Ideas - Herodotus: Eros and Tyranny

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus travelled the ancient world gathering stories from a wide range of sources. One of his many prescient observations was how given the right circumstances a political strongman can emerge and seize control — a forewarning for us today.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Now, all in the mainland were free, but they relapsed into the rule of tyrants, as I shall show. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

There are certain ingredients that create the conditions for a tyrant to flourish. There was a man among the Medes, a clever man, whose name was Deokys. Deokys had fallen in love with royal power. He was, quote, seized by a longing. The Greek word is eros. An eros for tyranny. Seized by an eros. He was captured. He became enthralled with the idea of power.

It's the same verb that you would use of your passion for a woman, right? That power gives you erotic jollies. Parodidus tells us a lot, not only about the psychology of tyranny, but about the psychology of acquiescence and accommodation of it. More than 2,000 years ago, Herodotus traveled the ancient world, from what's now Greece, through Persia, to Turkey, to Egypt, to Italy, gathering stories from a wide range of sources. Part of his mission was to understand how different cultures understand themselves and how they come to organize themselves.

One of the shocks you get when you read Herodotus is sometimes how modern these stories seem. And one of his many prescient observations was how, given the right circumstances, a political strongman can emerge and seize control. There is an allure to giving yourself over to that, to letting yourself be lost to the hero, to this sort of larger-than-life person that says something like, only I alone will save you, to paraphrase another tyrannical personality. says something like, only I alone will save you, to paraphrase another tyrannical personality. And I think Herodotus shows us both the horrors of despotic psychology, what it can do to the despot and everyone around him, but also allows you to understand how easy it is to slide into that, how attractive and alluring it can be to surrender to the despot, to surrender to the

sorts of meaning even that the despot promises to his people. And so we can see autocracy or tyranny arising when a society is polarized into opposing groups, into opposing camps, and people are afraid that order has broken down. And so they want strong leadership, effective leadership. And for that, they're willing to give up their freedom and entrust themselves to someone who's not accountable for their actions. So the trouble is that autocratic power has a life of its own. It's insatiable. Back in the 5th century BCE, Herodotus identified the key ingredients for tyranny to establish itself and flourish, a forewarning to us today. This is the second part of our series on the enduring insights of Herodotus, by Ideas producer Nikola Lukšić. Herodotus gathered hundreds of stories and colorful observations for his expansive and groundbreaking tome, simply titled The History. And within the kaleidoscope of stories, he provides us with vivid portraits of despotic leaders, taking us on a deep dive into the psychology and sociology of authoritarian rule.

The Psychology and Sociology of Authoritarian Rule. First, he introduces us to the people of Medea, the Medes, an ancient civilization that once thrived in what's now modern-day Iran. He tells the story of King Deokhis, and it amounts to a kind of despotism 101. This is an amazing passage in the work. I mean, it's one of the passages in the work that you ask yourself, how could he have written that? It's just such an astonishing passage.

I'm Clifford Orwin. I'm a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. So Diocese finds his people, the Medes, in a state of utter anarchy, being preyed upon by rampant criminality and miscarriages of justice. It was a time of great lawlessness through Medea, and Diocese did what he did because he knew that injustice is the great enemy of justice. The Medes of his village chose him to be a judge among them. And he promises them justice, meaning law and order. To that extent, he is their benefactor, and they hail him as such. The problem is his motive in so doing, which Herodotus states very frankly. He was, quote, seized by a longing, the Greek word is eros, an eros for tyranny. So hearing that description of Deocuse, we might expect him just to be a bad dude. But what he does, because he wants power, is he just becomes a judge who is fair, right?

He says he knows that justice is ever the enemy of injustice, so he practices justice for unjust reasons. And that's already in itself very rich. My name is Lindsay Mahan Rathnam, and I'm an assistant professor of political theory at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. The thing that makes Dayakiz so interesting is that he was really good at that job. He was very fair. He did bring peace and stability to his people. And so Dayakiz became so central to the Medes that everything came to rely upon him. So then Dayakiz was practicing this for a while. And he said, aim to rely upon him. So then Diakis was practicing this for a while. And he said, look, all I do all day is serve the people. It's not benefiting me at all. So I'm going to retire. And this is all part of his scheme.

