Travels with Herodotus Read online

  He is profoundly intrigued by this subject; indeed he is preoccupied, absorbed, insatiable. We can imagine a man like him possessed by an idea that gives him no peace. Activated, unable to sit still, moving constantly from one place to another. Wherever he appears there is an atmosphere of agitation and anxiety. People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards—and they are always and everywhere in the majority—treat Herodotus’s sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even.

  Could it be that Herodotus is regarded in just this way by his contemporaries? He says nothing about this himself. Did he even pay attention to such things? He was occupied with his travels, with the preparations for them and then with the selection and organization of the materials he brought home. A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

  We do not know in what guise Herodotus traveled. As a merchant (the proverbial occupation of people of the Levant)? Probably not, since he had no interest in prices, goods, markets. As a diplomat? That profession did not exist yet. As a spy? But for which state? As a tourist? No, tourists travel to rest, whereas Herodotus works hard on the road—he is a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian. And he is at the same time a typical wanderer, or, as others like him will later be called in medieval Europe, a pilgrim. But this wandering of his is no picaresque, carefree passage from one place to another. Herodotus’s journeys are purposeful—they are the means by which he hopes to learn about the world and its inhabitants, to gather the knowledge he will feel compelled, later, to describe. Above all, what he hopes to describe are the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks.

  That is his original intent. But with each new expedition the world expands on him, multiplies, assumes enormous proportions. It turns out that beyond Egypt there is still Libya, and beyond that the land of the Ethiopians, in other words, Africa; that to the East, after traversing the expanses of Persia (which requires more than three months of rapid walking), one arrives at the towering and inaccessible Babylon, and beyond that at the homeland of the Indians, the outer boundaries of which lie who knows where; that to the West the Mediterranean Sea stretches far indeed, to Abyla and the Pillars of Herakles, and beyond that, they say, there is still another sea; and there are also seas and steppes to the north, and forests inhabited by countless Scythian peoples.

  Anaximander of Miletus (a beautiful city in Asia Minor), who predated Herodotus, created the first map of the world. According to him, the earth is shaped like a cylinder. People live on its upper surface. It is surrounded by the heavens and floats suspended in the air, at an equal distance from all the heavenly bodies. Various other maps come into being in that epoch. Most frequently, the earth is represented as a flat, oval shield surrounded on all sides by the waters of the great river Oceanus. Oceanus not only bounds all the world, but also feeds all the earth’s other rivers.

  The center of this world was the Aegean Sea, its shores and islands. Herodotus organizes his expeditions from there. The further he moves toward the ends of the earth, the more frequently he encounters something new. He is the first to discover the world’s multicultural nature. The first to argue that each culture requires acceptance and understanding, and that to understand it, one must first come to know it. How do cultures differ from one another? Above all in their customs. Tell me how you dress, how you act, what are your habits, which gods you honor—and I will tell you who you are. Man not only creates culture, inhabits it, he carries it around within him—man is culture.

  • • •

  Herodotus, who knows a lot about the world, nevertheless does not know everything about it. He never heard of China or Japan, did not know of Australia or Oceania, had no inkling of the existence, much less of the great flowering, of the Americas. If truth be told, he knew little of note about western and northern Europe. Herodotus’s world is Mediterranean-Near Eastern; it is a sunny world of seas and lakes, tall mountains and green valleys, olives and wine, lambs and fields of grain—a bright Arcadia which every few years overflows with blood.

  THE HAPPINESS AND

  UNHAPPINESS OF CROESUS

  Seeking an answer to the question most important to him, namely, where did the conflict between East and West originate, and why does this hostility exist, Herodotus proceeds with great caution. He does not lay claim to understanding. On the contrary, he keeps to the shadows and has others do the talking. The others are, in this case, the learned Persians. These learned Persians, Herodotus says, maintain that the instigators of the worldwide East-West conflict are neither the Greeks nor the Persians, but a third people, the Phoenicians, peripatetic merchants. It was they who first began the business of kidnapping women, which in turn triggered this global storm.

  Indeed, the Phoenicians kidnap in the Greek port of Argos a king’s daughter called Io and take her by ship to Egypt. Later, several Greeks land in the Phoenician city of Tyre and abduct Europa, the daughter of its king. Still other Greeks kidnap from the king of Colchis his daughter, Medea. Paris of Troy, in turn, seizes Helen, wife of the Greek king Menelaus, and carries her off to Troy. In revenge, the Greeks invade Troy. A great war breaks out, whose history is immortalized by Homer.

  Herodotus paraphrases the commentary of Persian wise men: Although the Persians regard the abduction of women as a criminal act, they also claim that it is stupid to get worked up about it and to seek revenge for the women once they have been abducted; the sensible course, they say, is to pay no attention to it, because it is obvious that the women must have been willing participants in their own abduction, or else it could never have happened. And as proof he cites the case of the Greek princess Io, as the Phoenicians present it: The Phoenicians say that they did not have to resort to kidnapping to take her to Egypt. According to them, she slept with the ship’s captain in Argos, and when she discovered that she was pregnant, she could not face her parents, and therefore sailed away willingly with the Phoenicians, to avoid being found out.

