In Our Time - Herodotus

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of histories, dubbed by his detractors as the father of lies. Herodotus (c484 to 425 BC or later) was raised in Halicarnassus in modern Turkey when it was part of the Persian empire and, in the years after the Persian Wars, set about an inquiry into the deep background to those wars. He also aimed to preserve what he called the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks, seeking out the best evidence for past events and presenting the range of evidence for readers to assess. Plutarch was to criticise Herodotus for using this to promote the least flattering accounts of his fellow Greeks, hence the 'father of lies', but the depth and breadth of his Histories have secured his reputation from his lifetime down to the present day.WithTom Harrison Professor of Ancient History at the University of St AndrewsEsther Eidinow Professor of Ancient History at the University of BristolAndPaul Cartledge A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Yeah, what'd have it ought to? There's a lot. I'd be able to... I'd want to take-cooking and cat-outeleneen, maybe matrix lead-valot, and a certain metal vanguard. If I'd just be able to say, maulist, to 1,500-euroan-a-usiacerud's edun

valixtemies to. Cudda jellélymoy and liquehest. Radio Podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, to some Herodotus was the father of history.

To a few others, the father of lies. He's been famous since the 5th century BC, when he wrote about the Persian Wars in order, he said, to preserve the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially why they warred against he. other. And he covered not just politics, warfare and diplomacy, but culture, ideology, geography, and religion, a combination so prized by readers in the ancient world that when so much else has been lost, his histories are the longest single piece of Greek prose to be preserved

from that time. And it's written with wonderful gusto. With me to discuss erroliterers are Tom Harrison, Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. Esther Aidenow, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. and Paul Cartlidge, A.G. Levantis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Paul, can you tell us what we know about the early life of urologists? There's a short answer, which is very little indeed, because he lived in an era before biography was a recognised genre. And this is one of the instances of just how odd our evidence for him can be. The best, the longest account of his life, that is his parentage, where he came from.

Brom and all that, belongs to the 10th century of our era in a Greek lexicon with a Turkish name. Any rate, we've got a fair idea of his date, haven't we? Well, we estimate circa 484 BC, so allowing him to have been born just before the main last three, four books of his histories, as it were, 484.79. And we think he lived at least to 430 BC and probably died shortly after that and his work we think possibly was widely disseminated in the four-twenties and so on. So he came not from mainland Greece, but from, as it were, Asiatic Greece. He was born a subject of the Persian Empire and his parents, one of their names, was not of a Greek form. There's a view that I've read from you not that he was exiled and eventually found his way to Athens.

That's completely correct. And again, it's all part of the moment. much, much later biographical tradition. He doesn't actually mention his exile, but if he really was exiled, having taken part in a rising against a pro-Persian tyrant, a sole ruler, an autocrat in his native Halicarnassus, that would sort with the sort of personality, the sort of outlook on his history that Herodotus presents. He didn't only go to Athens, very far from it. He seems to have traveled immensely widely, and he ended up in what we call West Greece, that is old Italy, southern Italy, a place called Thuria or Thuri-E, which had been founded under Athenian auspices only in the 440s. So he went there, aged about 40-plus, and possibly spent

quite a lot of time there writing up his histories. How recent were the Persian wars when he wrote his histories? Can you refresh our memory very briefly? of them. How fresh were they in the Greek mind, these massive Persian wars, the names that many people know. If you can rile them off and get us into that. They would have been terribly fresh to him as he grew up, because in his teens, we're talking about great events, 490, the Battle of Marathon, 480 to 479, the invasion by Xerxes, great king of Persia of mainland Greece, huge amphibious expedition, and Herodotus is its chronicler. He was able, he actually quotes one person who was a participant, so he was old enough

to be within striking distance, but yet not actually a participant himself. So these names, Cyrus up to Xerxes, would be rolling through his mind and through the minds of others. So he'll be acquainted with it. It would be an important stem of his culture. Well, it actually goes way back. The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus, Cyrus II, the great Kourash in Persia, round about 550 BC, when the southern Iranian Persians revolted against their northern Iranian kinsmen, the medians, and reversed the relationship. So Cyrus became great king of a massive empire that expanded very, very quickly, within a generation, as far east as Afghanistan, Pakistan, as far west as the Aegean Sea,

and then later on it went up into northern Greece, it went down into Egypt, into Africa. And so this is a massive thing. All Greek lies, not just Herodotus, were conditioned by the circumstances of the great Greek-Persian wars of the first two decades of the 5th century BC. Thank you. Asa, I don't know, according to Herodotus, why did he write to the histories? Well, you yourself, Melvin, have given us a good idea of what he says about why he's writing the history. So he's setting out to record human events that he thinks are impressive.

