and inspected everything long enough, Cresus said to him, My Athenian guest, word of your wisdom and travels, have reached us even here. We hear you have wandered through much of the world in the search for knowledge, so I really can't resist asking you whether you have seen anyone who surpasses all others in happiness and prosperity. He asked this in the hope he would be declared the happiest and most prosperous of all. But Solon had no intention of flattering him.

He spoke the plain truth. Sir, that would be Tellus, the Athenian. Cretius was aghast, dumbfounded, because Tellus was a complete nobody. But according to Solon, He had good and noble children and grandchildren surviving him. Tellus died nobly in battle defending his city and was given a public funeral with full honors.

As Solon spoke at length about Tellus's happiness and prosperity, he spurred Cresus to ask further who might be the next most happy person. Solon said Cleobis and Byton. These two were brothers and also complete unknowns. Their story is that on a festival day they pulled their mother five miles on an ox cart to get her to the shrine. All the other women lavished high praise on the boys for showing such filial love, and then the brothers fell asleep at the sanctuary and died peacefully.

This story did not sit well with Cretius. Cretius now became annoyed. Are you disparaging my own happiness, as though it were nothing? Do you think me worth less than even a common man? He was able, apparently, to stand the fact that he wasn't mentioned as the first happiest or first most blessed, but that he wasn't mentioned even as the second most blessed, but instead these obscure backwoodsmen from this insignificant part of Greece are mentioned as the second most blessed.

This really does get his goat. So this then provokes Solon to deliver this long speech on human happiness, which is the first great set piece in the work. It is a very powerful statement, and it's a very Greek statement. So it provides us with a very important insight to what we might call a certain version of a distinctively Greek wisdom. So long responded, you seem to be very wealthy and you rule over many people, but I cannot yet tell you the answer you asked for until I learn how your life ends. You see, the man who is very wealthy is no more happy and prosperous. than the man who only has enough to live on from day to day.

The Greek idea of eudaimonia of happiness not as euphoria or a good feeling or pleasantness or a sort of thing that we can achieve, but rather as something that we do and practice that is inherent in activity, which is later theorized by people like Aristotle, Herodotus is already showing us that story. He's giving us stories again and again of people who live good lives by acting with skill in their lives according to where they find themselves and their character and who respect the norms and the culture that they live in and contribute to those in some way.

And that that's happiness, not Cresis, who is rich as Cresis, who has all these possessions and has achieved some measure of domination and conquest over the world and not tyrants who would pursue him similarly. What Solon says to Cresis, well, I mean, your wealth isn't really, worth very much until you've died a good death. Having lots of wealth just isn't the same thing as being fortunate and happy.

So Hoholbios, the person who's happy, fortunate. And he says, I can only declare you truly fortunate when you've died. It's necessary to consider the end. The God often offers prosperity to men, but then destroys them utterly by the roots. Anything can happen any day. Human life is entirely a matter of chance. So this is voicing the sort of incredible archaic pessimism, it's often called, where really the gods can pull you down at any moment and you have to be humble and modest in relation to the gods. Don't be arrogant. And then, in fact, what happens with Creeces is he is arrogant. He's far too arrogant. And that arrogance leads him to misjudge his own power and his own wisdom. And he makes a catastrophic decision, which is, is to attack Cyrus the Great, the leader of the Persians,

and the divine anger comes to Cresas, as we may guess, herorta says, because he thought himself the most fortunate of men. So his arrogance in thinking he's the most fortunate is then punished. So it is a terrific moral tale, which Herodos makes very important by telling it at great length. So I think the length is also to make sure that the readers don't miss this, It is very, very significant. It's right at the beginning.

And it's echoed at the very end of the histories. That makes complete sense. Beware of arrogance. This certainly is a forewarning that contemporary politicians could absorb. Yes, indeed. And don't want other people's possessions. Don't want other people's lands because at the very end, Cyrus is having a conversation with someone.