Robbery and anarchy grew even more in the villages than before. and anarchy grew even more in the villages than before. If we go on as we are going now, we will not be able to live in this country at all, said the Medes. Let us therefore set up a king among us. This country will then be well governed, and we won't be undone by anarchy. So they had this council, and they had a debate. Then at once the question was

proposed as to whom to make king. Deokis was so much in everyone's mouth, people putting him forward and praising him, that they all ended up agreeing he should be their king. Deokis won. The Ozen people on his side won. The reason that they side is really revealing. Without stability, you can't have a good life. And so there's something really attractive to that, which I think we need to see when we're looking at modern day authoritarianism and why it's so attractive to people. Because we tend to think like everybody hates it, everybody wants to escape from it, but it's better than starvation. It's better than dying. And I think De Aches understands that appeal for people, and Herodotus is here is sympathizing and making

vivid why people would assent to this. But of course, once you've assented to this, you get changed by it. You come to rely upon it. You stop being able to taste freedom, so to, as it were, because you never tasted it before. By artful contrivance, he brings it about that the people freely choose him as their king. This is orchestrated at every step of the way, but the people are unaware of it. And he then establishes a kind of pre-modern prototype of a totalitarian state. There's no other way to describe it. of a totalitarian state.

There's no other way to describe it. When he got to power, he first ordered the Mies to build them a fortress worthy of a king and to fortify it with bodyguards. The fortress had great strong walls, one circle inside the other. The building was designed so that each circle of walls is higher than the

next, and within the final circle are the royal palace and the treasuries. He retires into seclusion behind impregnable walls, circles of walls painted in different colors to suggest that you're further retreating away from the world of the mere mortals. When all was built, the Achaeans decreed that no one could come to talk to the king directly, and all communication must happen through messengers. And when the king came out, no one was to look directly at him, and anyone who laughed or spit in his presence would incur disgrace. His spies and eavesdroppers were everywhere throughout the land. No one can come into his presence. Everything has to be done through messengers.

No one can laugh or spit in front of him. And Herodotus tells us that he does this so that those who were previously his equals wouldn't plot against him by seeing that, in fact, he was no different than they were. My name is Catherine Morgan, and I'm professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. I think it's a question of creating a kind of exceptional role for himself. And the fact that he surrounds himself with ceremonies and rules, surrounds himself with ceremonies and rules. He kind of ritualizes the political role that he has to make himself a person apart. And we're told, Herodotus tells us that one of the reasons he does this, one of the reasons he walls himself off, is that he's afraid that if the people that he grew up with could hang out with him in the judgment chamber, they would remember that he's just a man like they are,

and they might plot against him. So he walls himself off. He isolates himself to make it seem as though he's not like other people. He's somebody special. The normal rules don't apply. What's really central here is that Diocuse's quest for power began with a kind of primal impulse. He tells us at the start that Diocuse has an almost erotic passion for autocratic power, and that this is the goal behind everything that he does. And he didn't have to tell it that way. You could, for example, have said that Diocles was an upright judge who was persuaded to become king. Or I suppose you could have said that he opportunistically seized the

kingship when he saw how influential he was. But the interesting thing about Herodotus' narrative is that in this version, he sets out to build a reputation for justice in the first place because he's in love with autocratic power and all his actions build towards that goal. build towards that goal. And it also sets up autocratic power as a thing that you can fall in love with. And that's, I don't quite know how to put it. It's almost dangerous in some way. Yes. Because it's Eros that he uses, right? Yes, that power gives you erotic jollies. And it can overwhelm the rational, I suppose, too. Yes, but of course, Diocles is interesting because of this combination of passion, right? of passion, right? He's got a passion for autocracy, but he then uses his rationality to get into power. He has a plan, right? He has a long-term plan. Right from the moment when he

starts being a judge, his goal is to be king in the end. And so he's using his rationality to get what he most desires. And so I think it's not just a question of being irrationally overwhelmed by passion, but of making your intellect complicit in your desire. Collect complicit in your desire. Diokis establishes his authoritarian state because of the enthusiastic endorsement of his base, the majority who saw him as their savior, as the one person who could restore things to where they should be. So one way to understand him is as a kind of populist, or this is a kind of parable of populism.