He wants to stop them from being erased by time. He wants to preserve famous and important and impressive and remarkable achievements by both Greeks and non-Greeks. And in particular, what he's interested in is the cause of the hostilities between the Greeks and the Greeks. non-Greeks. So you can see that his history, when he uses the term historiare, what he actually means is an inquiry. It's not a history in the sense that we now use that term of one event following another event. He's got a much broader understanding of what he's setting out to do as an intellectual activity. And you can see in what he's writing that part of what motivates him, I think, is actually a personal ambition, an intellectual ambition that he's following.

And whether that's to understand better the world around him and what has caused the events that he's describing, or whether it's also and or that he's in some ways competing with writers of his own time, particular predecessors, there's one in particular Herketeus of Miletus, who's roughly writing about the same time but may have also influenced. the ways in which Herodotus approaches his subjects. And there's a slightly competitive edge to what he's writing. The Persian Wars, really. That's the core of it.

So the book that he writes is really, well, the nine books, as they became, we think they were divided by one of the directors of the Alexandrian Library. There are nine books, and they basically describe, at the highest level, the expansion of the Persian Empire. So you start with Cresas, who's a king of the Luther. Lydian Empire. You start the Lydians, you tell the story of the rise of Cyrus in book one with a little bit of a digression around Athens and Sparta because there are lots of digressions across Heroditors. That really is the meat of the material. In book two, he moves to

Cambyses, Cyrus' son, or Cambyses is not entirely sane, let's put it that way, but he invades Egypt. And book two, a lot of book two, is about Egypt, about its history. the most amazing description of that culture. Book three, we see the rise of Darius. Darius in book four attempts to invade Scythia and Libya. Then in book five, there is a revolt by the Eastern Greeks against Darius. The Athenians come to their aid. And because of that, Darius wants to punish the Athenians. And that's the beginning of the initial set of Persian wars. That book ends with the Battle of Marathon. And that defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Marathon

opens up for a much larger invasion of Greece. Darius dies during the preparation of that. Xerxes comes to the throne. Xerxes proceeds with that set of battles. So 481-479. Thermopyla in Book 7, the Battle of Salamis in Book 8. And in Book 9, the battles of Plataia and Mikale. Thank you very much.

What was this? Can you describe? what he said was his method, Tom Harrison. Basically, it goes on, according to him, on a huge series of travels, meeting as many people he can, many people that come from all the places that have been mentioned earlier. And not only talking, as has been hinted, at their history of what happened in battles and such,

but talking about their culture, their anecdotes, their sexual practices, their way they treated children, the way they ate. I mean, that's one of the things that gives it its ripeness. He does get a lot of the material, though, from second-hand. hand information. And it's also worth saying that he uses previous literary sources to a much greater extent. Esther mentioned Hecateas of Miletus, who was an early fifth century writer. He mentions more the poetic sources. So he mentions Homer a lot in book two and elsewhere.

He mentions other poetic sources much more explicitly. He also quotes inscriptions. So things written on stone, particularly in the later books in relation to the Persian Wars. He uses a huge, huge variety of material from all over. In terms of how he imparts it, that's a really difficult question. It goes back actually to the question of date. I think it's worth saying that there isn't a single publication date, and we shouldn't think of it as like a single book launched on August the 15th or whatever day. This is something which he probably delivered in oral lectures. That's what most people would think. It's also something that probably was revised in written form. In the end, it is a very, very written product. It's got very good cross-references that

almost all work, but clearly it was delivered over time. It's worth saying also that the timer which he is writing it has a huge impact, I think, on the structure and also speaks to some of those big themes about what he's doing with the work. He wrote, Paul gave a date of, you know, 430 is a possible timer which he put down his pen, as it were, or died. I'd go further than that and say that he was writing at least into the four tens. The crucial point about that is that he's writing against the background of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta and their respective enemies. And so as he is writing about the Persian Wars, he's also reflecting vicariously on these contemporary events.

He, for example, begins with Athens and Sparta in book one. Cresus, the Lydian King, is looking for an ally. Esther mentioned Cresus earlier. and he's told to make an alliance with the strongest of the Greeks to fight the Persians. He looks into it, he finds out who those are, and he's told it's either the Athenians or the Spartans, and so you get your first introduction to them. They come up in pairings regularly through the early books. And there's a sense in which, even as he's doing an account of the Persian wars,

he's also telling the story of a struggle within Greece as to which of these cities is going to be the top dog, if you like, when the war comes to an end. They're clearly fighting for supremacy. puts things that might look very kind of patriotic in a much darker light. So there's a famous passage in the heart of the Persian Wars where the Athenians give many reasons why they won't side with the Persians, why they won't make an alliance for the Persians. And they say they won't do this because there's no money, there's no land that would make it worthwhile for them to do so. In a contemporary context, when the Athenians,

as Paul said, have created an empire of their own in the light of the receding of the the Persian Empire from the Greek world, that has a rather bitter meaning for his contemporaries. They saw the Athenians as having enslaved people and done things for land and money. So it's a sort of parallel narrative, if you like, that runs through his book. I really would like to get to grips with the texture of it, because it's a fantastic read. And one of the reasons it's a fantastic read. He's bringing in actions of 700 cities. He's bringing in an enormous number of women play a part.

