Travels with Herodotus Page 20

  When they hear of the Persians’ approach, they initially give the news no credence, but finally accept the information and, spurred on by Themistocles, prepare themselves for combat.

  The battle begins at dawn, so that Xerxes, sitting on a throne at the foot of the mountains which lie opposite Salamis and are called the Aegaleos, can observe it. Whenever anything went well for his side, he asked who the captain of the ship in question was, and his scribes wrote down the name of the man, his father, and the town he came from. Xerxes, confident of victory, wants to be able to reward his heroes later.

  Faithful descriptions of battles which can be found in the literature of every epoch have one thing in common: they paint a picture of tremendous chaos, monstrous confusion, spectacular disorder. Even the most carefully orchestrated engagement in the moment of frontal collision descends into a bloody, quivering vortex, in which it is difficult to get one’s bearings let alone to gain control. There are those hell-bent on killing others, and those looking for a means to slip away, or at the very least to duck the blows, and everything is overlaid with shouts, moans, and yelps, amidst turmoil and smoke.

  So it was at Salamis. Whereas in the combat between two individuals one may discern agility, even grace, the collision in tight quarters of two fleets consisting of wooden ships and propelled by thousands of oars must have resembled a great bucket into which someone has thrown hundreds of sluggishly creeping, clumsily clambering, and chaotically entangled crabs. One ship rammed another, one listed on its side, another sank to the bottom with its entire crew, yet another attempted retreat, somewhere else several struggled against one another, permanently locked together it would have seemed, somewhere else a ship was trying to turn around, another was attempting to slip out of the bay, and in the general confusion Greeks fell upon Greeks, Persians upon Persians, until at last, after hours of this maritime hell, the Persians gave up and those of them who were left—those not drowned or otherwise killed—escaped.

  Xerxes’ first reaction to the defeat is fear. The first thing he undertakes is to send his children to Ephesus (some illegitimate children of his had come along on the expedition). He gives them as a guardian Hermotimus, a high-ranking court eunuch who was born in Pedasa.

  Herodotus is very interested in this man’s fate and writes about it in detail: No one we know of has ever exacted a more total retribution for a wrong done to him than Hermotimus. He was taken prisoner in a war, put up for sale, and bought by a man from Chios called Panionius. Now, Panionius made a living in the most atrocious way imaginable. What he used to do was acquire good-looking boys, castrate them, and take them to Sardis and Ephesus, where he would offer them for sale at very high prices; in foreign countries eunuchs command higher prices than whole men on account of their complete reliability. One of Panionius’ victims—one among a great many, because this was the way he made a living—was Hermotimus. In fact, however, Hermotimus’ luck was not all bad: he was sent from Sardis to Xerxes’ court as one of a number of gifts, and eventually became the king’s most valued eunuch.

  Now, when Xerxes was in Sardis, in the course of setting out with his army against Athens, Hermotimus went down on some business or other to the part of Mysia called Atarneus, where people from Chios live, and he met Panionius there. He entered into a long, friendly conversation with him, first listing all the benefits that had come his way thanks to Panionius, and then offering to do as much good to him in return; all he had to do, he said, was move his family to Atarneus and live there. Panionius gladly accepted Hermotimus’ offer and moved his wife and children there. So when Hermotimus had Panionius and his whole family where he wanted, he said, “Panionius, there is no one in the world who makes a living in as foul a way as you do. What harm did I or any of my family do to you or any of yours? Why did you make me a nothing instead of a man? You expected the gods not to notice what you used to do in those days, but the law they follow is one of justice, and for your crimes they have delivered you into my hands. As a result, then, you should have no grounds for complaint about the payment I am going to extract from you.” When he had finished this rebuke, he had Panionius’ sons brought into the room and proceeded to force him to castrate all four of them. The deed was done, under compulsion, and afterwards Hermotimus forced the sons to castrate their father. And that is how vengeance and Hermotimus caught up with Panionius.

  Crime and punishment, injustice and revenge—one always follows the other, sooner or later. As it is in relations between individuals, so it is between nations. Whoever first starts a war, and therefore, in Herodotus’s opinion, commits a crime, will be revenged upon and punished, be it immediately or after the passage of time. This relation, this inexorable pairing, is the very essence of fate, the meaning of irreversible destiny.

  Panionius experienced it, and now it was Xerxes’ turn. In the case of the King of Kings, the matter is more complicated, because he is also the symbol of the nation and of the empire. The Persians in Susa, having learned about the annihilation of the fleet at Salamis, do not rend their garments; rather, they tremble for the fate of their king and hope that nothing untoward happens to him. Which is why, when he finally does return to Persia, his homecoming is a grand and magnificent occasion—the people are happy, relieved. Who cares about the thousands of dead and drowned, about the shattered ships—what matters most is that the king is alive and that he is once again with us!

  Xerxes escapes from Greece, but leaves part of his army there. As its commander he designates his cousin, Darius’s nephew—Mardonius.