Because populism is all about giving the people what it wants over and against those crooked elites who never give the people what they want. So it's only Diocese who not only promises the people what they want. So it's only Diocese who not only promises the people what they want, but actually gives the people what they want and maintains it for the rest of his life. So in that respect, you can say he's the public servant par excellence. And isn't it true of modern authoritarianism that the modern authoritarian begins always as presenting himself as the servant of the people who will deliver it from corrupt elites. I mean, that's Mussolini, that's Hitler, that's Bolshevism, ultimately. That, I think, rings a bell, this mixture of

populism and authoritarianism. He's the people's authoritarian ruler. Then secondly, above and beyond this, he recognizes the need of cloaking himself in a cult of personality to set himself apart from and above his subjects. The way in which he withdraws from the world behind these walls, each painted a different color to suggest some mystic scheme, renders himself completely invisible because, Herodotus says, because he wants to set himself apart as somehow more than human. And then lastly, and most disturbingly, he succeeds in establishing a regime in which the people willingly sacrifice any vestige of self-government for the sake of stability.

of stability. So in the story of Deocys, Herodotus paints a picture of how an authoritarian figure can emerge. A combination of personal charisma, a passion for power, and a knack for strategic thinking to win over people who are fundamentally attracted to someone who promises them stability. attracted to someone who promises them stability. In other stories, Herodotus reveals how corrosive that power can be, not only for the people subjected to the authoritarian's power, but the authoritarian himself. This becomes clear in the next case study, a strongman who became king about 200 years after Deocys. This one is called Cambyses. 200 years after Deocys. This one is called Cambyses. One of the things that I find so interesting about the way this narrative is set up in Herodotus

is that he gives us our choice about when precisely we think Cambyses actually loses it. Unlike Deocys, Cambyses simply inherits his role to become leader of the Persian Empire. His dad was the Persian leader Cyrus the Great. Cambyses is a fascinating figure. So he's the son of Cyrus. And for all the ways in which Cyrus was excellent and really was excellent and successful and a leader capable of governing well, his son was not, right? And I think that this tells us a story about the problem of succession and despotism. So for every virtue that Cyrus the father had, his son Cambyses lacked. But I think it's more than

just his nature was somehow deficient, although Herodotus is clear that there was something diseased about him, that there was an illness of the body that affected his mind. But the circumstances of growing up in that power are familiar with anybody who, you know, sees the corrosive effects of power today. Cambyses' first major move was to conquer Egypt. He succeeds, but doesn't know how or when to stop. And there's no one to stop him. His sanity goes into a death spiral. One of the first signs of his decline, he commands his men to break into the sacred tomb of a pharaoh who once insulted his family. He ordered the dead body of Amasis to be brought out from the tomb, and when this was done he bade his men to whip it and pull the hair out and stab it, and in various other ways to show it outrage.

After the men had grown tired of these acts, because the corpse had been embalmed and offered resistance to their efforts and did not break up. Cambyses ordered them to burn it. Burning corpses is not a proper practice for either Persians or Egyptians. After conquering Egypt and desecrating the pharaoh's corpse, he then fixes his sights on Ethiopia. So then he starts his campaign against Ethiopia. And this is the first time that Herodotus says he's not in his right mind. He's gone mad. So Herodotus thinks Cambyses was mad to invade Ethiopia. And in fact, the attack is a disaster.

His army runs out of food. He still won't turn back, which Herodotus says would have been the action of a wise man. But he keeps on pushing forward until his soldiers even resort to cannibalism. And only then does he give up. So that's stage one. After his disastrous attempt to conquer Ethiopia, Cambyses grows more and more paranoid and enters stage two of his unraveling. He returns to Egypt and stumbles on a major festival celebrating the birth of a sacred bull calf.

People dancing, singing and praying. At the sight of the Egyptians doing this, Cambyses suspected they were making merry at his misfortunes. Cambyses takes it personally because they're all out singing and dancing in the streets and he thinks that they're happy at his failure. So the Egyptians try to tell him this is our custom, but he won't listen. Cambyses, when he heard that, said they were lying. And as liars, he punished them with death. He has the bull brought to him, and he stabs it with his dagger

because Herodotus says he's mad. He beats the priests, he orders the executions of anybody who celebrates. It was directly as a result of this, say the Egyptians, that Cambyses went mad, though he was not in true possession of his wits before. Now, the Egyptians say, Herodotus tells us, that this is when Cambyses went mad. And it was because of his impious act.