there's the sacrifices, there's gold, there's oracles, there's gods. I'd like to get some sort of idea of the meat and stew of all this, Paul. What about you doing it? Well, all human life, but not only human, superhuman life, was in Herodotus. And that's because what he's trying to tell is the story of humankind. And he has a specific subject in terms of its time and place. And he is personally involved, very personally involved, the number of references to the invidious pronoun, i.e. I, is quite considerable. But on the other hand,

he is very much not, and this is the important point really, in the context of the Middle East, the way in which people in, for example, Babylonia or before the Persians in medians, on the way they propagated the right line, the view of what had happened. Herodotus is an individual. Nobody is hired him to do this. He is not a spokesman for any regime. And he's actually been called rather nicely, I think, the denial of official history. So insofar as he was a storyteller, what's interesting to us historians is how he graded the types of, as Tom was saying, predominantly oral sources. And he came up with the tripartite classification. The best, i.e. the most reliable is eyewitness evidence. The second one is hearsay evidence. You've heard it from somebody who claimed to be an eyewitness. And third, and way down, is tradition. And you'll find here we're just moderating and modulating the ways in which he represents what his sources have told him. But very rarely does he say, this is the one and only line that can be taken. This is the absolute truth and we must not deviate from this. In fact, his ideal was not so much true.

as what he called something like unerringness. And so you'll often find him saying, it's not my job to tell you what certainly was the case, i.e., what actually happened. My job is to tell you what my sources told me. And then, of course, what he does is shape those sources into the kind of narrative for the Desta and Tom have so brilliantly described. I would love some examples.

I was going to cite an example earlier on of little details where he talks about a town nearby Haldikarnassas where whenever the, whenever something is unfortunate is going to happen to them or their neighbours, the priestess grows a beard. This has happened three times and it's a complete non-sequitur. It goes nowhere. And yet clearly it's interesting in its own right. It's not, it's a kind of marvellous story that is part of what he's doing. I like the women who resemble the men who they're both bald, snub-nosed and bearded from births. I forgot from that bit. You just have this image. It's just fabulous. The founding of Cyrene is a really lovely story

for thinking about so many things that Herodotus does. And Sirene is North Africa. It's in book four. But here you have exactly what Paul was talking about. So here is Herodotus collecting a series of different points of view about the foundation of this city. He starts with the Spartan version and the Theran version.

So Theris is modern Santorini. A Spartan called Theras takes a group of people to the island, which at that point is called Calista. So that's the Spartan version. Then he moves to the Theran version, and he talks about how Grinus, who is a king of Thera, goes with a minion called Batas, goes to Delphi, and the priestess pronounces that actually what he's got to do

is to go and found a city in what they call Libya. which is in North Africa. They ignore this for a while. There's no rain. They suffer. They decide they've got to make the foundation. They go to Crete to ask for advice. So there they meet a man called Corobius.

And then we hear a little bit about Corobius. I think he's a Murakseller. They toddle off to Pletia. They leave Corobius there. And in fact, some Samians go past. And they feed him. They leave him food for a year. And then we're told a little bit about the Samians

and how the Samians get blown off course. then we go back to the voice of Herodotus and Herodotus says, well, you know, the Therans and the Sirenians agree on what happens next, but the Sirenians have a slightly different account of what happened before. And then we get the story of Battus. Battis goes to Delphi to ask about his stammer. He's told to found a city. In a lovely sort of mirror of the previous version, this time the Pythia won't stop talking. So she just kind of hits repeat and keeps saying, you've got to go found the city, you've got to go found the city. you've got to go found the city, you've got to go found the city.

So off he goes, they go back to Thera, and in fact the Therans stop them from landing by stoning them. And you can see why the Therans won't have told this version of the story. And that's something that you find with these stories of Herodotus. Just as Paul is saying, these are stories that are told that he's gathered, and we can see how they rub up against each other by showing how different communities are thinking about and presenting themselves in.

different lights. Paul, I'm going to persist in this for a little while, I'll learn probably. I know you might think it's me, but it isn't actually. It's the difference of things. Structures are great and that's fine, but there's lots and lots of he's very good on differences. He's very good on instances and maybe I'm up a gum tree. Anyway, Paul, have a go. You're not up a gum tree and one of his modes of approach is precisely by difference. For example, He was most interested in it because of the number of wonders that it contained, but also because in, I think it's 35 ways, the ways of the Egyptians, the customs of the Egyptians are not just different from, but they are antithetical to the opposite of what, and here he assumes there is a standard Greek. Actually, Greeks differed amongst themselves quite often. But the point is, my dear listeners and readers, my Greek listeners and readers, You think Egypt is a faraway place. Well, let me tell you, it's even more weird than you imagine.