  Why does Herodotus begin his great description of the world with what is, according to the Persian sages, a trivial matter of tit-for-tat kidnappings of young women? Because he respects the laws of the narrative marketplace: to sell well, a story must be interesting, must contain of bit of spice, something sensational, something to send a shiver up one’s spine. Accounts of the abductions of women satisfy these requirements.

  Herodotus lived at the juncture of two epochs: although the era of written history was beginning, the oral tradition still predominated. It is possible, therefore, that the rhythm of Herodotus’s life and work was as follows: he made a long journey, and upon his return traveled to various Greek cities and organized something akin to literary evenings, in the course of which he recounted the experiences, impressions, and observations he had gathered during his peregrinations. It is entirely likely that he made his living from such gatherings, and that he also financed his subsequent trips in this way, and so it was important to him to have the largest auditorium possible, to draw a crowd. It would be to his advantage, therefore, to begin with something that would rivet attention, arouse curiosity—something a tad sensational. Story plots meant to move, amaze, astonish pop up throughout his entire opus; without such stimuli, his audience would have dispersed early, bored, leaving him with an empty purse.

  But the accounts of the abductions of women weren’t merely cheap sensationalism, provocative and piquant story lines. Here already, at the very start of his investigations, Herodotus tries to formulate his first law of history. His ambition here stems from his having gathered on his journeys an abundance of material from various epochs and places and wanting to determine and de
fine some principle of order to impose upon this seemingly chaotic and unsorted collection of facts. Is it even possible to arrive at such a principle? Yes, Herodotus replied. That principle is the answer to the question “who … first undertook criminal acts of aggression.” Having this question as to precedence in mind makes it easier to negotiate the tangled and intricate twists and turns of history, to explain to ourselves what forces and events set it in motion.

  The defining of this principle, the awareness of it, is hugely significant, because in Herodotus’s world (as well as in various societies today), the eternal law of revenge, the law of reprisal, of an eye for an eye, was (and remains) alive and well. Revenge is not only a right—it is a most sacred obligation. Whoever does not fulfill this charge will be cursed by his family, his clan, his society. The necessity of seeking retribution weighs not only on me, the member of the wronged tribe. The gods, too, must submit to its imperatives, and so too must even impersonal and timeless Fate.

  What function does vengeance serve? Fear of it, dread in the face of its inescapability, should be enough to stop anyone from committing a dishonorable act that is damaging to another. It should function as a brake, a restraining voice of reason. If, however, it turns out to be an ineffectual deterrent, and someone commits an offense, the perpetrator will be seen to have set into motion a chain of retribution that can stretch for generations, for centuries even.

  There is a kind of dreary fatalism in the mechanism of revenge. Something inevitable and irreversible. Misfortune suddenly be falls you and you cannot fathom why. What happened? Simply this: that you have been revenged upon for crimes perpetrated ten generations ago by a forefather whose existence you weren’t even aware of.

  The second law of Herodotus, pertaining not only to history but also to human life, is that human happiness never remains long in the same place. And our Greek proves this theorem by describing the dramatic, affecting fortunes of the king of the Lydians, Croesus, whose story resembles that of the biblical Job, for whom Croesus was perhaps the prototype.

  Lydia, his kingdom, was a powerful Asiatic state situated between Greece and Persia. Croesus accumulated great riches in his palaces, entire mountains of gold and silver for which he was renowned in the world and which he willingly displayed to visitors. This show took place in the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., several decades before the birth of Herodotus.

  The capital of Lydia, Sardis, was visited on occasion by every learned Greek who was alive at the time, including Solon of Athens (he was a poet, a creator of Athenian democracy, and famed for his wisdom). Croesus personally received Solon and ordered his servants to show him his treasures, and, certain that the sight of them astonished his guest, he queried him: “So I really want to ask you whether you have ever come across anyone who is happier than everyone else?”

  In asking this question, he was expecting to be named as the happiest of all men.

  But Solon did not flatter him in the least and instead cited as the happiest of men several heroically fallen Athenians, adding: “Croesus, when you asked me about men and their affairs, you were putting your question to someone who is well aware of how utterly jealous the divine is, and how it is likely to confound us. Anyone who lives for a long time is bound to see and endure many things he would rather avoid. I place the limit of a man’s life at seventy years. Seventy years makes 25,200 days … No two days bring events which are exactly the same. It follows, Croesus, that human life is entirely a matter of chance….

  “Now, I can see that you are extremely rich and that you rule over large numbers of people, but I won’t be in a position to say what you’re asking me to say about you until I find out that you died well…. Until [a man] is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.

