Histories (Herodotus)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus opens with a declaration of purpose: to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time. That sentence, written in the 5th century BC, is itself an act of historical defiance. The man who wrote it had traveled the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, walking through Egypt, climbing into Scythia, crossing into Persia, and returning home with a book that Western civilization would argue over for more than two thousand years.

  Herodotus set out to answer a single, burning question: why did the Greeks and the non-Greeks go to war with each other? The answer sprawled across nine books, named after the nine Muses, covering the rise of the Persian Empire, the customs of dozens of peoples, stories of kings and oracles and dolphin-riding harpists, and the climactic clash of two civilizations at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis. No one had ever written anything quite like it before. The question that remains is whether Herodotus was a rigorous chronicler, a gifted fabulist, or something altogether harder to define.

• 2. A World in Nine Books

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  Book One, named after the Muse Clio, opens not with a war but with a kidnapping, the abduction of Io, Europa, and Medea, and marks the Trojan War itself as merely a precursor to later conflicts between Asia and Europe. From there, Herodotus moves to Lydia, where the king Candaules compels his bodyguard Gyges to view the naked body of his wife. When she discovers the intrusion, she forces Gyges to choose between his own death and murdering the king. Gyges kills Candaules and takes the kingdom.

  That pattern, hubris followed by catastrophic consequence, runs through all nine books. Croesus consults the Oracle at Delphi, which tells him that if he attacks the Persians, a great empire will fall. He attacks. The empire that falls is his own. Xerxes, planning his invasion of Greece, receives a dream-phantom that frightens him and his counselor Artabanus into choosing war. He marches west with a force that Herodotus himself put at approximately 5,283,220 strong, a figure that modern scholars regard as fantastically exaggerated.

  The war books, from Book Six onward, contain some of the most celebrated passages in ancient literature. At Marathon, the Athenians win despite facing a vastly larger Persian force. At Thermopylae, the Spartan king Leonidas holds the pass for three days with a small Greek force of approximately 7,000, until the local guide Ephialtes of Trachis reveals a secret mountain path. After the Greek defeat, Xerxes orders Leonidas's head removed and his torso fixed to a cross. At Salamis, the Greeks prevail because of better organization and a practical advantage: more of them could swim.

  Book Nine closes not with triumph but with cruelty. Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, orders the mutilation of the wife of Masistes. Masistes himself dies after his intent to rebel becomes known. The final image of the Persian Wars in the Histories is neither glory nor peace but the brutality of power consuming itself.

• 3. The Man and His Method

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  Herodotus claims to have traveled extensively, conducting interviews and collecting stories across territories of the Persian Empire. He never pretended to offer a purely objective record. At the opening of the Histories, he announces that the purpose is to prevent great achievements, both Greek and non-Greek, from being forgotten, and to explain the causes of the conflict between them. That framing is already a choice, already a point of view.

  His predecessor Hecataeus of Miletus had attempted something similar, declaring in the opening of his own Genealogies that the stories told by the Greeks were various and in his opinion absurd. One modern scholar called Hecataeus's work a curious false start to history, because despite his critical spirit, he never fully separated history from myth. Herodotus knew Hecataeus's work and on at least one occasion mocked him for naive genealogy. Yet Porphyry, writing later and quoted by Eusebius, claimed that Herodotus may have borrowed extensively from Hecataeus, possibly copying his descriptions of the crocodile, hippopotamus, and phoenix from Hecataeus's Circumnavigation of the Known World, and misrepresenting the source as the Heliopolitans.

  What Herodotus added, and what Hecataeus had not, was scale. He embedded Greek events within the larger frame of oriental history, listening for oral traditions and folk-tale motifs alongside hard geographic fact. Historian Barry S. Strauss has called him a philosopher with three great themes: the struggle between East and West, the power of liberty, and the rise and fall of empires. The scholar John Herington described Herodotus as a centaur, with the urbane and responsible classical historian as the human forepart, and something out of the faraway mountains, out of an older, freer and wilder realm where our conventions have no force, as the body joined to it.

• 4. Cause, Fate, and the Gods

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  Herodotus attributes the causes of events to both human and divine agents, and he sees no contradiction between the two. The framework traces back to Homer, who opened the Iliad by asking who set the heroes at each other's throats. Herodotus opens with the same logic: who is responsible, and why?

  For Herodotus, gratitude and revenge are the fundamental human motives, and they drive the narrative as much as any political calculation. Some readers have taken this focus on personal motive as a sign that Herodotus could not perceive broader, more abstract causes. The scholar John Gould argued the opposite: that Herodotus was trying to explain events in the rational terms his contemporaries would have recognized, rather than imposing abstract frameworks that would have been foreign to his audience.

  The gods, in the Histories, never appear in person. Yet Herodotus states emphatically, in Book Nine passage 100, that many things prove to me that the gods take part in the affairs of man. The theological logic he offers elsewhere is precise: faulty craftsmanship is the human cause of a house collapsing, but divine will is why the house collapses at the specific moment when you happen to be inside. Human agency produces the structure; divine will determines the timing.

