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The Iliad and the Odyssey, at the end of the oral period of Greek culture, are a legacy of generations of bards. What we have learned about the ways of bards today in the Balkan mountains, where the Homeric bards once sang, suggests that there was a stability and continuity in the tales they told. For, unlike modern poets, Homeric bards were not concerned with “originality.”
The Homeric epic had originated in long centuries before Homer and the eighth century B.C., in the creative period when bards were improvising, learning from older men, and even adding to the familiar heroic themes. While creative talent was still at work on the Iliad and the Odyssey, bards assimilated their individual contributions into these monumental poems. The Homeric word for poet is aiodos, or singer. And like all successful singers, bards were not reluctant to build their repertoires from the works of others.
When bards, enriched by the creative talents among them, found an attractive version, they could reproduce it for generations. The Homeric bards had probably reached this stage in the mid-seventh century B.C. But the rise of literacy and reliance on fixed texts brought the decline of the spontaneity of the bard, the aiodos singing to the accompaniment of his lyrelike kitharis. He was displaced by the rhapsode, or trained reciter. The rhapsode (the word means “song-stitcher” in Greek), who appeared in the fifth century B.C., was well trained, and probably had texts of Homer, though he still recited from memory. Rhapsodes then competed for prizes at public festivals. But while the bards were relied on for the authentic traditional myth, the very name “rhapsode” became a byword for unreliability as they continued to perform and compete for prizes into the third century A.D. The last stage in the degeneration of the tradition of the oral myth, rhapsodes were despised by educated people. Scholars can still detect their awkward additions to the works of earlier Homeric bards.
The Homeric epics were finally written down at the end of the true oral period—the “Dark Ages” of ancient Greece (c. 1100-900 B.C.). That Dark Age proved well suited for the thriving and transmission of oral poetry, which, unlike architecture, required no prosperity or any particular materials. The rudeness of daily life in an illiterate community that made literary culture impossible was no barrier to the seeking for heroes. Like the Norse sagas, the Homeric epics themselves suggest that ages of hardship and adversity, which reward courage, pride, and sheer survival, are fertile for heroic poetry.
Perhaps eras when other grand outlets for man’s seeking, hopes, and ambitions are lacking naturally find expression in the only kind of monument that needs no material resource—the monumental epic. Such great monuments—to paraphrase Whitman—require great audiences. The Homeric epics found their audiences (and patrons) in the feasts of noblemen and in the religious festivals of the community. In other ways too the Homeric epics played the role of monuments. For a monument, as the origin of the word (in Latin, monere, to remind, admonish, or warn) suggests, aims not to surprise and astonish, but to remind.
Many of the special qualities of the Homeric epics are then easier to understand. The modern reader may feel disappointed that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not hold him in suspense but always have a familiar outcome—the more familiar and predictable because the gods are always ready to intervene to produce the predictable result. So in a Homeric epic there is no uncertainty about the outcome, toward which the gods have led events. Our interest is in the uncertain motives and reactions of the people. The focus is not on the unraveling of a usually predictable plot but on the tantalizing uncertainties of the reactions of Achilles or Hector. The Iliad and the Odyssey, recited entire at the annual Panathenaea festival, made myth and memory the handmaid of ritual. And an affirmation of the communal sense of purpose.
Still, fantasy has continued to give myth an undying universal appeal not found in later prosaic versions of the past. And no literature has been more fertile than myth in fostering Western humanism in young and old, awakening interest in other people’s culture, other people’s ways of seeking. Homer’s apotheosis in antiquity as The Poet somehow survived in the Middle Ages even though his works were unknown in the Latin West. The Renaissance revival of Greek made the Homeric epics newly available and awakened enthusiasm, expressed in translation. George Chapman, who claimed to be directly inspired by the spirit of Homer (Iliad, 1611; Odyssey, 1614-15), was followed by passages of translation by Thomas Hobbes in quatrains (1674-75) and by John Dryden later in the seventeenth century.