And he not only is a historian in the sense of trying to describe and explain specific events occurring in a particular time and place. He's also interested in the level of timelessness. What is it that makes humans humans? Well, it's when they come together in communities. and he quotes from a poet called Pindar, who was a contemporary, an older contemporary. Pindar wrote in a poem of his that custom, Nomos, is king of all, of all things and of all people. What's meant by that?

Well, Herodotus picks up that catchphrase and applies it to, now I imagine, this is an imaginary scenario. Great King Darius. Darius was particularly interested to know. about the funerary customs of two distinct peoples, representatives of which lived in one of his capitals, namely Sousa, and one of those were Greeks, and the other ones very specifically are not just Indians, but Kalatian Indians. And the schstick, as it were, is that Greeks cremaint, whereas these Indians cannibalize their dead relatives. And so it goes like this. Darius asks us, Darius asks the first the Greeks in, how do you dispose of your dead?

Well, we cremate. Well, actually, not all Greeks did, but some did. Then he says, okay, to the Indians, how do you dispose of your dead? And they're absolutely horrified to hear that Greeks cremate their dead relatives. This is part of the story. And so they say, we cannibalize our dead. Well, now, if you were a normal Greek listening to that, you'd think, oh my goodness, these barbarians are the utter limits of barbarism if they eat their dead

relatives. No, Herodotus says, hang on. Every people believes that its own customs and, of course, funerary customs are absolutely central to who are people are and where they see their place in the world. And then he quotes Pindar, you see, custom is king of all. Well, ask yourselves, dear listeners. I think that's quite a powerful sort of nostrum to think about. Tom, thank you very much. Tom Harrison, why does Herodotus pay so much attention to Egypt in the first part of the history? Detailed attention in geographical sense, talking about the Nile and the flooding of the Nile. Why do you think he pays that gives it so much attention? Well, what he says is that he's giving Egypt so much attention because of the depth of its history, the number of its monuments.

the word he uses is erga, which means deeds, but deeds for him means not just kind of human actions, but also things that people have done, things they've constructed. So he's interested in the pyramids, he's interested in other buildings, like a great labyrinth, which he describes in an elaborate detail, but he's also interested in the depth of their history. And that's utterly dwarfing of the length of Greek history. So that's what's going on on the surface. I think at the same time, and this goes back to some of the things people have said, Esther and and Paul have said about sources and Hecateus of Miletus, who I mentioned earlier.

Egypt's also kind of like a laboratory for him in methodological terms. It's a place where he can show off and say what's distinctive about his approach. So it's in the case of Egypt that he engages particularly with Homer. He claims that Homer really knew, but hid the fact that Helen of Troy didn't end up in Troy, but in fact only went to Egypt, the same story roughly as you get in Euripides' play, The Helen. He engages with scientists, Ionian scientists, about the sources of the Nile. Egypt also, though, is quite interesting in other ways. It's a source of lots and lots and lots of Greek culture.

It's from Egypt that the Greeks get the names of their gods. It's from Egypt they get the division into months. It's from Egypt they learn how to make phallic processions. So processions where they have upright phalluses in honour of the god Dionysus. So all these things come from Egypt. Egypt's this kind of great font of Greek culture, and yet there's a kind of ambivalence there as well. So he focuses a lot on the Nile. In the future, he imagines the Nile is going to no longer flood.

And the Egyptians have taken this for granted, all their agricultural wealth, they just rake in without any effort. In the future, they're going to be disappointed, he says, and it's all going to go wrong. And then another really important thing to say about the Egyptian account, as Esther hinted out earlier, all these ethnographies are kind of framed by Persian advance. At the beginning and the end of Book 2, you hear that Cambysius the Persian king has invaded, and he turns Egypt upside down. So it ends, Book 2, on this point of utmost prosperity.

Egyptian history is this huge long period of unruffled prosperity and calm, and yet we know that it's over. Esther, how much of a role does Fate play in his view of history? We see it from very early on in the history, We hear about Cresus in a sort of the story of Cresus is a very programmatic story for understanding how Herodotus understands the world to work in the sense of what is what supernatural powers, if you like, are controlling. What happens to Cresus is unalterable because of the story of his ancestors. So how he came to the throne is the story. of Gaigi's and Kandali's wife.

So Kandali's is so in love with his wife that he wants everyone to see and appreciate her. And he suggests that Gaiji's hide and look at her. She knows this is going on. When she's naked? It's also partly a story about a husband's betrayal of his wife. But what is happening there is that she then reasserts that sense of boundaries by plotting with Guigi's to kill Kandallis and put Gaigi's on the on the throne.