  Mardonius begins cautiously. First, without hurrying, he calmly winters in Thessaly. Then he sends a special messenger to the various oracles, to learn their prophecies. Guided by these, he sent a Macedonian, Alexander …, off to Athens with a message. One reason he chose Alexander for this mission was because Alexander had family ties with Persia … He considered Alexander his best bet for winning over the Athenians, which he wanted to do because he had apparently heard that they were a populous and warlike race, and he was aware that the defeat the Persians had met at sea was due mainly to them. With the Athenians on his side, Mardonius was sure—an entirely justified confidence—that he would have no difficulty in gaining control of the sea, while he already had a considerable advantage on land, as far as he could see. So this was his plan for overcoming the Greeks.

  Alexander arrives in Athens and tries to convince its inhabitants that they should not wage war against the Persians but instead should enter into an agreement with them, for otherwise they will perish, seeing as how the king has incredible power at his command and a very long reach.

  The Athenians nevertheless reply as follows: “In actual fact, we were already aware of the disparity between the resources at our disposal and Xerxes’ enormous power, so there was no need for your pointed reminder. Nevertheless, we are so focused on freedom that we will fight for it however we can…. Go and take this message from the Athenians to Mardonius: as long as the sun keeps to its present course, we will never come to terms with Xerxes. On the contrary, we will take to the field and fight against him, confident of the support of the gods and heroes for whom he felt such utter contempt that he burnt their homes and statues.”

  And to the Spartans, who had arrived in Athens fearing that the city would come to terms with the Persians, they said this: “You are perfectly well aware of the Athenian temperament. You should have known that there isn’t enough gold on earth, or any land of such outstanding beauty and fertility, that we would accept it in return for collaborating with the enemy and enslaving Greece…. So if you didn’t know it before, we can assure you that so long as even a single Athenian remains alive, we will never come to terms with Xerxes.”

  After hearing these words, Alexander and the Spartans departed from Athens.

  TIME VANISHES

  This was no longer Addis Ababa but Dar es-Salaam, a city on a bay that had been sculpted into such a perfect semicircle that it seemed like one of hundreds of gentle Greek cove
s—this one somehow transported here, to the eastern shore of Africa. The sea was always calm; slow little waves, creating a quiet, rhythmic splash, sank without a trace into the warm sand of the shore.

  Although the city numbered no more than two hundred thousand, it seemed now as if half the world had converged upon it and was calling it home. Its name alone, Dar es-Salaam, which in Arabic means “House of Peace,” spoke of its ties to the Middle East (infamous ties, to be sure, because Arabs shipped out African slaves through here). The center of town was occupied largely by Indians and Pakistanis, with all the permutations of language and faith their civilization has produced: Among them were Sikhs, followers of the Aga Khan, Muslims, and Catholics from Goa. There were colonies of immigrants from the Indian Ocean islands—from the Seychelles and the Comoros, Madagascar and Mauritius—an attractive, even beautiful group that came into being from the mingling of various peoples of the South. And there were the more recently arrived Chinese, who had come here to build the Tanzania-Zambia railroad.

  Encountering for the first time such a diversity of peoples and cultures as were in evidence in Dar es-Salaam of the 1960s, the European was struck not so much by the realization that all manner of other worlds existed beyond Europe’s boundaries—he had been aware of this, at least theoretically, for quite some time—but above all by the fact that these worlds met, mixed, and coexisted without the mediation and, to some degree, without the knowledge and consent of Europe. For many centuries, Europe was the center of the world in such a literal and obvious way that it now dawned upon the European with difficulty that, without him and beyond him, other peoples and civilizations carried on with their respective traditions and their distinct problems. It was moreover he who was the newcomer here, the foreigner, and his universe but a distant and abstract reality.

  The first to realize the world’s essential multiplicity was Herodotus. “We are not alone,” he tells Greeks in his opus, and to prove this he undertakes his journeys to the ends of the earth. “We have neighbors, they in turn have their neighbors, and all together we populate a single planet.”

  For a human being who until then had lived within the confines of a small homeland whose territory he could easily cover on foot, this unprecedented, planetary survey was an awakening, one that transformed his understanding, imparting to it hitherto unknown dimensions, an entirely new scale of values.

  Traveling and encountering various tribes and peoples, Herodotus observes and records that each of them has its own history, which unfolds independently from yet parallel to other histories—in other words, that far from being one story, human history in its aggregate resembles a great cauldron whose perpetually simmering surface sees incessant collisions of innumerable particles, each moving in their own orbits, along trajectories that intersect at an infinite number of points.

  Herodotus discovers something else as well, namely, the multiformity of time, or, more precisely, the multiplicity of methods of measuring it. For in the old days, peasants calculated time by the seasons of the year, city dwellers by generations, the chroniclers of ancient states by the length of the ruling dynasties. How does one compare these measurements, how does one find a means of conversion or a common denominator? Herodotus wrestles with this issue constantly, searches for solutions. Accustomed to an exacting mechanical measurement, we do not realize what a problem the computation of time once presented, how much difficulty lurked therein, how many riddles and mysteries.

