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

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Born on the Western edge of an empire that stretched all the way to India, Herodotus was a Greek historian of the 5th century BC. His major work The Histories, a long and detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars and the cultures of the ancient world, is considered the founding work of History in Western literature. Herodotus was known for his thorough research, his use of eyewitness accounts, and his engaging storytelling style, and was not impervious to feuding with other historians… Join Tom and Dominic as they look into the life of the "father of History". *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That am a Spartan queen. I come to tell you a story. A story unlike any that has been told before. It is the story of the greatest war ever fought. Years had lasted. Famous cities went up in flames. Mighty heroes, the pride of Greece and Asia, won undying glory for themselves. Some died before their time and their shades fled down to the underworld. Others, when the war was done, met with equally unhappy fates. One, returning from the war, was murdered in his own palace.

Another, a man of tricks and turns, the great schemer who did more than anyone else to secure victory for the Greeks, roams the world to this day. Who knows if he will ever make it home? I too, in the years since the war, have roamed the world. I have spoken to those who fought and survived. I have toured the fields and sailed the waters where the battles were decided. I have sought to understand everything that happened, how it was that East and West came to go to war. I played my own small part.

I will tell you how. But this is not just my story. It is the story of everyone who played a part, gods as well as men. A story unlike any you will ever have read. So that, Tom Holland, as you well know, is the beginning of the book The Wolf Girl, The Greeks and the Gods by, would you believe, Tom Holland yourself. You've basically persuaded me to read out your own book to you. I did.

This is a podcast about Herodotus, the father of history. We could have started with Herodotus, but you've chosen to start with Holland. Explain yourself, Tom. Shameless self-promotion. So the premise of this book is that Gorgo, who is mentioned in Herodotus, the first great historian. In fact, the first historian, full stop. There was no Herodotus before Herodotus, the first great historian. In fact, the first historian, full stop. There was no Herodotus before Herodotus is the famous maxim. And in this book, he introduces a Spartan princess called Gorgo, who is the daughter of a Spartan king called Cleomenes,

and who will go on to marry another Spartan king called Leonidas, the king who in due course will die at the Battle of Thermopylae. She is the heroine in my children's book and plays key parts in various parts of the story, but she's also embodying this desire to explain what happened in the war, but also why the war happened, and even more than that, the infinite quality of the world in which he's living. So the world of the Greeks, but also the world of the Persians who are invading Greece. There's a twofold echo in that introduction. So the first echo is an echo of Homer. Yes.

So the story of great cities being burnt, of kings coming back from the wars and being murdered. The trickster who wanders the earth. Cunning tricksters, yes. So you might think that that's Troy. You might think that that's Agamemnon, the Greek king, who comes back to Mycenae and is murdered by Cytomnestra. You might think that that's Odysseus. But in fact, the cities in my version that gets burnt is Athens,

gets burnt by the Persians in 480 BC. The king who returns home and is murdered is Xerxes, the Persian king who gets killed in a palace coup. And the man of many tricks and parts who secures victory for the Greeks is Themistocles, the great Athenian admiral at the Battle of Salamis, who basically wins that decisive naval engagement. So there is that echo, but there is also an echo of Herodotus, who at the beginning of his great work kind of talks in similar terms to Gorgo in the version that I've just given. So I will read the first line of the first work of history ever written,

where Herodotus announces himself and his purpose. You're not going to read it in Greek, are you, Tom? You're going to read it in a lovely translation. Who's the author of this translation, may I ask? Me. Me. So this is the Penguin Classics. The most egotistical podcast ever recorded this episode.

I know, I know, I know, I know. But it is quite a good translation, though, I say it myself. So here we go. Herodotus from Halicarnassus here displays his inquiries that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time and that everything great and astounding and all the glory of those exploits which serve to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect be kept alive. And additionally, and most importantly, to give the reason they went to war. So Tom, when he talks about the glory of those exploits, am I right in saying, I read that you had, in your translation of that, you have given a little nod to Homer there,

that you could have translated that differently. But because the talk of glory and all that sort of stuff is some kind of nod to the Iliad, is that right? Yeah. So Herodotus there is absolutely echoing the Iliad. So Troy is mentioned, but actually Herodotus, when he's trying to explain how it is that the peoples of Asia and the peoples of Europe have gone to war, he lists the Trojan War, but he goes back even further. And he says that according to the Persians, it's the fault of the Phoenicians who are the naval power in what's now Lebanon, who are subjects of the Persians, who form the core of the great fleet that gets defeated at Salamis. And the Persians say that the Phoenicians came and they abducted a princess of Argos, and that this led to a kind of tit-for-tat princess rustling. The Trojans then come and

nick Helen, and so it goes on, and it's just kind of escalated and escalated and escalated. Basically, Herodotus' account, his inquiries, and that's what hysteria means. The word history comes from it, means researches, it means inquiries. It's an enormous shaggy dog story because just when you think that he's going to go into kind of details about how it is that, say, the Persians become part of this story, he doesn't. He's going off on an absolute kind of, going massively off piste. And he starts to talk about a king who wants his bodyguard to have a peek at his queen while she's naked. Yeah, very famous.