So what then happens by the time we get to Cresis is that this has to be punished. And this is actually the, so his fall from his throne is we are told specifically by the god Apollo when he goes to address him. He actually explains that this is because of your ancestors. And this kind of programmatic story established. is that there are ways in which, once your fate is set, you can't escape it. But fate is only one of the ways in which events are controlled. Can I hear from Tom? What role do the gods play?

To my mind, they play a crucial role. It's worth saying, though, what role they don't play. They don't turn up like the Homeric gods in their own form or disguised as another human being who you know. They don't turn up in that kind of very direct way. It's slightly more abstracted. they come in a form of miracles. So extraordinary stories. There's one, for example, where some men are digging a ditch to keep the Persians out and they become injured with lots of splinters from the stone in their eyes.

And then they consult an Oracle because they think that these events are more people being injured than should be. They think this is more divine than was reasonable or than was natural. And the God tells them to stop digging the canal than just let the Persians in. So you get those kind of miracle stories. You get stories of divine retribution, where the gods are kind of stepping in because somebody has gone too far in human violence, and so they kind of correct the cycle.

There's a queen who performs too extreme of vengeance on other people, and is eaten inside out by worms, and this is an instance for Herodotus of how great punishments, or excessive punishments, deserve punishments from the gods. And they also appear rather like that idea that they're kind of correcting excessive vengeance. there's one very striking passage where he talks about divine foresight having a role in ensuring a kind of balance of power in the animal kingdom. So lions have very few children, hairs have lots of children, and this balance is out in the long one. It doesn't quite work in biological terms, but the idea is that divine foresight is kind of standing behind everything.

I think also one other idea that's really important is the idea that the gods are also lying behind the instability, of human fortune. That's a really key theme throughout the histories. You can think you're in a thoroughly fortunate position like Cresus, the Lydian King in But 1, and yet then you have a terrible comeuppance. Coming from so long, no one happy until he is dead. So Esther, you want to come in? There's a sort of pattern to it. So there is the contingency idea of fortune that comes in, as Tom is describing. But there's very much also this idea that there's a cycle, that if you're on the up, you are just inevitably going to be coming down at some point. And that idea of the cycle of fortune runs throughout.

So Solon talks about it. Artabanus talks about it. These are the wise men who are advising different characters. So Solon talks about it while advising Cresis. Artabarnas talks about it while he's advising Xerxes. And you see it reflected again and again in stories, perlicities, who is a tyrant, who he also is advised by Amis, a ruler of Egypt, to that he should lose something special to him because the gods have clearly got it in for him

because he is so fortunate. So he must do something to arrange misfortune. And in fact, he does try and throw away a ring and it comes back to him. And at that point Amis knows that he's lost. Paul, what about these great battles that we've drummed into us, not drummed into, I'm romantic at school, the great, let's just take marathon, let's just, let's take Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis. Is there anything you can say and encapsulate about what they have in common,

the way they fought, what made one stronger than the other, and so on? Can you just give us some account of that, if you can, in the short space, a lot of you? Well, I think it's a great credit to Herodotus that he, unlike, I'll give you one example of a much later Greek historian, if you can call him that, Diodorus of Sicily. He does not homogenize battles. They are very, very clearly distinct. It's a separate question whether he gets all the facts right, because for that he would be dependent on sources, and that been survivors. And because he, remember, is only four or so at the time of the Battle of Salamis. He's not born at the time. time of the Battle of Marathon. But they're quite clearly distinct. And we, ancient historians, insofar as we're interested in military evolutions, as opposed to the broad historical significance of the battles, we argue about precisely how, for example, the Battle of Plotilla really evolved in 479 BC, did it take precisely or anything like the form Herodotus describes. But then, of course, if you're a historian of Napoleon and of Wellington, there's a great deal of dispute as to how exactly the

Battle of Waterloo evolve. So we tend not to think that's the most important thing about Herodotus. We credit him. We give him the benefit of the doubt when he is criticized or indeed contradicted by a later source, as for example, he was by Diodorus, whom I already mentioned, using another source for the Battle of Thermopylae in August or so of 480 BC. There is a passage in Diodorus, which introduces an entirely new element utterly suppressed by Herodontus, or is it invented by the later source? So we argue about that sort of thing,

but the general lines of how accurate was his account of each particular battle, we tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. We have no choice, to be honest. Why did the, it's a bit, it's very David, Goliath in my memory of it and my reading again of Herodon. Why did the Greeks win against this

massive empire, these Titanic armies and why did so let me up. Why did the Greeks win? Okay, let's do a little bit of deconstruction. When we say the Greeks won the Persian wars, something like 32 or 33

Greek communities were bold enough and resolute enough to stand together. Hang on and swear that they would resist. The other 700 or so in the Aegean, not to mention all the other Greeks around the Mediterranean and around the Black Sea who weren't involved at all, they actually either fought with the Persians,

I mean on the Persian side, or they tried to stay neutral. And there are some pretty big fish in amongst the allegedly neutral. I'm talking about you, Argos. And there are some pretty nasty examples of Greek cities. going over and siding with the Persians. I mean you, Thebes.

