Herodotus, The Histories

The nine books of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, written in the third quarter of the fifth century BCE, are the earliest surviving work of Greek history, and along the way they preserve more about the Achaemenid world than any other classical text. Their announced subject is the great collision of Greeks and "barbarians", and the growth of the Persian Empire is the backbone on which the whole is strung. But Herodotus was too curious to stay on that thread: around the conquests he hangs long digressions, the logoi, on the lands and peoples the Persians swallowed, so that the Histories are at once a war-narrative, an ethnography, and a geography of the known world. For the empire of Darius and Xerxes they are indispensable, endlessly informative, and to be read with a critical eye, for they are an outsider's report, gathered at second hand from the fringes of a world whose language their author could not read.

The man and the book

Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, a Dorian-Ionian city on the coast of Caria in south-western Asia Minor, then itself a subject-city of the Persian king; the ancient tradition places his life roughly between 484 and 425 BCE. He wrote in the Ionic dialect, in the new prose of "inquiry", and he did not describe his own times: the Histories run down to the Greek capture of Sestos in 479 BCE, but he published in the 420s, a full two generations after the events of Darius's accession that concern this compendium most. Hellenistic scholars later divided the work into the nine books we still use and subdivided those into chapters; Herodotus himself knew no such genre. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica observes, "from a modern point of view it comprises historiographic, ethnographic, geographic, and topographic aspects, also including fairy tales, gossip, legends, anecdotes, and mythographic parts" (Rollinger).^[1] The very shapelessness is part of the value: he swept up everything.

The method: historíē, "inquiry"

The opening sentence of the book gives it its name and its programme: it is the historíē, the inquiry, of Herodotus, set down so that the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians should not lose their fame with time. His method was to collect what he was told, to weigh it, and, crucially, to name the disagreement rather than smooth it over. He distinguishes what he has seen for himself (opsis) from what he has only heard (akoē), he flags when an informant may be partial, and he repeatedly records a story while refusing to vouch for its truth, holding (as he says elsewhere) that he is bound to report what is said but by no means bound to believe it all. That candour is at once his chief virtue and the reader's chief difficulty, for he transmits Persian court tradition, Greek rumour, and his own inference side by side, and leaves us to sort them. His governing theme he announces at the very outset, and it never leaves him:

"Human happiness never continues long in one stay." (Herodotus 1.5, trans. Rawlinson)^[2]

Cities once great have grown small, and the small great; the wheel turns for every king and every house. It is the tragic key in which the whole vast work is pitched, and it colours everything he reports of the Persians, whose greatness he shows always with its fall implied.

What he preserves: the Persian ethnography (1.131-140)

For the religion and customs of Persia the indispensable passage is the short Persian logos of Book 1. Herodotus opens with the worship, and what strikes him is a series of absences:

"The Persians have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly." (Herodotus 1.131, trans. Rawlinson)^[3]

Instead, he reports, they go up onto the mountain-tops and sacrifice to the whole vault of heaven, and to sun, moon, earth, fire, water and the winds; and no offering may be made without a priest to chant over it:

"A Magian man stands by them and chants over them a theogony (for of this nature they say that their incantation is), seeing that without a Magian it is not lawful for them to make sacrifices." (Herodotus 1.132, trans. Macaulay)^[3]

This is our earliest outside description of open-air Iranian worship and of the Magi at the heart of the rite; it agrees, remarkably, with the imageless, fire-honouring, element-revering religion the Persian evidence itself implies. He goes on to the making of a Persian, in the line that is the moral spine of the whole culture as the Greeks saw it:

"They educate their children, beginning at five years old and going on till twenty, in three things only: in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth." (Herodotus 1.136, trans. Macaulay)^[3]