  At times, when I had a free afternoon or evening, I would drive in my beat-up green Land Rover to the Sea View Hotel, where one could sit on the verandah, order a beer or some tea, listen to the sigh of the sea or, beginning at dusk, to the chirping of the cicadas. It was one of Dar es-Salaam’s most popular meeting places, and colleagues from other agencies or publications would often drop by. During the day, we all cruised about town, trying to find things out. There was not much happening in this remote, provincial city, and to collect any information at all we had to cooperate, not compete. One of us had a better ear than others, one a better eye, another more journalistic luck. Every now and then—in the street, in one of the air-conditioned cafés, or here at the Sea View Hotel—the exchange of loot took place. Someone had heard that there had been a coup against Mobutu; others dismissed this as gossip—and how could one verify it, anyway? From such rumors, whispers, conjectures—and facts, too—we cobbled together our reports and sent them back home.

  Sometimes no one appeared on the verandah, and if I happened to have Herodotus with me, I would open the book at random. The Histories is full of stories, digressions, observations, hearsay. The population of Thrace is the largest in the world, after the Indians, of course. If they were ruled by a single person or had a common purpose, they would be invincible and would be by far the most powerful nation in the world, in my opinion. This is completely impossible for them, however—there is no way that it will ever happen—and that is why they are weak …. They have the practice of selling their children for export abroad. They do not restrict the behaviour of their young women, but let them have sex with any men they want; however, they keep a very strict eye on their wives. They buy their wives from the woman’s parents for a great deal of money. Being tattooed is taken by them to be a sign of high birth, while it is a sign of low birth to be without tattoos. They consider it best not to work, and working the land is regarded as the most dishonourable profession. The best way to make a living, in their judgement, is off the spoils of war. These are their most remarkable customs.

  I raise my eyes and notice that in the colorfully illuminated garden a white-clad waiter—a Hindu called Anil—is feeding a banana to a tame monkey hanging from the branches of a mango tree. The animal is making comical faces, and Anil is roaring with laughter. The waiter, the evening, the warmth, the cicadas, the banana, and the tea, all remind me of India, of my days of fascination and confusion; both here and there, the tropics penetrate with the same intensity every fiber of one’s being. It even seems to me that the scents of India are reaching me here, but it’s just the aroma of Anil, with his betel, anise, and bergamot. And India, in a sense, is all around—one keeps seeing Hindu temples, restaurants, sisal and cotton plantations.

  I return to Herodotus.

  The frequent reading of his work and even a certain kind of intimacy with it—a familiarity, a habit, a dependence, even—started to exert an odd indefinable influence on me. What is certain is that I was no longer conscious of a barrier of time, of being separated from the events the Greek describes by two and a half thousand years—a veritable abyss in which lie Rome and the Middle Ages, the birth and development of the Great Religions, the discovery of America, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the steam engine and electricity, the telegraph and the airplane, hundreds of wars, including two world wars, the discovery of antibiotics, the population explosion, thousands upon thousands of things and events which, when we read Herodotus, vanish as if they didn’t exist, or at least recede into the background, moving from the fore into the shadows.

  Could Herodotus, who was born, lived, and worked on the other side of this chronological chasm, feel impoverished as a result? We can make no reasoned inference that he did, and he gives no indication. On the contrary: he lives fully, explores the whole world, meets numerous people, listens to hundreds of tales; he is an active, energetic, and tireless man, constantly searching, constantly busy with something. He would like to learn about many more things, issues, mysteries, solve many more riddles, find the answers to a long litany of questions, but he simply does not have time enough—enough time or strength. He simply cannot manage it all, just as we cannot manage it all—man’s life is so brief! Is he bothered that there are no high-speed trains or planes yet, or even bicycles? One can reasonably doubt that. If he had a train or plane at his disposal, would he have gathered and left us even more information? One should doubt that as well.

  I have the impression that Herodotus’s problem was altogether different: He decides, prob
ably toward the end of his life, to write a book because he realizes that he has amassed such an enormous trove of stories and facts that unless he preserves them, they will simply vanish. His book is yet another expression of man’s struggle against time, against the fragility of memory, its ephemerality, its perpetual tendency to erase itself and disappear. The concept of the book, any book, arose from just this battle. The written word has a durability, one would even like to say “eternality.” Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn’t write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is why it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them. That is how it is and always will be. Engendering this reality is the impression of writing as an easy and simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann’s observation that “a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.”

  As a result of Herodotus’s desire to preserve for others as much as possible of what he has found out and lived through, his book is not a simple recording of the histories of dynasties, kings, and palace intrigues—though he does write a great deal about rulers and power, he tells us also about the life of simple people, about their religious beliefs and agricultural practices, about illnesses and natural disasters, about mountains and rivers, plants and animals. For example—about cats: If a house catches fire, what happens to the cats is quite extraordinary. The Egyptians do not bother to try to put the fire out, but position themselves at intervals around the house and look out for the cats. The cats slip between them, however, and even jump over them, and dash into the fire. This plunges the Egyptians into deep grief. In households where a cat dies a natural death, all the people living there shave off their eyebrows—nothing more. In households where a dog dies, they shave their whole bodies, head and all.