Even though he wasn't really a sensible person before, this is when he goes out of control. Narcissism plays a huge role because it makes the personal political. The Egyptians are just having their festival. This is a festival they have every time this miraculous bull calf is born. But he thinks that it's all directed at him. Everything is about him. And so he engages in this outrageous attack against Egyptian religion and custom because he can't imagine that anybody would be doing something that wasn't about him. And how crucial do you think narcissism is for a tyranny to take hold? I don't think that narcissism is a necessary condition for tyranny to take hold. But I think that it will often be an effect of creating a tyranny. Because if the tyrant sets himself apart, thinks that he is an exceptional person to whom normal rules don't apply, narcissism is just bound to develop. I suppose we could say that autocracy creates a kind of narcissism. Cambyses has all these unlawful and horrible urges. And if you think

about what despotism is, it tells you that what you want is right, that what you want to do must be for the good of the people, that what you want, whether it be invading Ukraine, is the right thing to do. And we can see the horrifying effects of this, not just on the people around you, and it is horrifying, but what that does to your psyche. Like, there's a crumbling of the psyche when everything is allowed to you. Things get even worse when the despot puts himself totally above the law. Cambyses fell in love with one of his sisters and wanted to marry her. What he intended to do was against the law,

so he summoned and questioned the royal judges. But because what he intended to do was against usage, he knew this himself, he knew this before asking the sages, he summoned the sages and questioned them. He brings together the Persian judges and he says, look, is there a law that says I can do this? And the judges, for good reason, are worried for their lives. So they seek to preserve their life while also preserving the law.

And they gave him an answer that was both just and safe. They said they could find no law that sanctioned brothers marrying their sisters. But they had found another law which said that he who was king of Persia could do anything he wished. And at that point, the judges have made themselves superfluous. Why have judgment or the faculty of judgment or the institution of judgment if everything the despot wants to do is legal. And so we see Kim Bises after this, and he was already a bad dude, but we see whatever sanity he had just goes away from him because he just does whatever he wants. He can't distinguish between ends. He can't consider which one of his whims are justifiable, logical, or good.

If he wants it, it must be okay. And so what he does, he continues to go and try to make everything open to him. He opens the tombs of the Egyptians. He tries to correct and demystify their religion. He attacks their most sacred places, but he also violates the bodies. He violates everything. There's everything that he does is sort of attempted to make everything open to him. Everything, things that naturally should not be open to anybody subject to his power. He sees any restraint as a violation of that basic law that the dust spot should be able to do whatever he wants. On Ideas, you're listening to the second installment of our series on the enduring insights of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on.

For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. With his insatiable curiosity, Herodotus captured stories from around his ancient world, believing the stories he gathered would help different cultures understand themselves and each other. I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the colors

from what man has brought into being. In his magnum opus, simply called The History, through a kaleidoscope of stories, he captures the nature of autocratic rule, how it's established, and how it can metastasize into tyranny and damage those living under it, including the tyrant himself.

The story he tells of Cambyses serves as a warning for us even now as to what can happen when a leader rules with total control of the judiciary with no constraint. The perfectly despotic law is the law that the despot can do whatever he wishes. So in other words, it's a law that enshrines lawlessness as the fundamental principle of despotism, at least for the despot. And it's precisely that law that Cambyses preserves to live out as if in a kind of dream fulfillment of it, that is, doing whatever he wishes at any given moment, practicing

no self-restraint of any kind, and therefore simply wreaking havoc among everyone who surrounds him. And what does this say about the relationship between power and lack of constraint? Is there a corrosive effect? Absolutely. I mean, the definitive vice of both the despotic monarch and the Greek tyrant is shown to be hubris. Insolence, but basically what it means, I suppose, if you wanted a single contemporary English translation, would be something like transgressiveness. That despots and tyrants are inherently transgressive because they lose all sense of their belonging to the same species as other men, who therefore ought to be treated with restraint due to fellow members of the same