And the consequences of that are fatal. And then before you know it, you've got a story about a guy who's been a musician who's been captured by pirates and he escapes them by jumping into a sea while he's playing his lute and he lands on a dolphin and gets taken to dry land. And so it goes on and so it goes on. And you realize that this is a kind of great compilation of stories and wonders. And if it looks forward to history, it also looks forward to, I don't know, the Arabian Nights or great collections of short stories. So that's the wonderful thing about Herodotus and why he is not just my favourite historian, but I think my favourite writer, is that he is both a great historian and infinitely entertaining. All right. Well, Tom, before we get into the weeds, so let's take a step back and look at the sort of broad context. So you said there's no Herodotus before Herodotus.

So the father of history, we are in the 5th century BC. Herodotus is obviously writing in Greek and sees himself as Greek, but he's not from what we would conventionally see as Greece, is he? He's from Halicarnassus, which is now Bodrum in Turkey. Yes, the great yachting centre. Yes, exactly. So give us a sense of what we know about Herodotus, the man and his times. Well, we know very little about his biography because people in his age simply weren't interested in recording details like that. Herodotus is essentially the first person who is putting down penned biographies of people, and he doesn't do it for himself. So we can tell from that opening that he does come from this place, Halicarnassus,

which was founded by settlers from the Peloponnese. So that's the little, you know, the kind of the fork that constitutes Southern Greece. And they cross the Aegean to the Asian side of the Aegean. And they come to the Asian side of the Aegean and they come to a place called Caria, which is basically the kind of the southwest corner of what's now Turkey. If we want any kind of information about biographical information about Herodotus, we actually have to go to the 10th century AD. So there's a Byzantine encyclopedia. Oh, yes. The Suda. The Suda, the fortress, as it's called. This is a millennium and a half after Herodotus lives.

And there we get the detail that his father was called Lyxes and his uncle was called Paniasis. And apparently these are names that are essentially Carian, which imply either that Herodotus is kind of Grico-Carian or that the Greeks have become sufficiently Carianized that they're adoptingaryan names. Either way, it points to a sense that Herodotus is inherently cosmopolitan. He is Greek. He is part of the Karyan world. More broadly, he's part of the world of Anatolia. Anatolia and Halicarnassus with it has been conquered by the Persians. When Herodotus is born, presumably sometime in the 480s BC, he's born a subject of the Persian king. And to be a subject of the Persian king is to be aware of yourself as part of a dominion that is

huge beyond the dreams of any previous conqueror. So Herodotus is born on the westernmost edge of an empire that stretches all the way to India and the Hindu Kush. That means, I think, that compared to Thucydides, the other great historian who will follow Herodotus, Thucydides is born in Athens and his perspective is a very Greek one. He's not really interested in anything beyond the purlieus of Greece. Herodotus has an inherently more global scale of interests. His history, when he says that his aim is to record the glory of those exploits, which serve to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect, because the Persians essentially rule the whole of Asia, and from

Herodotus' perspective, much of Africa, that means that Herodotus' subject is basically the entire world because he sees it as a world war. I mean, it isn't. For the Persians, it's a kind of peripheral border skirmish, really. But Herodotus frames it as being this great war between Europe and Asia. And this therefore justifies him in writing not just history, but accounts of the animals, or the products, or the wealth, or the customs of places up in what's now Ukraine, or in India, or in Arabia, or in Egypt. It's not just the first great work of history. It's also the first gazetteer. It's the first work of ethnography i mean essentially it's the first work of non-fiction and it is the acorn from which the say the great oak of what's now the internet

comes okay the desire to comprehend the totality of human experience and kind of record it's wikipedia so let me ask a couple of practical questions do we have any vague sense of a date when herodotus wrote the histories? Yeah, several decades after the failure of the Persian invasion. So the great invasion that's led by Xerxes is 480. It ends at the Battle of Plataea in 479. We know that Herodotus speaks to people who had taken part in those events. And's incredibly thrilling because you're witnessing the birth there of historical method. Oral history. Well, talking of the Battle of Plataea, this great land battle between the Greeks and the

Persians which ends in Greek victory and finishes effectively the Persian Wars, Herodotus speaks to a guy called Thassander who comes from a city of Orchomenus, which is kind of allied with Thebes. And Thebes is a great rival of Athens. And so the Thebans are on the Persian side. And shortly before the battle, the Persian general hosts a banquet at which people from Thebes, people from Orchomenus, Greeks who are allied to the Persians, share in this banquet with the Persians. And Tharsander has a conversation with a Persian talking about the prospects for the battle ahead, and the Persian is actually a bit pessimistic about them. And Tharsander remembers this,

and he then talks to Herodotus. So this is as close to hearing a voice of someone who fought at the battle as we're ever going to get. And it's the first time you have that. It's the first time in recorded history that this is being done. So in a sense, this is the creation of history. And that's what makes reading Herodotus so thrilling is the sense that Schopenhauer said that everything that history will become is already there in Herodotus. And that's the fascination of it, I think. Okay. This is a bit like talking to Herodotus because you've got a Herodotian method of answering the questions where you're going to shoot off and tell me anecdotes and stories,

which is great, which is exactly how Herodotus was. Which is what he's all about. Yes. Exactly. So that's when it's written. Next, how is it written? I.e., what's it written with and on? I mean, that seems like a very banal question but i mean does he write it with he doesn't write on wax tablets or something surely he's well he's writing it in greek um it it seems to be written for oral consumption yeah so he he's probably giving he's he's reading it at festivals um the greeks are inherently competitive uh you know they that They cannot do anything without kind of organizing a competition. So probably that's what he's doing. And then he's writing it down as well.