Shall we conquer other lands? And someone says, well, beware, because if you conquer other lands, you know, you may become soft. And that we know by the end of the histories that, of course, the Persians did start conquering other people's lands. And they were defeated. In Herodotris's understated way, he leaves us with this hanging anecdote. And some people can go away and think that it's a warning to the Athenians, or it might be awarding to the Persians or anyone else who wants to create an empire. The modern Vladimir Vladimir Putin

The modern Vladimir strongly argued that all Russian speakers were part of one great nation, suggesting that Ukraine was not a real country and even that the Ukrainian language was not a real language. Trump is still your president. This is a major fraud in our nation. We were getting ready to win this election frankly, we did win this election. What words of caution do you think Herodotus would have for democracies?

This is one of the things that Herodotus' histories does. He knows the power of a good story. He knows the way it can either elevate but also corrupt and destroy our thinking. But he also knows that you can't just simply stop it. You can't just simply correct it, right? Because we all know how, you know, conspiracy theories and misinformation and all these things that are generated by AI and the Internet can trap people and lead them to do and believe outrageous and awful things. But we also know that you can't just tell somebody that it's false and snap them out of it, right? Debunking usually doesn't work very well as anybody who's had an awkward Thanksgiving-dinner conversation can attest.

And so what he does in the histories, we can't do exactly ourselves, but there is something there to us. He gets where the story is coming from first. He gets the allure, because you can't speak to people who are in thrall of this if you don't get where they're coming from. That doesn't mean you endorse it. That doesn't mean that you say it's okay. But when you listen to these stories and take it seriously, you can see what their motivations are. And once you know what their motivations are, once you know, what longings, what desires, what need is being fulfilled.

It doesn't mean that you can speak to it, right? There is something tragic. We often just cannot control other people and the fantasy of control is something that belongs to the despot, in fact. But we can hope maybe slowly to persuade, but we only persuade if we meet people where we are, if we draw them in and listen to their story and then gently correct it. Now, some people just are lost to those stories,

But you have to get that allure, you have to get that why it moves people if you have any hope of changing the narrative, so to speak. Do you think Herodotus had any kind of grand ambition to think that, you know, 2,000 plus years later, we might have moved beyond the kinds of stories that were evolving then? I think one of the things that comes out of the histories is just how deep the temptation to, violence to war is, just how profoundly sometimes people want to give themselves over to something that feels very exciting but is in fact very destructive. Like there's all sorts of things that lead to war. It's not a very easy problem to solve. And I think that's why he has such a broad view, you know? One of the reasons that fortune never resides in one place is that we have a tendency to destroy one another. It's not just natural events that destroy cities. It's we

ourselves. And so I don't think Herodotus thought he could solve the problem of time, that he could solve the problem of destruction, of violence, of hatred. But I don't think he depicts all of this as inevitable. Small interventions sometimes do change things. They sometimes can correct and shift the narrative just enough, just enough, that not the best, but maybe the least bad thing happens, that not the worst, but maybe something slightly better happens, that you can open a crack in these bad stories. summoning all these different people and showing them how they can act in concert to face challenges and crises,

I think there's something really hopeful about Herodotus' histories in that sense. And if we could tell ourselves some of these stories about how the Athenians were able to unite with the Spartans to defend themselves against the invaders, we might have a lot more imagination about how to cooperate across difference today. I Herodotus of Halicarnassus am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the colours from what man is poured into being. You are listening to Herodotus, The Power and Peril of Story by producer Nicola Luxchit. Special thanks to all of our guests. Rosalind Thomas, I'm Professor of Greek History. at the University of Oxford.

Lindsay Mahan Rathnam, and I'm an assistant professor of political theory at Duke Kunshon University in Kunshan, China. Clifford Orwin, I'm a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and I'm an historian of political thought. Joel Alden Schlosser, I'm the chair and associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. Michael Ondachi, writer. Yes, that last voice you heard was of the poet and novelist, Michael. Undachi. You might recall that Herodotus plays a key role in his book or prize-winning novel, The English Patient.

It was a great freedom to stumble on Herodotus when I was writing that book. There was a great vividness in it. You know, that was, you know, you were allowed to imagine anything. You know, he imagined, whether he was telling the truth or not, he was imagining or finding the great stories, which all writers want to find. Readings from the history were adapted from translations by David Green and Andrea Purvis. You can find more details on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Gabi Hagorilius.

Senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.