species. So that's the most profound respect in which despotism is corrupting. And certainly, it's true that the most destructive authoritarian regimes of our time, right up, of course, to the existence, the very conspicuous existence of North Korea today with its ongoing cult of the Kim family, but also the various obvious attempts of both Xi and Putin to restore that cult of personality to establishing the degree of authority that they want. I think in Erotus' presentation, despotism just necessarily tends toward that, in part because of its utility to the despot, that the despot somehow can't justify his monopoly on power without somehow persuading both others and himself that he is somehow bigger and greater than they are in a way that no human being is bigger or greater than any other human being. But also, the enormous power of the despot is simply likely to have that kind of impact on

people. What Cambyses does to those closest to him is narcissistic cruelty at its worst. Although there are many candidates for the title of most horrible anecdote in Herodotus. This, I think, is a pretty good one. So the story of Prex Aspius is really creepy. So one of his favorite courtiers is called Prex Aspius, and Prex Aspius' son is his cupbearer. So one night at dinner, everything seems fine, Cambyses asks Prexaspis what the Persians thought about him. And Prexaspis, because he thinks that he's in a safe place, replies that all the Persians praise him, but they think that he's perhaps a little bit too fond of his wine. What sort of man do the Persians think I am? What stories do they tell about me?

Praxas Peace answered, Master, in all other respects they praise you highly, but they say you are over-addicted to the bottle. highly, but they say you are over-addicted to the bottle. The king was furious. Your son shall stand in the doorway, he said. If I shoot and hit him in the middle of the heart, the Persians are talking nonsense. If I miss him, you may say they are right, and I am not in my senses. He says that he is going to shoot Praxaspe's son, the cupbearer, with an arrow through the heart. And if he hits him through the heart, it's clear that the Persians are wrong about the effects of wine on him.

If he misses the heart, he'll agree that he's not in his right mind. He drew the bow and hit the boy, and as the boy fell, Cambyses ordered the attendants to slit him open and see the wound. He turned to the boy's father and burst into laughter and said with delight, see, I'm not mad. Praxaspis saw that Cambyses was out of his mind. And Praxaspis is terrified, and he says, Master, not even a god could shoot so well. Not even a god could make a shot like that. It's not saying that it's good.

It's not even a god would do something like that. It's not even that God would do something like that. And so Cambyses, by being told that everything is allowed to him, that everything should be open to him, seeks to render everything open and knows no distinction between sanity and law and the unlawful, between what is naturally opaque or uncertain, what should be open to him. He knows no distinction between his whims and sees in the clearest proof of his insanity, he sees that as a proof of sanity because he sees that if I'm able to do what I want, I therefore must be sane without pausing to reflect on what it is that he actually wants to do and whether what he wants to do is good. So despotism as a whole leads to this idea

that what you want to do must be good. And this is why we often see despots find it very difficult or modern day authoritarians find it very difficult to change course, because that would be to admit, you know, fallibility. That would be to admit error. That would be to admit that maybe your power isn't warranted. So you must be right. It's very, very hard to change course. And I think we see that playing out today. And so there's something inherently corrosive about the lack of law or accountability. Right. To the despot and to the people around them. Because when you are around this, you have to watch yourself.

You have to constantly watch yourself for what you say. So this poor father, Praxaspis, standing over the murdered body of his son has to say, what a shot! And that's like a violation of every bond, of every tie, but of privacy, of the idea that you can be yourself. There's no being authentic around the despot because everything has to be a performance for his benefit. The despot sees people as puppets, people as things to be experimented on, and we turn ourselves into it in order to survive, to adapt, to live. Things become performatively cheerful.