On paper? Papyrus, I guess. On papyrus. And yes, this was my other question. Why is he writing it? Who's he writing it for? Because if this hasn't existed before, what's the point of doing it? So it's for recitals, it's for competitions. So there's another tradition that he leaves Halicarnassus, he gets exiled, and he ends up in a colony that's been founded by the Athenians called Thuria in Italy, in Southern Italy. And if there's any truth to that tradition, then it suggests that he

is being backed by the Athenians there. And he apologizes at one point for his argument that it's the Athenians who play the key role in defeating the Persians. So he constructs the first ever counterfactual, the first ever what if. He says, what if the Athenians had sided with the Persians rather than with the Spartans and the Peloponnesians? What would then have happened? And he says, well, without the Athenian fleet, the Spartans would have been unable to stop the Persians from landing troops all across the Peloponnese. And doubtless, the Spartans would have held out, but they would have been overwhelmed. They would have gone down. And so all of Greece would have been conquered. He's nervous about making this argument because by this point, the Athenians have become themselves

an imperial power. So in the wake of the Persian Wars, they are the great, you know, the saviour of Greece. And so they leverage this to make themselves basically the mistress of what initially is a kind of defensive alliance, but very soon becomes an empire. And it's this that leads to them in the end fighting with the Spartans, their erstwhile allies. And so the sense that the Athenians who have seen off the despotism of Persia have now themselves become despotic is part of the narrative. And it is also a theme that is woven into Herodotus' own history. The fact that he is standing up for the Athenians and the role that they've played in the war,

and the fact that there's this tradition that he ends up in an Athenian-sponsored colony, there's a tantalizing hint there that perhaps he's consciously writing it for an Athenian-sponsored colony, there's a tantalizing hint there that perhaps he's consciously writing it for an Athenian audience. Because by this point, Athens has become the great centre of literary culture, of all kinds of things. And in the terms of how people would, as it were, consume this work. So he would read extracts at festivals and things like that, but would copies be made of his original that would be distributed among Athenian nobles? Yes. So Herodotus has survived because, obviously, people copied it.

Classical texts, by and large, if they survive, it's due to their popularity. And it's evident that even in his own lifetime, copies of the histories are starting to spread and spread. The evidence for that is Thucydides, who never mentions Herodotus, but it's an absent presence. The very fact he's not talking about Herodotus, and yet he's so clearly influenced by him. And again and again, he is making points that are clearly aimed at Herodotus, suggests that this has become part of the literary culture of Athens by the time Thucydides is writing, a decade or so, probably after Herodotus has finished it. So right from the start, the world's first two historians are sniping at each other.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And so it begins. But Herodotus himself, I mean, so the question then is, if there's no Herodotus before Herodotus, how has he got the idea for this kind of incredible project yeah and i think the answer to that lies in another region of the aegean which is the region called ionia of which the greater city is miletus but that you know there are other cities as well and they also have been conquered by the persians but they are the centers of what i guess could could legitimately be called the first great enlightenment. And this is the birthplace of philosophy in Greece. So Thales and Anaximander, people who are looking at the universe and trying to construct laws that would explain the functioning of the universe.

And it's interesting that Herodotus chooses to write in prose because the first texts in Greek that are written in prose are laws, bodies of laws. And there's a sense, I think, in which the philosophers are trying to speak in the same way about the entire universe. So just as you would have a body of laws that structure how people should behave, say, in a city, what the philosophers are doing are trying to apply those laws to explain why there's thunder, why there are seas, how the world began, is the world the center of the universe, all that kind of thing. Is it round? All this kind of stuff. But that's what they're doing. And I think that Herodotus is kind of applying that measure, that approach to the dimension of recent affairs, of recent events. Although he's a kind of great narrative historian, loves anecdotes,

loves stories, he is also writing his history to try and kind of work out if there are rules that govern the patterns of human behavior. Yeah. And you said there was no Herodotus before Herodotus, but there are accounts, aren't there, of writers who had done non-fiction before. So I'm just looking at a list, Dionysius of Miletus, Hecateus of Miletus. So Miletus is the centre of, as you said, sort of proto-Enlightenment. And there are other people whose works are now lost, I assume, who are sort of writing nonfiction works. Is that fair? So Thucydides' pictures about Herodotus, and Herodotus, who generally from his work seems to have been a very genial man. People seem to have talked to him very readily,