The horse, the bow, and above all the truth: this is the outsider's glimpse of the ideal that the royal inscriptions carve as arta, the Truth against the Lie. Herodotus adds that for the Persians the deepest shame of all is falsehood: "The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie; the next worst, to owe a debt: because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies" (1.138). He notes that they hold rivers sacred, so that "Into a river they neither make water nor spit, neither do they wash their hands in it" (1.138); and that a man at sacrifice may pray no good thing for himself alone but only "that it may be well with all the Persians and with the king" (1.132). He is fascinated by the little marks of difference: they will not vomit or make water in another's presence; they hold their birthdays the greatest of feasts; and, most memorably, they take their weightiest counsels twice over, "when drinking hard", and again sober the next day, adopting only what pleases them in both states (1.133). He notices their openness, too, in a phrase he plainly relished: "There is no nation which so readily adopts foreign customs as the Persians" (1.135), the Median dress and the Egyptian armour taken up without shame. And he reports, though as something the Persians kept close, their treatment of the dead, exposed to dog and bird before burial, the whole rite in the hands of the Magi, whom (Iranica notes from 1.140) he singles out as free to kill any living thing but dog and man with their own hands. Much of this the administrative and religious evidence from Iran quietly confirms, and it is the fullest portrait of Persian custom the ancient world has left us.

What he preserves: the accession, the tribute, and the wars

Beyond the customs, three bodies of matter make Herodotus essential for Darius's reign. First, the accession (3.61-79): the death of Cambyses, the seizure of the throne by a Magus impersonating the dead Bardiya, the conspiracy of the Seven, and the killing of the usurper. Here Herodotus runs strikingly close to Darius's own Behistun inscription (see below). Attached to it is the famous Constitutional Debate (3.80-82), in which the seven conspirators argue the merits of democracy, oligarchy and monarchy before settling on kingship, Darius himself carrying the day:

"Nothing better can be found than the rule of an individual man of the best kind; seeing that using the best judgment he would be guardian of the multitude without reproach; and resolutions directed against enemies would so best be kept secret." (Herodotus 3.82, Darius in the Constitutional Debate, trans. Macaulay)^[4]

As told, the debate is almost certainly a Greek composition, and Herodotus expects disbelief; but he insists the speeches were made, and the passage is a priceless window on how Persian aristocratic ideology could be imagined from outside. Second, the satrapies and tribute (3.89-97): Herodotus lists Darius's provincial divisions and their assessments, closing with a single grand sum:

"The total which was collected as yearly tribute for Dareios amounts to fourteen thousand five hundred and sixty Euboïc talents." (Herodotus 3.95, trans. Macaulay)^[5]

It is our fullest classical account of the empire's fiscal skeleton, broadly (if not always exactly) consonant with the administrative reality. Third, the wars themselves, from the Ionian revolt through Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea, which fill the second half of the work and which no other continuous narrative preserves.

His sources: Persian informants and oral tradition

Where did it all come from? Herodotus claims wide travel and, above all, spoken testimony, "basing his accounts on indigenous informants", in Iranica's words. For Persian matters these will have been, in the main, Greeks or Hellenized subjects at or near the Persian court, Ionians and Carians who had served the King and could carry his stories westward, together with the traditions of the Greek cities of Asia. He could not himself read Old Persian cuneiform, Elamite, or Babylonian, so the inner life of the court reaches him already translated, and often already shaped into a good story. The consequence is visible everywhere: the names of his Persian protagonists are frequently sound, genuine Iranian names, while the tales attached to those names may owe as much to Greek narrative habit as to Persian fact. How literally to take his source-citations is itself one of the oldest questions in the study of him: since Felix Jacoby's great article of 1913 many read them as the honest notes of a travelling eyewitness,^[6] while Detlev Fehling argued that they are in good part a literary fiction, a rhetorical device of citation rather than a record of real informants,^[7] and Robert Fowler and others take a middle path.^[8]

The source-critical problem: an outsider using Greek names

The deepest difficulty is that Herodotus sees Persia through Greek eyes and Greek words. He practises what scholars call interpretatio graeca: he renders the Persian high god not by his own name but as "Zeus", equated with the whole vault of heaven, and this habit can mislead badly. His single most notorious slip comes in the very chapter on Persian worship: reporting that the Persians took up the sacrifice to a heavenly Aphrodite, he names the goddess, wrongly, "Mitra" (1.131).^[9] But Mithra is no goddess of love; he is a male Iranian god of the covenant and the sun. The Encyclopaedia Iranica treats the passage as a genuine confusion, most probably between Mithra and the goddess Anāhitā, and as a plain measure of the limits of Herodotus's grasp of Persian religion (Rollinger).^[10] It is the kind of error that only an outsider, working at second hand and fitting the strange onto the familiar, could make.