Right. Esther, what prominence does Herodotus give to... Herodotus seems to me to give quite a good deal of prominence of very powerful women. Would you agree with that? And could you give us one of two instances? Yes, there are a number of very powerful women. Artemisia is one of the key women, obviously, that features at the Battle of Salamis. She's an extraordinary woman And it may be that Herodotus focuses on her Because she is Artemisia of Halicarnassus, after all

She is in some ways As tricky, if you like, as Themistocles And people have sort of drawn parallels between her and Themistocles In the sense that, and in fact that she may in some ways represent Athens In the way in which she manages at the Battle of Salamis to avoid being rammed and sunk by actually ramming and sinking a ship that's on her own side.

But she is described as having Andrea, which is this very masculine quality of bravery. We see her also giving advice to Xerxes. So she also appears in some ways as like the advisor figures, similar to Solon, similar to Artabanus, who run through our... the history. So she's a very powerful female figure. And yet at the same time, he sends her off with the slave to look after his kids, does Xerxes. But there are, as you've said yourself,

Melvin, an awful lot of other women that are talked about and described throughout the histories. And in a number of different ways, they help to create this sense of nomoy that Paul was talking about, this idea of custom. Thank you. Tom Harrison. He describes a non-Greek world, and we're led to understand that he walked or traveled around it and had conversations with people all over the place. Does he, do you feel he really understands it? Anyway, how far do you think this took him? We'd be misleading people if we didn't say that he doesn't claim to go everywhere.

So he claims to have gone to Egypt, and some people have actually doubted that he went to Egypt, but he doesn't claim to have gone to the heartland of the Persian Empire, for example. So the question of his travels has been for a long time a kind of big controversy. It's certainly true that he gets some things wrong. So, for example, the Persian god Mithra, he thinks is a goddess, and it seems to be because Mithra sounds a bit like the word for mother in Greek. And so he's assumed that it was a female goddess. He says things about Persian language that are probably wrong, for example.

He probably couldn't speak many or any foreign languages apart from maybe Karean. so there's a possibility of kind of confusion if you're dealing through interpreters. But there's an awareness of the depth of history of these civilizations. At the same time, there's a desire to kind of bring it down to scale and make it manageable. So, I mean, that's a wider Greek phenomenon. Words like obelisk and pyramid and crocodile, I mean, Herobtus tells you the origin of crocodile. He says that the Greek saw these crocodiles, and the word crocodile means lizard in Greek. So he says they named it after the animals they have on their walls in their goals.

in their gardens because they look like each other and I think there's something about an obelisk is a roasting spit for making kebabs as it were in a pyramid as a cheesecake so they named all these enormous things after tiny things in their own world

to try to kind of bring them down to scale he also gets an awful lot right in the end though perhaps the issue whether he's telling the truth about or getting things right isn't the most important thing as Paul was talking about earlier on foreign peoples are also a

mirror in which the Greeks can see their own customs reversed, and that's a really important kind of overarching message of his work. And I think also just the variety and the diversity of foreign culture is incredibly important. The Libyans, he discusses at the back end of book four, huge variety of Libyan tribes, and their customs are completely outlandish. You have people whose language sounds like the sound of screeching bats. You have people who have no personal names. They have, you know, no individual names, people who eat monkeys and so on, or paint themselves. And he's interested in that diversity, I think, for its own sake, these are the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians. He's interested in, if you like,

and this goes back to something Esther said right at the beginning, and if you like, kind of tracking the very margins of human experience, what it is to be human in all its extremes. Paul, why was he called the father of lies and do you think he was? He was in the sense that obviously not everything he said corresponded to the truth. When I did my philosophy as an undergraduate truth was a problem, he was thought to be a liar for two reasons, really. One, he said things that were unimaginable and seemed empirically impossible.