and he seems a delightful man. But he has this Hecatias he clearly hates, and is endlessly dissing him. It's Hecatias who goes to Egypt, and a bit like Plato's account in Atlantis, where Solon goes and is laughed at by the priests, and he says, you Greeks are children. A similar thing happens to Hecataeus. He goes to the priests and he talks about his interest in genealogy, and the priests just laugh in his face because the Greeks have no understanding of the past at all. Herodotus says primly that I take no interest in genealogy, even though he does. His envy and dislike of Hecataeus clearly, as a predecessor and arrival, is something that's animating him. But there's no Herodotus before Herodotus because

no one is applying this to the dimension of the past. That's the key innovation. So what Herodotus is doing, he's not, you know, as it were, an archival historian staying in one place and pouring over the records, because you mentioned Hecataeus traveling to Egypt. The remarkable thing about Herodotus is that he's not merely the first historian. Am I right in thinking he's also either the first or one of the first travel writers? Because he's combining his history with ethnography, with anthropology, with travel writing, all these kinds of things. Because off he goes to Egypt and all these places. It does seem that Hecataeus had as well. But Herodotus is, I mean, he's exceptional as far as we can tell, because Hecataeus' works haven't really survived.

Exceptional in the breadth of his interest in other places. So Herodotus was called by Cicero the father of history. But more recently, he's been called the father of lies interest in other places. So Herodotus was called by Cicero the father of history. But more recently, he's been called the father of lies. And a bit like with Marco Polo, did Marco Polo go to China? There are people who argue he didn't. There was a kind of a trend to argue that essentially Herodotus hadn't been anywhere and that the whole book is really a meditation on Greece and that what he writes about the Egyptians or the Persians or whatever are simply riffs on the Greeks. He knows about the Greeks and the Persians and the Egyptians are constructed as people who are not like the Persians or the Egyptians. I think that that

is clearly not true because what's happened over recent decades is that again and again, evidence has been found that kind of backs up what Herodotus is saying. And I think it's pretty universally accepted now that Herodotus did go to Egypt. Yeah. So what Herodotus will do is he'll be telling you a story. You know, he'll be telling you about the kingdom of Lydia, and then he'll go off on one about Lydia. You know, the kind of clothes they wear, the most amazing things to be seen in their kingdom, that kind of thing. The biggest one of all is Egypt.

So he's describing how the Persians are invading Egypt. Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, he's leading this great army. They're invading Egypt. It's incredible drama. And then Herodotus says, Egypt is a land which boasts an inordinate number of wonders and possesses more monuments surpassing description than any other in the world. Reason enough then, I think, to describe it at some length and when he says some length he actually means enormous length yeah because it's you're girding your loins now for hundreds of pages yes you don't in any way begrudge it because it's herodotus who for instance who tells us about the process of mummification it's herodotus who talks to us about the kings who built the pyramids. He gives us all kinds of mad details about the

obsession the Egyptians have with cats. He claims that Egyptian women stand up to pee, Egyptian men sit down to pee. It's full of this kind of mixture of clearly credible reportage and mad stuff. Well, he's making some stuff is made up, is just hearsay. So again and again, he says, so again, I'll quote him. Those who find such things credible must make what they will of the stories told by the Egyptians. My own responsibility, however, as it has been throughout my writing of this entire narrative, is simply to record whatever I may be told by my sources.

Right. And in Egypt, it seems that his sources are the priests. And what you have to wonder when you get stories about how the daughter of Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid, set herself up as a prostitute and raised enough money to build a small pyramid that stands in front of Cheops' pyramid, or when you get tales about how there are flying snakes that try and break into Egypt and they get beaten off by storks. And Herodotus claims that he's seen the bones for himself of these flying lizards. You know, what exactly is going on there? We can't be sure.

And I suspect that it's a mixture of words getting lost in the translation. Herodotus doesn't seem to have spoken any language apart from Greek. Maybe the priest's pulling his leg. Certainly having some fun with the Greek. They see him as a barbaric kind of primitive and they're just teasing him. Or maybe the priests themselves don't know. Or maybe Herod, as with the skeletons of the flying snakes, I mean, I don't know what he saw there,

but maybe some weird graveyard of animals or something, mummified animals. I mean, it's hard to know. Or maybe it's Chinese whispers. He's picking up reports of reports of reports of reports. But that idea that he says again and again, you may not believe what I'm saying, but this is what I was told, and my duty is to report what I was told. I'm just the messenger. Don't shoot the messenger. That's what he's saying, right? Absolutely. But again, that is the historical method at work. He's reporting his sources. Okay, very good. So Tom, we will come back after the break with some of the most colourful and, as it were, the funnest details and anecdotes and stories from Herodotus. And you can pick out

some of your highlights for us, and we can delve a bit deeper into the mystery of the histories. So we will see you after the break. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. During Darius's reign, he invited some Greeks who were present to a conference and asked them how much money it would take for them to be prepared to eat the corpses of their fathers. They replied they would not do that for any amount of money. Next, Darius summoned some members of the Indian tribe known as Kalatiai who eat their parents and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, with an interpreter present so they could understand what was being said,

how much money it would take for them to be willing to cremate their father's corpses. And they cried out in horror and told him not to say such appalling things. So Tom, that's from Herodotus. Right from the start, he's a relativist, right? He's got a story about the Greeks who won't eat their father's corpses, the Indians who won't cremate them, and he's having some fun with that. I think it's so brilliant that you go for that, because I think that that anecdote is the absolute heart of his methodology. So the context for this story is Cambyses, after the enormous digression Herodotus has done about the Egyptians, has finally invaded Egypt and he's conquered it. And then according to Herodotus, done about the Egyptians, has finally invaded Egypt and he's conquered it.