Interest in Homer remained so alive that when the young Alexander Pope (1688-1744) published his first volume of his translation (containing the first four Books) of the Iliad in 1715, the excitement was said to be the greatest ever aroused by a book of verse. The King and the Prince of Wales subscribed substantial sums and the translation actually established Pope’s financial independence. It was said that no poet before (not excepting Shakespeare) had been so highly paid. Nor perhaps has any since. When the six volumes of Pope’s Iliad were completed, Pope had received from the publisher the unprecedented sum of £5,320.4s. The publisher, Bernard Lintot (1675-1736), played a heroic role. Even after Pope’s work was pirated in Holland, Lintot went ahead and printed seventy-five hundred copies of a new edition of his own. And his faith in Pope’s Homer was fully justified by the fortune he made from the enterprise—enough to secure for him and his son the posts of high sheriffs of Sussex.
It was Keats who united the English translator and the Greek epic past in immortality in his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
17
Herodotus and the Birth of History
Enjoying the heroic past with Homeric bards, why would anyone turn to the prosaic past that came to be known as history? The appearance of historiography—the writing of history—in classical Greece was one of their most remarkable and surprising achievements. For the cast of Greek thought in the age of Socrates and Plato was conspicuously antihistorical. According to Plato, the only subject of genuine knowledge was what was permanent and unchanging. So the ancient Greeks had the greatest respect for mathematical knowledge, and Pythagoras elevated numbers into the key to the universe. They dwelt on the distinction between true “knowledge” (episteme) and mere “opinion” (doxa). Then, why pursue the uncertain accounts of changing human actions, of societies born and decayed? At the same time, as we have seen, in the face-to-face community of the polis, the idealization of the evanescent spoken (over the enduring written) word, expressed in the way of dialogue, removed some temptations to make written records of their thoughts. “Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history,” observed Aristotle, “since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
The birth of history in ancient Greece was the legacy of two originals—Herodotus and Thucydides. Both were exiles, and so the readier to pursue a kind of knowledge not valued in their home-polis. Unlike the anonymous mythmakers, they signed their names at the outset of their work, and their twin legacy would suggest the questions of historians for millennia to come. What had really happened and why? What were the lessons of the past for the future?
The word “history” (historie) in Greek, of Ionian origin, meant inquiry. It had first connoted “research” into the nature of the physical world. Miletus, on the Ionian coast of the eastern Mediterranean, had been the home of Thales (born c. 624 B.C.), founder of the first Greek school of philosophy. From there, too, Hecataeus (c. 550-489 B.C.) appears to have been the first to apply this method of “investigation” from nature to the inhabited earth. He traveled widely and was one of the first logographers, recording local traditions and genealogies of mythical families. They were m
ostly interested in the legendary foundations of cities, and in the variety of local customs. Hecataeus’ statement of purpose is a rudimentary credo of the historian: “What I write here is the account of what I considered to be true. For the stories of the Greeks are numerous and, in my opinion, ridiculous.” His “Genealogies” tended to make the mythical past more credible. These logographers expressed the characteristic Greek interest—not surprising for a seafaring people—in the dominating power of the physical environment. His interests were more in geography—the variety of present phenomena on the earth—than in the shaping power of past events. The works of logographers survive only in fragments, and they left nothing that could be called a work of history. But the first such work did somehow grow out of their tradition, and when it appeared it opened paths into the past.
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The exuberant Ionian intellectual adventure was not to be frustrated by a mere dogma of philosophy. Just as the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century would dissolve Christian orthodoxies, defrock clergy, and guillotine kings, so the Ionian Enlightenment of the sixth century B.C. shook revered icons of Greek culture as it opened endless paths of inquiry. Thales had asked general questions about nature, and sought rational answers. As Bertrand Russell observed, Thales set philosophers on their paths to understand the world. Called “physicists” (from the Greek physis for nature), they tried to find the single substance—air or water—from which the world was made.