And you said that we can glean lessons for today. Are there any specific cases that you're thinking of? So I might get the details of this wrong, but on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, I remember watching this sort of video of Vladimir Putin holding a court, so to speak, and talking about his plans. And you can see some of his lackeys being like, what am I supposed to say? What do I say that'll make him happy? And this one poor guy, I mean, he's probably a pretty bad dude, but this poor guy was clearly displeasing Putin. And you can see him fumbling and stumbling for the right thing to say,

for the right thing to say that will please Putin, who is somebody who is lost in a fantasy world, lost in a world where what he wants must be good and anything, any objection to him, any obstacle to him must be something malicious. And it's, you can't pull back from that without profound humiliation, without a loss of credibility, without a loss of power. And so authoritarians get trapped upon their own desires because they can't evaluate them well. The story of Cambyses is a story of autocratic power feeding into narcissism, which then feeds into impulsive, murderous behavior with absolutely no limits. There's something deeply troubling about Cambyses

himself, but in this final case study, the story of Xerxes, Herodotus shows that the role of the despot necessitates a certain character trait. You might start out as a regular, compassionate, and thoughtful person, but the structure of the role itself will demand a kind of inhumanity. My name is Joel Alden Schlosser. I'm the chair and associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. I think of Xerxes as such a tragic character, and maybe this is a way in which Herodotus is showing his humanity, that he's humanizing Xerxes not such a tragic character, and maybe this is a way in which Herodotus is showing his humanity, that he's humanizing Xerxes, not to detract from the real cruelties and violence that he was part of, but to show us that he's caught in the middle of something. He's stuck

in this story, not of his own making, that is sort of pushing him beyond where he wants to go, and he feels powerless to resist and gets no help from his friends in doing so. Nobody steps in and pushes back hard enough to prevent him from kind of doing the inevitable. He has no great virtues. He has no great vices. He is the one, therefore, who is most shaped by simply the fact that he is a despot. And so he would be useful, if you like, to political scientists for that reason, sort

of the clearest case of despotism. And it's a mixed bag. I mean, Xerxes has certain virtues which are arguably both enhanced in some ways and corrupted in others by despotism. He has certain vices which are exaggerated by it. But I think that what you see in Xerxes above all is the extent to which despotism unhinges even people of ordinary sanity by shutting them off from the kind of consort with ordinary people from which one can draw the right conclusions about ordinary life.

Xerxes is ambivalent as to whether he should expand his empire and lead the Persian army into Greece, then into Europe and the unknown world. And we meet Xerxes struggling with how he doesn't want to invade any of these places. He's having dreams that he has to do it. So I think there's a real ambivalence that we're supposed to see in him. And yet he still acts the despot. He still is unwilling to change the course of the current that's sort of pushing him forward. And he does so with a lot of violence and lack of compunction.

Xerxes makes a series of phenomenally bad judgments. And I don't think that the suggestion there is that he has phenomenally bad judgment. I think the suggestion actually is that as a despot, there's so much that the despot can't see. There's so much that the despot presumes. The despot's tendency to overestimate his strength and to be blind to his weakness is so great that Xerxes would have had to be an unusually and perhaps improbably great individual to escape from it. He doesn't escape from it. perhaps improbably great individual to escape from it, he doesn't escape from it. And the result,

they write, is that his great scheme for doubling or even more the size of the already immense Persian empire by conquering all of Europe comes crashing down in disaster around his ears. All for reasons that were predictable, by the way, and all for reasons that certain of the characters foresee. I mean, there's some bad luck in it too, but one of the characters makes the point that an expedition of this size is unusually vulnerable to bad luck, and that turns out to be the case. That's just a fact of life. So Xerxes is in his way, again, if you want to talk about relatability, the most relatable of the Persian despots because the most ordinary. And Xerxes in some ways is more sympathetic than Cambyses, precisely because we see him coming into power and we see him actually trying to figure it out and trying to do the right thing. And a couple of times Xerxes actually does listen and he does change his mind.

actually does listen and he does change his mind. But Xerxes still is swayed and corrupted by the power that he has bestowed upon him. Xerxes is in some ways a more reasonable character than Cambyses, but he inhabits the same kind of pathology, I think. He has the same tendency to think that everything is about him. So we could take, for example, the story of the building of the bridge over the Hellespont. In order to march his massive army of more than a million soldiers into Greece, they had to build a bridge over the Hellespont, a waterway that's about 1,500 meters wide. But mid-construction, the bridge was destroyed by a flash storm. Now, storms happen, and most people would not say that this storm has happened to spite me personally.