Beyond such lapses lies the larger charge, ancient and modern, that he is unreliable in substance. Cicero coined the double verdict that has clung to him ever since: he called Herodotus the "father of history" (pater historiae), and in the same breath noted that the work was full of tall tales (innumerabiles fabulae), so that a later age would dub him equally the "father of lies". The gravest concrete faults are well known. His figure of more than a million and a half fighting men for Xerxes' army is a physical impossibility, one that the countryside could never have fed and that modern logistics reduce to a few hundred thousand at most; the vast number magnifies the miracle of the Greek victory and the King's hybris.^[11] His portrait of Xerxes as a vain and impious tyrant, scourging the sea and weeping over his host, is a Greek moral type, at odds with the measured king of the royal inscriptions. And his Persian court-scenes, the harem intrigues, the whispered counsels of queens, the set speeches he could not have heard, carry the unmistakable shape of Greek drama rather than of anything an archive would record. He is not, for all that, the worst offender in his own tradition: the court-insider Ctesias of Cnidus, who wrote a generation later in avowed opposition to him and claimed better Persian sources, is reckoned so much wilder that his unreliability is often said to make Herodotus look, by comparison, a model of accuracy.

Where he can be checked: the striking confirmations

And yet, set against the Iranian evidence that has come to light since, Herodotus is confirmed as often as he is caught out, and sometimes spectacularly. When the Cyrus Cylinder was read, it bore out his statement that Cyrus the Great had a grandfather of the same name. When the Persepolis and Babylonian tablets were studied, they answered to his picture of a great officialdom, a provisioned Royal Road, and a religion of Magi and open sacrifice. The Old Persian text of Behistun turned out to lie strikingly close to his narrative of Darius's accession: the closeness is such, the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes, that "he may have come into contact with one of the many versions of the inscription which were sent all over the empire" (Rollinger), though the differences show he reshaped what he took.^[12] Even a single administrative tablet can vindicate a stray detail: cuneiform records of the estate of a Persian noble named Mardonius fit, and confirm, the general Herodotus places at Plataea. The pattern is instructive. Where his statements can be tested against the Persian record, the institutional and factual substance is frequently sound; it is the stories built over the facts, the motives, the speeches, the court intrigues and the moralising, that are most heavily Greek. As Stephanie West has put it, for the rise of Persia "we depend on Herodotus for a continuous narrative", and the other evidence can "illustrate his account, fill in some gaps, or show that the situation was more complex than he supposed", but the narrative frame remains his, so that "we become familiar with Herodotus's version of events before we realize that it is his" (West, cited in Encyclopaedia Iranica).^[12]

How he sees the Persians

For all his errors, the temper of the Histories is a genuine resource. Ancient critics called Herodotus philobarbaros, a barbarian-lover, as a reproach; for the student of Persia it is a gift. He records the Persians' mourning and their marriage customs, the honour paid to the man with many sons, the King's slow weighing of a servant's whole account before he strikes (1.137), the mercy of Cyrus on the pyre and the grief of Xerxes over his own doomed host. He gives the many peoples of the empire their dignity and their difference, and closes the whole work not on a note of Greek triumph but on Cyrus's warning that soft lands breed soft men. This capacity to imagine the enemy from within, to make the Persians tragic rather than merely monstrous, is the very quality the modern historian most needs, and it is why a book so often wrong remains so nearly irreplaceable.

Transmission and translation

The Greek text of Herodotus survives through the medieval manuscript tradition and was among the first classical prose works printed in the Renaissance; the division into nine books, each later named for one of the Muses, is a late-antique and Byzantine convention, not the author's. For this compendium the verbatim quotations are given in the two standard public-domain English translations, George Rawlinson's of 1858-1860 and G. C. Macaulay's of 1890, each identified at the point of quotation. Both are Victorian and occasionally archaic, and neither should be pressed for fine philological nuance; but for conveying the substance and the voice of Herodotus they remain serviceable and are freely usable.