And then according to Herodotus, who in turn has got it from the priests, he goes mad and he goes around insulting all the Egyptian gods. A divine bull is born and Cambyses kills it. And Herodotus is really shocked by this. The reason that he's shocked, he says that everyone believes their own customs to be by far and away the best. And from this, it follows that only a madman would think to jeer at such matters. And this is Herodotus' coordinating assumption, that everybody's customs are precious to them, and that they all have different ways of seeing the world, and that people take for granted their own way of seeing the world. And it's only when they're kind of brought up against other ways of seeing the world that you can see how relative they are, how culturally contingent. And he illustrates this point with exactly the story that you told about it's Darius summoning

Greeks who burn their parents when they die, and an Indian tribe who supposedly eat them. And both are appalled by the idea that they might adopt the custom of the other. And the lesson that Herodotus draws from this, he cites Pindar, the great poet, he says, this shows that custom is all. But I think that there's a further dimension that makes this an astonishing moment. Because what Herodotus is doing there is he is placing Darius the Great at the center of the story. And Darius the Great, he's the king who follows on from Cambyses. And he is the man who will send the expedition that gets defeated by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 BC. In a sense,

Darius is, for the Athenians, the bogeyman. But what Herodotus is doing is making Darius, the Persian king, the center of the story. From his perspective, the customs of both the Greeks and the Indians are kind of weird. It's the Persian who stands geographically at the center of the story. He's chosen Greeks and the Indians because they're both on the periphery of his empire. So Herodotus can recognize that to a Persian king, it's the Greeks who are the barbarians. And it's an absolutely kind of stunning insight. I hate to use the word liminal. Yes.

But Herodotus, he comes from a place that is on the edge of the Persian world, but also on the edge of the Greek world. So is he uniquely placed to be able to deliver these insights, to be able to understand context and stuff in a way that somebody born in Athens would not have seen this because they'd have said, how dare you question our customs? I think that must be the explanation for it. I mean, we don't know, but it seems to me the likeliest explanation for this ability to kind of basically think himself or at least attempt to think himself into the shoes of other peoples. Because I had an Iranian friend who was very kind of nationalist. His family had gone into exile in the revolution, and he had changed his name to Cyrus as a kind of mark of respect for the founder of the Iranian monarchy. And he hated Herodotus and refused to read him. And I keep

saying, oh, you must read him. He's wonderful. And he'd say, no, he's a terrible Greek who traduces the Persians. But he's wrong because Herodotus is hugely respectful of the Persians. He admires them as a people. It's Herodotus who records the Persian maxim that boys should be taught to ride, to shoot a bow and to tell the truth. And he records this as kind of very admirable principle. And even Xerxes, the Persian king who builds great bridges of boats across the Hellespont and lashes the waters when a storm breaks them and often behaves in a kind of hubristic way. A man who is so convinced of his power that he is committing the crime of going where he shouldn't, i.e. invading Europe, as Herodotus sees it. Nevertheless, the portrayal of Xerxes is often quite positive.

So Herodotus describes the vast scale of the Persian expedition, all the soldiers who are going on the invasion. And then he says that in all the millions of people on this expedition, there was no one more handsome nor better fitted to wield supreme power than Xerxes himself. And there's a very famous account when Xerxes, just before the invasion, he's still on the Asian shores before crossing to Europe. He is looking at his army. He's looking at his fleet. He's looking at his fleet. He feels this great surge of pride that he is the king of kings, the king of the world. And then suddenly he starts to weep. And his uncle who's standing by him says, well,

why are you weeping? Why these tears? And so his answer is, according to Herodotus, that he had been musing on how short his human life and the pity of it pierced me through. All these multitudes here, and yet in a hundred years time, not one of them will be alive. So that is a very Greek perspective. It's evident that Xerxes never said that. That is a perspective of tragedy. It's something that Athenian audiences watching Euripides or Sophocles would appreciate. But it is an attempt by Herodotus to sit on Xerxes' throne and to imagine, well, what would he think? How would he feel? So there is a kind of emotive effort there.

But some people listening to this, Tom, will say, I love history because history tells me truth, because history is a search for, it's a quest for the truth. And they would say, you know, in a postmodern relativist age, it's really important to cling on to these principles that there is a difference between truth and lies. And the idea of Herodotus, the father of lies, you know, seems to run counter to that. And the story that you're just telling there, Herodotus is writing, his book is not merely an account of following his sources, but it's an act of imagination as well, isn't it? As I think it has to be, because the effort of trying to think yourself into the shoes of different peoples for a Greek, I mean, I think for anyone, does require an effort of imagination.