But this is what Xerxes does. He is so angry that he has the sea whipped, says Herodotus. Xerxes was furious and ordered his men to lay 300 lashes on the Hellespont. I also heard that he sent branders to brand the Hellespont. And he has chains thrown into it, and this is what his servants say as they whip it. They say, Herodotus says, barbarous and arrogant words. He told those who were laying the lashes to say these words of violent arrogance. You bitter water. Our master lays this punishment on you because you have wronged him

it is with justice that no one sacrifices to you who are a muddy briny river they're whipping the water right you wronged him when he'd done you no wrong King Xerxes is going to cross you whether you want it or not and it's right that no one sacrifices to you since you are a salty and a foul river. And there's this kind of childish petulance about

this, right? You made this storm to spite me. You destroyed the bridge to spite me. And now, river, although of course it's actually part of the sea, I'm going to punish you. And it's this kind of narcissistic arrogance that Herodotus typifies a tyrant, this attempt to dominate nature and enslave it. So of course he throws the chains into the sea because he wants to chain the sea, but the bridge itself is a kind of chain. And we need to remember too that for the Greeks, rivers and bodies of water could be considered divine beings. This is why people are talking about sacrifice. So as well as being hubristic towards nature, he's being arrogant towards the divine. Oh, and by the way, he has the supervisors of the destroyed bridge executed.

Oh, and by the way, he has the supervisors of the destroyed bridge executed. So he commanded the sea to be punished, and he ordered the bridge supervisors to be beheaded. And unjust executions are one of the marks of a tyrant. So in this sense, Xerxes is doing just the kind of thing that Cambyses did. Okay, so bridge number one has been destroyed. So now they build better bridges and they put a road on top of it. And as the army sets out from Sardis in Lydia to cross into Europe, there's an eclipse, which is a terrifying portent for people in the ancient world. And this eclipse terrifies a man called Pythias, who had offered substantial donations to the campaign, and he'd been honored by Xerxes for that.

So he thinks that he's in good with Xerxes. So he goes to Xerxes and says, I'd like to ask you for a favor. Master, I have five sons, and it behooves them all to go with you to Greece, said Pythias. My lord, do take pity on me and release one of my sons,

the eldest from your army, that he may take care of me at this time of my life. Take the other four with you, and may you come home again, having accomplished your goals. Xerxes was violently angry and answered, Vile creature! I myself am marching to Greece with my children, my household, my friends, and you dare speak of your son, you who are my slave? friends, and you dare speak of your son, you who are my slave?

Right, so there's an example with this figure, Pythias, who says, look, can I just ask you one itty-bitty tiny little favor? I have five sons. Four of them will go out with you and campaign, but can I just keep one at home just in case? I don't want to lose all my sons. And this enrages Xerxes so much that he has the son that Pythias wanted to protect cut in half. You and four of your sons will be protected, but for this one son of yours, for whom you care so mightily, your request will cost him his life. Such was his answer, and he ordered those who were charged with such matters to find the eldest of the sons of Pythias and cut him in two and set the two halves of the body on each side of the road. And the army would march between them. Xerxes' army marches past the dismembered body of the sky's sun as a spectacle and a warning

about the futility of resisting anything. And this is somebody who in other places listens to criticism. This is somebody who at times can grow and change. And yet he is capable of these acts because of the institution, the power that he has is so corrosive to his ability to judge, sees any bit of resistance as complete resistance. So he demands public uniformity. He demands absolute fealty. And this sort of like desire to kind of control hearts and minds, as it were, is something that I think that goes along with the despot, which requires that everything be open to you. It requires a complete subjection of the people. I don't think it's a desperate act to show power. I think that it, first of all, is an expression of Xerxes' very great anger whenever he's opposed. That's another bad tendency of despots. They expect to be obeyed, another bad tendency of despots. They expect to be obeyed, therefore become very angry when anyone opposes them. But it also is simply a way in which authoritarian rulers demonstrate and maintain

their power. I mean, Xerxes is not under any illusion, certainly as to why his non-Persian subjects obey him. They obey him only because they fear him. So that fear has to be maintained. And one way in which fear must be maintained is by exemplary punishments. So the punishment has to fit the crime in the sense of being more than the crime, right? You sin and you'll be punished even more than you deserve to be reminded, you know, so that others, you know, not so that others, pour encourager les autres, right? So I think that this is actually