People with heads in their breasts and snowflakes that were like cotton wool and this thing, absolutely impossible. That couldn't have happened. But the main reason that he gets labelled in this. very negative way, is that Plutarch, distinguished author, Beotian, from Carineer, writing about 100 AD, took against Herodotus to such an extent that he wrote an entire tract called On the Mean-Spiritedness of Herodotus. Actually, it was Plutarch, who was the more mean-spirited. But the reason that he took that line was that he thought that Herodotus had maligned his fellow Beotions of

Thebes. And I mentioned earlier, you may remember, Thebes took the Persian side. Well, Herodotus, though he was objective as between Greeks and Persians, he wasn't objective when it came to Greeks distinctly deciding to go with the Persians. And then they did all sorts of other terrible things. And so Herodotus gives them a hard time. And he obviously takes the side of the loyalist resisting Greeks, as opposed to the either neutral or in the case of Thebes, the mead-izing Greeks, the ones who actually went over to the Medes and Persians. Thank you very much. Now, briefly now, please. Starting with you, Tom, he's been in and out-of-fashioned Herodotus for over 2,000 years.

What's his position now? I think he's probably never had a higher reputation. I mean, I think he's always, I wouldn't quite say he's been out of fashion. I think it was always, even when his reliability was questioned, And it was always kind of, if you like, priced in with the Rogers. He was always seen as a charming storyteller, but just a rather a kind of naive recorder of other people's accounts rather than having an intelligent kind of artful overview himself.

I think what's happened in the 20th century, in particular, is people have looked much more at the way in which he is shaping his narrative. There's a lot more appreciation of that. There's also a sense in which his model of history, where he's not just looking at military political events, but he's also looking at the role of women, the role of culture in this kind of huge sense and diversity, has become much more rightly fashionable.

So he's become a kind of useful model. And his artfulness has come to the fore in this period. But he's had a huge influence over a much longer period, and that's sometimes down to individual stories. I think 19th century readers of Rodgers often saw him almost as a kind of storehouse of stories which they treated a bit as if they were stories from the Bible. Asla.

He has increased. relevance now also for us because in some ways his focus on who is telling what story in their own, from their own perspective, mirrors in some ways the polyphemous effect of social media. And I think there is something there that echoes that resonates for us that we can, we can appreciate what it is that he's doing in terms of collecting voices, not just from a intellectual disciplinary way. So we appreciate him, perhaps as in some ways, a fact founder of anthropological and ethnographical approaches. But I think there's something there also about the way in which he reflects our experience of hearing many stories and trying to

make sense of them and trying to find boundaries around which we can formulate our understanding. Thank you. And finally, Paul. Well, for me, and he has two main significances. One I've banged on about is humanity, his appreciation of what it is to be human. And I'll just give one example now. He was a kind of pacifist. He was very against war and in particular civil war. And I think that's admirable that he should have expressed that. But secondly, he is for me, my founding father. He is the father of my history. I wouldn't be here in a way. And I think neither Esther nor Tom. But for him, he kicked it all off. And then, of course, it's his reception through Thucydides and so forth that make him still so love. and lively. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Esther Idenau, Paul Cartledge and Tom Harrison, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, it's Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, often called the first feminist novel so scandalous in its time that her sister Charlotte Bronte tried to suppress it. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we not say you'd like have said most urgently? Perhaps we could talk a little bit more about the role of fortune.

That's my particular hobby horse. The ways in which that conflicts with ideas of fate is something as I find very interesting in Herodotism and always have. Whether Tuja, which is fortune, is actually planning things or is personified and actually planning things or in fact is something that is purely contingent. So, for example, if you've got little Kipselis almost being killed and he smiles at his killer and it's by Faye A Tuchier, and I just wonder, I often wonder about that,

is that meant to be something that has agency that makes him smile so that he's not killed or is it that it's just by contingency? So there is actually some agency that interrupts the flow of fate. And I'd be really interested to know what Paul and Tom think about that if they wanted to talk about it. It's probably more me than you, Paul. I don't know. I used to think about this a lot, that question and that episode in particular. I mean, I don't think my view, I suppose, is that he doesn't have a kind of rationalised view of the relationship between chance and the divine, but certainly the divine kind of over, somehow is in the background behind those contingencies. and whether or not the divine is there, there are a huge number of contingencies, moments where things come together.

Like, for example, the moment to which Aristagoras wants to, decides to launch the Aynan Revolt in Book 5, where I've forgotten all the things that happen. He's in debt, and then the message comes at the right moment and all these things come together, Herodda says. So he uses the word sum lots to show that there are lots of coincidences to come together. So there are endless moments of small events that have huge consequences. and I think that's a very striking pattern,

the pattern of contingency across his work more broadly, which connects to what you're saying about patterns of reciprocity. I think there's another one, if you like, that goes in parallel with it. Yes, the small that becomes large. I've got nothing to add to those, what you've said extremely elegantly. But going back to that Kippsler story, he is very interested in justice and in sole rulers. And he seems to, people differ on this,

whether or not they think Herodotus was a serious political thinker or political things swim before his eyes. Just to give one example which we didn't mention, the very earliest example of Western political theory, as opposed to political thought, is contained in book three of Herodotus, but set in Persia at a crisis point in the history of the Achaemoneid dynasty. And therefore people have said, well, it's pretty unlikely that three noble Persians should engage in a mid-fifth century BC political theory discussion. And yet Herodotus comes back in book six, and this I think rather reflects slightly badly on him. People have said to him, no Persian would ever have dreamt of putting forward anything like what we Greeks understand by democratae, the power of the masses of the people.