The reason that Herodotus is writing what we would now call history, nonfiction, rather than fiction, is absolutely because he's not writing myth. So at the beginning of his work, he distinguishes very clearly between the dimension of what we would call myth. So basically, unverifiable accounts that are often contradictory from a very remote past that can't be check up on. And he essentially is confining himself to what the sons of sons have reported. So basically, he's not writing about anything that's not 100 years before when he's writing it. So to that extent, he can't be certain that, as he keeps saying, maybe it's not true what he's being told, but he's reporting what he's been told. And when it comes to reporting what other peoples have said, obviously,

he's on slightly shakier ground because he wouldn't be speaking their language and he can't always understand the cultural frameworks and contexts within which they might be operating. But what's intriguing is that there are times where he will express doubts about something that he's been told, but at the same time, reveal something that suggests that actually it's true. So the classic account of this is where he reports the claim by the Phoenicians that they have been on an expedition sailing down the east coast of Africa and rounded it and come all the way back up and sailed through the Pillars of Heracles, the Straits of Gib and rounded it and come all the way back up and sailed through the Pillars of Heracles, the Straits of Gibraltar, and come all the way back.

They've been commissioned by a pharaoh to do this. Herodotus says that he doesn't believe this for a minute. He says that one of their claims, which I personally find unbelievable, although others may not, was that while sailing around Libya, which is what he calls Africa, they had had the sun on their right-hand side. This, of course, is precisely the detail which enables us to know that the Phoenicians had crossed the equator. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah. So that suggests that when Herodotus is reporting stuff that he believes to be mad, it needn't necessarily be mad. And it also explains why when he reports the stuff that

clearly is mad, I think we should cut him some slack. So the most notorious example of Herodotus reporting something that clearly sounds mad is when he talks about how people in a desert in India source gold. And they say that the gold is dug up by giant ants and that the ants go down and they dig up the gold, but they're very kind of ferocious and predatory. They're dangerous. What the Indians do is they go out in the heat of the day when the ants are all sleeping. They grab the gold, and then they come back, and the ants chase them. They have to let go a camel so that the ants go chasing after the camel. This is absolutely the kind of story that has led Herodotus to being called the father of lies.

What's going on there, India is part of the Persian world. And so therefore it's part of Herodotus' world. But it is amazing to think that someone in the Greek world in the 5th century BC could report anything about India, which is unfathomable distances away. And so it must be, I mean, what are these ants? There's a brilliant theory that maybe they are marmots,

because there are marmots in certain regions of the Himalayas that go down and dig up holes and reveal gold dust. And the locals apparently did gather the gold. And you can imagine that maybe the word that is being used for marmot over the process of transliteration, as this story has reached the far end of the Persian empire, that it's become ant. And maybe it's been improved by the telling so that these marmots have been turned into kind of giant predators and things. But I think that you have to cut Herodotus some slack for that. I mean, he is doing something unprecedented. He is taking an interest in reaches of the world

that are, by the standards of someone in a pre-industrial world, unbelievably distant. And what about the actual, what we would call the sort of the straight history, so the high political stroke military history, because obviously there he's competing with Thucydides, isn't he? And does Herodotus stand up well, do you think? Because is he really interested in that or is he too interested in his marmots and his ants and stuff? He is interested. So he gives basically most of what we know about the narrative history of what's called archaic Greece, so pre-classical Greece, derives from Herodotus. He focuses particularly on Athens and Sparta, because they will play the key role in the defence of Greece against the Persian invasion.

So our records of the dual kingship in Sparta, the early customs of Sparta, the succession of kings of whom Leonidas is the most famous, but he's integrated into a family tree that we can reconstruct thanks to Herodotus. Also the emergence of democracy in Athens. So the career of Solon, who is the person, according to Plato, who tells the story of Atlantis, the kind of great lawgiver. Then there's a tyranny. We'll be talking about this in a later episode, how democracy comes to Athens. But Herodotus is really our key source for that. And then you have the details of the wars themselves. And I remember when I was a child, Herodotus is really our key source for that. And then you have the details of the wars themselves. And I remember when I was a child, Herodotus was the first classic I ever read because I wanted to read about the Persian Wars.

I'd become obsessed by them. And I realized that Herodotus is ultimately, you know, this is, if I want to know about the Persian Wars, I'm going to have to read Herodotus himself. And I spent the first four books of this vast work. He doesn't get to the Persian Wars at all. No, they don't happen for ages, do they? Yeah, absolutely. And then I got to the wars, the accounts of the Ionian revolt, when the Ionians rebel against the Persians, the Athenians support them. Darius is therefore

determined to take vengeance on the Athenians, sends the expedition to Marathon that gets defeated. Ten years later, his son Xerxes leads this stupefyingly vast amphibious expedition. If Herodotus is to be trusted on the numbers, which he may or may not be, he certainly isn't with reference to the manpower, but maybe with the ships, it's slightly more accurate. And the Spartans get defeated at Thermopylae, the Persians then get defeated at Salamis, and the expedition is conclusively defeated at Plataea. And Herodotus tells this story brilliantly. It's thrilling and stirring. That's why the glamour of Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis endures to the present

day. No one has made a Hollywood film about anything that Thucydides wrote, but 300 would be unthinkable without Herodotus. But it's not just the story. This is the first war. This is the first series of events that we can analyze as historians. Before that, we simply don't have the kind of the day-to-day detail, the day-to-day record. So yeah, I think it does hold up. So two questions about that, Tom. First of all, you said it was a stirring account. And of course it is. It's incredibly stirring and sort of rousing. And that's why 300 exists or any of the many fictional accounts of the Persian Wars. But we talked about Herodotus as a figure on the edge of the Greek and Persian worlds, able to see it from both perspectives. But these accounts, they are tinged, aren't they? I don't know whether