  Some scholars, including Geoffrey de Ste-Croix and Mabel Lang, have argued that Fate, the belief that this is how it had to be, is Herodotus's deepest explanation for events. Gould pushed back, proposing instead that Herodotus's language of inevitability is not a theory of historical necessity. It is the traditional language of a teller of tales whose tale is structured by his awareness of the shape it must have, where the narrative impulse itself, the impulse toward closure and the sense of an ending, is carried backward in time to become explanation.

• 5. Two Thousand Years of Argument

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  Criticism of Herodotus began in his own lifetime. The historian Duris of Samos called him a myth-monger. Cicero wrote in On the Laws that his works were full of fables. Aristotle, Flavius Josephus, and Plutarch all weighed in. The Alexandrian grammarian Harpocration compiled an entire book cataloguing the lies of Herodotus. Lucian of Samosata went furthest, denying Herodotus even a place among the famous dead on the Island of the Blessed in his Verae Historiae.

  The comparison to Thucydides was damaging. Thucydides was praised for truthfulness and reliability, even though, as critics noted, he built directly on foundations Herodotus had laid. Modern scholar Detlev Fehling argued that Herodotus exaggerated the extent of his travels and invented his sources, and that Persian and Egyptian informants in the Histories tell stories that neatly match Greek myths while showing no familiarity with their own traditions. For Fehling, the only credible explanation is fabrication.

  Alan B. Lloyd argued that Herodotus's writing about Egypt is seriously defective and that he was working from inadequate sources. German historian Detlev Fehling questioned whether Herodotus ever traveled up the Nile at all, and concluded that his works are intended as fiction. Dobedeker concurred that much of the content consists of literary devices.

  But archaeology has repeatedly intervened on Herodotus's behalf. He described the city of Gelonus in Scythia as thousands of times larger than Troy; scholars disbelieved this until 1975, when the site was rediscovered and found to be enormous. Excavations of the submerged Egyptian port city of Thonis-Heracleion recovered a type of boat called a baris that Herodotus had described, lending weight to his account. The recovery of the Naucratis stela supported his previously unverified claim that Heracleion was founded during the Egyptian New Kingdom. Cheikh Anta Diop argued that Herodotus always distinguished carefully between what he had seen and what he had been told, a habit that reads, to Diop, as scrupulous and scientific for his time.

• 6. The Ants of India

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  In Book Three, passages 102 to 105, Herodotus reports a species of fox-sized, furry ants living in one of the far eastern Indian provinces of the Persian Empire, in a sandy desert whose sand contains a wealth of fine gold dust. These giant ants, he writes, unearth the gold when digging their mounds and tunnels, and the local people collect the precious dust. He adds, in passage 105, that the ants are said to chase and devour full-grown camels.

  The story was one of the most ridiculed passages in the entire Histories, treated for centuries as pure invention. Then, in the late twentieth century, French ethnologist Michel Peissel traveled to an isolated region of northern Pakistan, the Deosai Plateau in Gilgit-Baltistan province, and interviewed the Minaro tribal people there. He found a species of Himalayan marmot, a type of burrowing squirrel, in ground that is rich in gold dust. The Minaro confirmed that for generations their people had been collecting gold dust that the marmots bring to the surface when digging burrows.

  Peissel proposed that Herodotus, who almost certainly did not speak any Persian and relied heavily on local translators across the multilingual Persian Empire, may have confused the old Persian word for marmot with the word for mountain ant. The camel-devouring detail, and the fox-sized body, remained unexplained. Pliny the Elder would later repeat the gold-ant story in the gold mining section of his Naturalis Historia, treating it as established fact. For any reader who has ever smiled at the absurdity of the passage, the Himalayan marmot of Gilgit-Baltistan offers a partial, unexpected vindication.

• 7. Survival and Legacy

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  The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Histories date from the Byzantine period, specifically the 9th and 10th centuries CE, a gap of roughly fourteen centuries between composition and the earliest copies that still exist. The most important of these is the Codex Laurentianus, catalogued as Plutei 70.03 and dating to the 10th century. A second major manuscript, the Angelicanus, comes from the 11th century. Multiple Vatican manuscripts and copies held at Emmanuel College Library and the Bibliotheque nationale de France round out the tradition.

  Beyond the medieval copies, many early papyri survive, including several in the Oxyrhynchus collection at Oxford. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2099, datable to the early 2nd century CE, preserves a fragment of Book Eight. Still others from the British Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Bavarian State Library cover books ranging from Book One through Book Eight, in fragments as old as the 1st century CE.

  The title our word history derives from the Greek term historia, meaning research or inquiry, the very word Herodotus used for his own project. Strauss notes that the Histories take the reader from the rise of the Persian Empire to its campaign against Greek independence, from the first stirrings of Greek self-defense to the beginnings of the overreach that would eventually turn Athens into a new empire of its own. Modern scholars have called Herodotus variously the father of comparative anthropology, the father of ethnography, and more modern than any other ancient historian in his approach to the ideal of total history. Whether or not one agrees, the Histories remain the primary, and often the only, source for events across the Greek world, the Persian Empire, and the broader region in the two centuries before Herodotus wrote them down.