  “… It is necessary to consider the end of anything … and to see how it will turn out, because the god often offers prosperity to men, but then destroys them utterly and completely.”

  And in fact, after Solon’s departure, the punishment of the gods descended brutally upon Croesus, in all likelihood precisely because he thought himself the happiest man on earth. Croesus had two sons—the strapping Atys and another, who was deaf and dumb. Atys was the apple of his father’s eye, protected and watched over. And yet, despite this, not on purpose but purely by accident, a guest of Croesus, one Adrastus, killed him during a hunt. When Adrastus realized what he had done, he broke down. During Atys’s funeral, he waited until everyone had left and it grew quiet around the tomb, and then, realizing that there was no one in his experience who bore a heavier burden of misfortune than himself, he took his own life at the graveside.

  After his son’s death, Croesus lives for two years in profound grief. During this time, the great Cyrus comes to power in neighboring Persia, and under him the might of the Persians increases rapidly. Croesus is worried that if Cyrus’s nation continues to gather strength it could one day threaten Lydia, and so he hatches a plan for a preemptive strike.

  It is the custom at the time for the wealthy and powerful to consult an oracle before making important decisions. Greece abounds in these oracles, but the most important resides in a temple on a towering mountainside—in Delphi. In order to obtain a favorable prophecy from the oracle, one must propitiate the Delphic deity with gifts. Croesus, therefore, orders a gigantic collection of offerings. Three thousand cattle are to be killed, heavy bars of gold melted, countless objects forged out of silver. He commands that a huge fire be lit, on which he burns in sacrifice gold and silver couches, purple cloaks and tunics. He also told all the Lydians that every one of them was to sacrifice whatever he could. We can imagine the numerous and humbly obedient Lydian people as they make their way along the roads to where the great pyre is burning and throw into the flames what until now was most precious to them—gold jewelry, all manner of sacral and domestic vessels, holiday vestments, even favorite everyday attire.

  The opinions which the oracle delivers are typically pronouncements of cautious ambiguity and intentional murkiness. They are texts so composed as to allow the oracle, in the event that things turned out otherwise (which occurred often), to retreat adroitly from the whole affair and save face. And yet so undiminished and indestructible is the force of the desire to have the veil lifted on tomorrow that people, with a stubbornness lasting thousands of years already, still listen greedily and with flushed cheeks to the utterances of soothsayers. Croesus, as one can see, was also in that desire’s thrall. Impatiently he awaited the return of the envoys he had sent to the various Greek oracles. The answer of the Delphic oracle was: If you set out against the Persians, you will destroy a great state. And Croesus, who desired this war, blinded by the lust of aggression, interpreted the prediction to mean: If you set out against Persia, you will destroy it. Persia, after all—and in this Croesus was correct—was truly a great state.

  So he attacked, but he lost the war, and as a result—and in accordance with the prophecy—annihilated his own great state and was himself enslaved. The Persians took their prisoner to Cyrus, who built a huge funeral pyre and made Croesus (who was tied up) and fourteen Lydian boys climb up to the top. Perhaps he intended them to be a victory-offering for some god or other, or perhaps he wanted to fulfil a vow he had made, or perhaps he had heard that Croesus was a god-fearing man and he made him get up on to the pyre because he wanted to see if any immortal would rescue him from being burnt alive …. Although Croesus’s situation up on top of the pyre was desperate, his mind turned to Solon’s saying that no one who is still alive is happy, and it occurred to him how divinely inspired Solon had been to say that. This thought made him sigh and groan, and he broke a long silence by repeating the name “Solon” three times.

  Now, at the request of Cyrus, who is standing near the pyre, the interpreters ask Croesus whom he is calling and what does it mean. Croesus answers, but as he is telling the story, the pyre, which has already been lit, starts to burn in earnest at its farthest edges. Cyrus, moved by pity
but also fearing retribution, reverses his decision and orders the fire extinguished as quickly as possible and Croesus and the boys accompanying him brought down. But all attempts to control the blaze fail.

  Croesus realized that Cyrus had changed his mind. When he saw that it was too late for them to control the fire, despite everyone’s efforts to quench it, he called on Apollo …. Weeping, he called on the god, and suddenly the clear, calm weather was replaced by gathering clouds; a storm broke, rain lashed down, and the pyre was extinguished.

  … Once [Cyrus] had got Croesus down from the pyre he asked him who had persuaded him to invade his country and be his enemy rather than his friend. “My lord,” Croesus replied, “it was my doing. You have gained and I have lost from it. But responsibility lies with the god of the Greeks who encouraged me to make war on you. After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose the god must have wanted this to happen.”…

  Cyrus untied him and had him seated near by. He was very impressed with him, and he and his whole entourage admired the man’s demeanour. But Croesus was silent, deep in thought.