Greek chauvinism is the right expression. Maybe that's too loaded. But he wants the Greeks to win. I mean, it's very partisan, isn't it? Yes, it is partisan. But as I said, that doesn't mean that you don't try and get a Persian perspective, which is what he's clearly doing when he's interviewing Thassander of Orchomenus. The significance of Thassander is that he can give the Persian perspective on the battles. So he's doing that. And as I said, also, he is very aware of all the kind of the military and moral qualities that the Persians have, and even that Xerxes have, the commander of this great invasion. So I think that he is actually unbelievably balanced and fair in his account of the invasion to the degree that Plutarch,

who is a biographer writing much later, kind of in the age of Trajan and Hadrian, he condemns Herodotus as a philo-barbarous, a lover of barbarians, a bleeding heart liberal, basically because he thinks that Herodotus has not been chauvinist enough. So I said how Herodotus is a bit like the philosophers, is trying to look for patterns, trying to look for laws. That was my second question. Are there laws that explain why the Persian Wars turned out as they did? So having said that he may well have been sponsored by the Athenians, there is a kind of quite a dark take on Athens in the histories,

because what Herodotus is describing over the course of his histories is a kind of cycle that great empires rise and fall. And the very last passage in the histories describes Cyrus, and it goes back to the life of Cyrus the Great, the man who was founded the Persian Empire. And it describes a time where Cyrus has conquered his empire and delegates from his subjects, the Persians, come to him and say, now we're the rulers of the world. Why should we subsist in this rough mountainous area where the Persians have their home? Why don't we go down into the rich flatlands of Mesopotamia and settle there

and enjoy the fruits of our greatness? Cyrus says, well, you can do that if you want to, but if you do, you're idiots because he says, soft lands breed soft men. So there's this inherent idea that, and it's one that Ibn Khaldun, the great Muslim historian also fixes on that. There's a kind of inherent cycle where greatness results in softness and the people who have won this wealth are then unable to defend their wealth against kind of immigrants, newcomers, people who are from poorer lands who want it. And so the cycle goes on. But with Herodotus, there's also an additional sense that powerful people are driven mad by power and powerful empires are driven mad by power. So Lord Acton, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely.

And so this is a lesson that is manifest in the histories because the Persians win because they are morally superior to the people they defeat. They tell the truth. They are not soft. They learn to fire the bow and to ride horses. But by the time you reach the reign of Xerxes, his wealth is stupefying. And although he is a tough warrior, he is also clearly being changed by the fact that he can command the resources of the entire world. And it's this that leads him to his hubristic ambition to invade Greece and try and conquer Europe and results in his overthrow, which in turn has opened the door for Athens to become a great power. And I think inherent but unspoken in Herodotus' history is the idea that Athens is following

the Persian path. So in his histories, he's describing how Athens becomes a democracy. And he says that, you know, it's incredible the change that democracy brings to Athens. The Athenians, who'd never really done anything before, suddenly are able to defeat their enemies because they are free,

because they are true to the kind of the ideals of this heroic new form of government. But, and it's this that enables them to defeat the Persians. But what everybody who's listening to Herodotus describe this knows is that even as Herodotus is reading out his histories or writing them, the Athenians themselves have become an imperial power. And although Herodotus probably doesn't live to see the defeat of Athens by Sparta, that is kind of baked into what he's writing. So he's writing as a warning? Yes, I think he is. And I think that if he'd known that Sparta would defeat Athens,

he wouldn't have been surprised that very shortly after that, Sparta in turn gets defeated by the Thebans. And then the Thebans in turn get defeated by the Macedonians. And so it goes on. And then the Macedonians get defeated by the Thebans. And then the Thebans in turn get defeated by the Macedonians. And so it goes on. And then the Macedonians get defeated by the Romans. This idea that greatness is a kind of treacherous thing for people to win. So it's like Kipling's poem, Recessional, that you did at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee or whatever it was. One with Nineveh and Tyre. One with Nineveh and Tyre. Yeah, it's the same idea. But the joy of Herodotus, though, Tom, is that it's not just that, isn't it? It's that, I mean, it's all the things you've talked about.