just the standard part of authoritarian statecraft, despotic statecraft in Herodotus. Through the many tendrils of the stories Herodotus captures and shares, his stories of autocratic rule carry a carefully crafted message. Herodotus is crafting his narrative to make a moral point about domination and power and what happens when you have a ruler who's not subject to any constraints. It's almost like a call for us to be more engaged in the politics

exactly one of my teachers used to say I tried to pay somebody to work out at the gym for me but it didn't really help me build any strength you can't do that with politics either somebody else can't exercise your political muscles for you and then you expect that you're going to be able to make decisions when the chips are down. In our world, where again, despotism is becoming uncomfortably close to looking like the default option, I think that remains very much a question

for us today. What steps free peoples have to take in order to retain their freedom, not only because of the threat that authoritarian regimes pose, but because of the temptation that authoritarian regimes pose. And that temptation certainly is very much complicated for us by the fact of technology. I mean, despots like Diocese and Herodotus show how much could be accomplished by despots even without modern technology. But of course, every modern despotic regime that we have known from the Bolsheviks onward have relied heavily on modern technology and relied very effectively on modern technology to enforce their despotism and maintain it. And yet we now see the technology itself

has certain despotic or totalitarian inclinations. That perhaps is realized more now than it was 10 years ago. And of course, it means that various methods of manipulation, which had been characteristic primarily of authoritarian regimes in the past, are now increasingly characteristic of contending parties within democratic regimes as well. So that, of course, is a vexing problem with which we have to deal. in which human nature always stays the same. One of the shocks you get when you read Herodotus is sometimes how modern these stories seem. You can imagine this kind of thing going on in any number of power centers across the globe, right? You're a companion to a dictator. You say something that displeases him. And the next thing you know, somebody's throwing you out of a window or poisoning you. These patterns do tend to repeat themselves. do tend to repeat themselves. And do you find, I'm just curious, do you find this repetition depressing or is it just a fact? I think this kind of repetition is both depressing and a fact. But that one of the points of telling these stories is that we can hope for something more, that we can recognize these sorts of behaviors and not just put them to one side.

But say, you know, these are real. These are real danger signals. We need to be careful what we choose. I think that Herodotus wants us to look to the end, right? It might seem tempting, if you have a particular set of political goals, to enable an autocrat in order to accomplish those goals. But because autocracy has its own internal dynamic, you can't control the person you put into despotic power. The tyrant will end up doing things that you would never have expected, and you won't be able to stop them. So we need to understand the dynamic of power and realize that we have a choice and that there are things that we need to be careful about. One of them is accountability. This is something that comes up several times, right? No ruler can be in a situation where they just do what they like because that position is inherently

corrupting. It makes the personal political in ways that are bound to lead to disaster. So I think Herodotus would want to make sure that any ruler was not isolated, was not unaccountable, was not inaccessible, because that just builds into the ruler's sense of exceptionalism. And I guess he'd want to talk about respect too. Herodotus is big on respect for law, respect for custom, respect for different customs if we go into the international arena. So you might think it's

ridiculous to consider a bull a god, as the ancient Egyptians were said to do, but to disrespect those beliefs is a form of arrogance that can, and in fact in Cambyses' case it does, lead to madness. As a citizen, as someone with political agency, we need to look to what each of our decisions within our own political sphere will possibly lead to. Yes, I think that's right. That we need to not prioritize just short-term goals, but that we need to take a long view. We actually have to think about the implications of our political choices for the kind of world that we want to create. You were listening to Herodotus, Eros and Tyranny by producer Nikola Lukšić.

It's the second of a two-part series on Herodotus and his enduring insights. You can find the first part in your podcast feed or by searching our website at cbc.ca slash ideas. Thank you to all of our guests. My name is Catherine Morgan and I'm Professor of of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. My name is Lindsay Mahan Rathnam, and I'm an assistant professor of political theory at Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China. I'm Clifford Orwin. I'm a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. I have status appointments to classics in Jewish studies, and I'm an historian of political science at the University of Toronto. I have status appointments to classics in Jewish studies, and I'm an historian of political thought.

My name is Joel Alden Schlosser. I'm the chair and associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. Michael Ondaatje, writer. Poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje recorded the words of Herodotus for this series. Readings were adapted from translations by David Green and Andrea Purvis. Web producer Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

Our senior producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.