No, he says, look, as a matter of historical fact in what we call 493 or so, the Persians instituted democratia. It's one of the few uses. It's one of the earliest uses of the word in all ancient Greek literature in the Asia Minor area where they had put down this revolt. And so for them, the Persians who are in control, democracy is not beyond the realms of possible. Well, I would beg very strongly to differ. I think he got. that wrong. But what I think he got right was the notion that politics informs a great deal of what makes humans humans, which is why I banged on about war and the anecdote, which I didn't have time to mention, but it's actually put in the mouth of creases, I think, that in war, unfortunately, father's bury sons, whereas in peace, sons bury fathers. And that's the natural order. And then at the beginning of book eight, he says that civil war, which is a terrible thing going on within a people, civil war, war within a people is as much worse than war against a foreign enemy, i.e. the sort of wars he's mainly talked about, unlike, for example, Thucydides, who bangs on

about civil war, as war is worse than peace. So war is absolutely terrible for him. I completely agree with you, Paul, about how the political is much more, much more present, as it were, in his work. I mean, one thing, if I could just kind of follow on from your point you said about the constitutional debate, just to return to another theme we talked about, which is the issue of veracity that you talked about near the end. Yeah, yes. There is that very striking passage just a few chapters before the constitutional debate, where Darius is justifying deceit in the context of their seizing the throne back, the Persian throne back. And he says those who use lies and those who use the truth are aiming at the same object.

And there's a Persian background to that because of the idea that the Persians like truth-telling. But it does seem to be very striking that that comes just before this really controversial moment. And I do think there is a, I'm just using that as one example. There is a kind of playfulness about the truth in the way in which he cites sources. The episodes, for example, in which you have a source for a source for a source. And I think there's one episode in the one that ends with the story of the piece. Pygmies, I've never forgotten which book it's in, where there are seven layers to this story, or there's a fantastic series of speeches at the end of book eight, where you have a message relayed

by Alexander of Macedon, including a message from Mardinus, the Persian General, including a message from the king, and each of them with a very subtly differently presented threat. Alexander pretending to be on their side, Mardonius and Xerxes being much more robust, he's very conscious of if you like how truth is mediated by those people who are delivering it. And I think that I wouldn't want defending his reliability or his truthfulness to get in the way of that playfulness, if you like. Nicely put, yeah. But he's also, I mean, he's quite specific that in making his own reports, he actually says, you know, we're under no obligation to believe what is said.

and that idea that he's sourcing this material very specifically from different speakers is actually it is the kaleidoscope, the material of his histories. So the playfulness with the truth also is actually something very serious insofar as these are the different accounts that are given. And it's very important that they're different accounts. And this is what he's trying to get to is how do you get to the truth? I think, in those issues. But I did just want to pick up on something that Paul was talking about with war, because what's, and humanity,

and this idea that what you see very clearly also is the effects on women, on the rest of the families, that war, the havoc that war reeks on the rest of families. And that speaks to his humanity very much for me, because it's the constant references back, you know, the women who are abducted, and what they do and how they talk. try to preserve their family structures when they're abducted, the women who are raped,

who are carried off, who are, all of these stories, the ways in which he allows you to see an entire culture being attacked, not just the battlefield, not just the men fighting, if you see what I mean. And that has always spoken to me very strongly in the way in which he's constructing constructing a picture of the world and what happens when people go to war. Can I talk about Athens briefly? Okay, I mean, it just goes back to something at the beginning, and I want to say this, we're talking about if you like why he's writing, and I was talking about the Peloponnesian War context

and this kind of dark shadowing of the Peloponnesian War over his histories. It's worth saying that what effect does that have? For some older readers, I mean, one of the most notorious is Enoch Powell, the politician who worked on Horatiss in the 30s, and beyond and wrote a terrible translation of Herodotus as well in the language of the King James Bible. For someone like Enoch Powell, Herodotus was defending Athens and was absolutely, you know, that was his mission, was to go back in the context of the Persian War and big up Athens's role in this great previous conflict. Increasingly, people are seeing it as a warning to Athens and rather more negative. And I think I go slightly more in that direction, but I wonder also whether actually both of those are wrong.

picking up on Esther and fatalism more widely. And what you're getting is, if you like, the sort of sublimation of contemporary events in this historical context to answer Melvin's question at the end about how things have changed. I think one of the main changes in the last 70 years or so, 70, 90 years, in terms of approaches to Rodgers, is a much more negative picture of his account of Athens. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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