It's the tangents and the mad stuff and the travelogues and the weird characters and the folk tales and the legends that he can never contain himself to the story, but just kind of disappears off down various rabbit holes. Not unlike the rest is history, it has to be said. So do you have particular favorites? My favorite story is a story that I was told years ago by the guy who taught me Latin. And he was a very good drawer, illustrator. And it's back when there were blackboards and he had chalk. And he told the story of a man called Hippocleides, who was a suitor for the hand of the daughter of a very rich and powerful

tyrant, a kind of single ruler of a city. And because the daughter was so eligible, suitors had come from across the Greek world. So it was a bit like people coming to win Helen in the story of the Trojan War. They'd all gathered there. And Hippocles was, you know, he's doing tremendously well. He's basically out in the lead. So the tyrant, the father of the daughter is, he's requiring them to wrestle, to run, to fight, to read poetry, to do all the kinds of things that an eligible Greek bachelor should be able to do. And then at the end, he's about to announce that Hippocrates has won and he hosts a great

banquet. And Hippocles is so excited and happy that he gets incredibly pissed and starts to dance on the table. And this is very infradig. And the tyrant says, what are you doing? And Hippocles says, I'm having a great time. Then he starts to dance on his hands and kind of wiggle his ears and shake his legs in the air. And the tyrant says, the way you're going, you're going to lose my daughter. You know, your bride is at risk. And Hippocrates says, and I paraphrase, Hippocrates couldn't give a toss, couldn't care less. And the tyrant says, you have danced away my daughter.

And Hippocrates just kind of collapses in a happy, drunken heap. And it just tells the story so well that it's, I think it's the earliest story that you can read and actually smile. It's funny. The first funny story in history. The first funny story in history. I mean, presumably, you know, there are stories that were funny to whoever told them, but the humor doesn't translate.

But I always remember the kind of wonderful drawing on the blackboard that the teacher did of Hippocrates dancing on his hands and wagging his ears and losing his girl. And it's full of stories like that. Equally, there are incredibly dark stories. So there's a terrifying story about a boy who gets kidnapped by a slave dealer, gets castrated, gets sold to the Persian king. He rises to become a powerful figure in the Persian court, comes back and inflicts the most horrible revenge on the guy who had turned him into a eunuch and sold him into slavery. What does he do? Don't leave us hanging, Tom. No, I'm going to leave it hanging. You can read it in my Penguin Classics translation of Herodotus. I was just about to say, that is brilliant salesmanship.

Because if you want to find out the end of that story, Tom's translation of Herodotus, an acclaimed translation, it pains me to say, hugely acclaimed, Tom. Well done, I say very grudgingly. And I say that grudgingly not because I'm a mean-spirited person, but because I've got to do another bit of salesmanship now uh because all of this tom is in aid of your children's book the wolf girl the greeks and the gods it's not all in aid of it you i've been wanting to do herodotus you know ever since we started you have to be fair now tell us so you decided to basically set yourself up as

a rival to herodotus because you're writing about the same period you are toying with herodotus aren't you a little bit he's the father of history this book is called the histories but uh your book as you have told our rest is history club members already ends with a feminist joke yeah her story because from a girl's perspective isn't it and did you do that deliberately because herodotus is it's from a girl's perspective, isn't it? And did you do that deliberately? Because Herodotus is obviously a man's perspective on history. I did it because, and again, I told the members of the club this, so they'll have heard this story before, that when I went to Greece to write Persian Fire,

my daughters were very young. So my older daughter, I think, was five at the time. So I had to try and make her interested in all this stuff about battles and archaeological ruins and things, not always the easiest thing. And Gorgo was the only young girl to feature in Herodotus. And so I made her the centre of the narratives and a bit like Flashman pops up in all the key events in Victorian history, Gorgo in my version popped up in all the battles and meets all the most significant people.

And so the book, The Wolf Girl, The Greeks and the Gods, A Tale of the Persian Wars, is Gorgo is the narrator for that reason. Just to end with, not you, but Herodotus. Do you think, so is Herodotus still, is he the greatest historian? I mean, the father of history, but is he the best still, Tom, after all these years? Most readable, most fun? I think he's definitely the most readable. I think he's the most entertaining. And I think because he, you know, as to repeat Schopenhauer's aperçu that all of history is contained within his work, by that measure, he must be considered the greatest.

There you go. The number one historian, Herodotus, and the number two, Tom Holland, together in one podcast at last, and where I rank, God knows. So on that note- Well, you're Herodotian as well. Oh, thank you, Tom. Because Herodotus is interested in the full sweep of human experience. And that's what your books are. You give the high politics, but you also give space hoppers. Yeah, exactly. I just would have loved Angel Delight and space hoppers. Would, exactly. I would have loved angel delight and space hoppers. Would he?

I don't think either of us are Thucydidean. No. That's the kind of polarity, high politics, mad stuff about ants. And I think this is very much on the side of mad ants. And I think this podcast is as well. I think it's our Roderick Ian podcast.

Herodotus would have enjoyed the episode about pigeons, wouldn't he? Or the disastrous parties or any of the other. Best dogs. Yes. He'd have loved the Costa Rican civil war. Right. He absolutely would.

I'm merely repeating what I've been told. Yeah, exactly. Right. On that note, we will return to Greece in a little while with the birth of democracy in Athens. But of course, we've got much more than Greece to come. We have things like the American War of Independence coming in July. We've got loads of fun things, rather like Herodotus,

ranging widely and credulously and credulously across the world. That's what the rest of history specializes in. So on that note, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. That's just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.