When the Ionians turned their inquiry on man himself, they took another look at their past, asking whether their myths were an adequate account. And what Socrates, at the cost of his life, did for Greek philosophy, awakening fellow Athenians to the discovery of their ignorance, Herodotus did for their quest for the past. This Ionian Enlightenment questioned the mythic view embodied in the Homeric epics and Hesiod. “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods,” Xenophanes (sixth century B.C.), the wandering Ionian poet from Colophon, observed, “everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men: theft, adultery, and deceit.” So they “demythicized the past,” in search of the qualities of man, and their past would not remain a vacuum. It would soon be filled by something quite new, of which Herodotus was to be the creator and the patron saint.
Myth, from the Greek for “word,” was a name for the comforting authentic tale of origins. As we have seen, the Homeric bards sang a reassuring tradition, of the virtues and exploits of heroes. Their tales did not shock or surprise but solaced by the familiar themes—of Achilles or of Odysseus, Agamemnon, or Menelaus. The poetic epithets and embellishments too were in recognized formulas. But history was quite another world. The word historie in Ionian Greek meant “inquiry” or investigation focused on the seeking rather than on the finding. We have seen how myth, authenticated by generations of chanting bards, responded to the expectations of living audiences. So the bard’s tales were being modified, not by newly discovered shapes of the past but by the novel expectations of each living listening generation.
History from this beginning would also become the name for a never-ending effort. Recollection of the past was an endless reaching. The past would no longer be a brilliant panoply of familiar verse but a dark continent of memory. Perhaps it could be newly illuminated in every generation. While myth was an anonymous product of community, history would be the work of the inquiring individual. We may speak of Homeric epics though there may never have been a Homer. But history begins with historians.
Herodotus, by consensus of scholars, is our first historian, the father of what we think of as history. And, unlike the anonymous Homer, from his first words Herodotus leaves no doubt of his authorship or of the nature of his enterprise:
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.
So, with his word “researches” Herodotus announced one of the great shifts in human consciousness not often enough recognized. Here was the shift from mere recording and repetition of tradition to the scrutiny of experience. And so the historian opened the gateway to the infinite past, a new eternity. Before Herodotus, besides the Homeric epics in the oral tradition of the bards, there had been logographers. But they were not investigators asking whether or why.
The Father of History, the title given to Herodotus by Cicero, has been confirmed by centuries of scholarship. Before Herodotus, describers of the past, not inquiring, were simply recording or reporting. They were not writing history but (in R. G. Collingwood’s phrase) “writing religion.” They were recording “known facts for the information of persons to whom they were not known, but who, as worshippers of the god in question, ought to know the deeds whereby he has made himself manifest.”
This new spirit of inquiry was conspicuously expressed in their language, in the shift from poetry to prose. The traditional epic themes of Homeric bards were perpetuated in verse, which was the common aid to memory for an illiterate society. History, the language of inquiry, would be written in prose. And Herodotus’ History is the first masterpiece in Greek prose. The writing of history, a new branch of literature, as the Roman rhetorician Quintilian observed, brought Greek prose to a new height.
Some admirers of Herodotus have credited him as the creator of “scientific history.” But this emphasis overlooks the uniqueness of the historian’s task. The ancient Greeks were pioneers in many fields of science, other realms of “inquiry.” But history was a literary art, because in history the subject and its audience were one. The effective historian is always telling us about ourselves, revealed in our human past. He cannot be a great historian unless he actually speaks to us. If he is a great historian, he never becomes obsolete, though he can be supplemented. With pleasure we still read Herodotus and Thucydides. It is no accident that the Father of History was in the vanguard of ancient Greek literature. So, our greatest historians, like Gibbon, hold as high a rank in literature as in history. Regardless of his place in the history of history, critics place Herodotus nearer to Shakespeare than to Thucydides and next to Homer. For Wordsworth, Herodotus’ History was “the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible, which had ever been written.”
How did it happen that our gateway to the infinite past was opened by this Herodotus (c. 484-c. 429 B.C.) of Halicarnassus? We know very little of his life beyond what he reveals in his History. Born of a prominent family in Halicarnassus on the west coast of Asia Minor, Herodotus was exiled by the tyrant of the city and traveled widely around the eastern Mediterranean. Herodotus visited Athens, he probably knew Pericles, and was reputed to have received ten talents for a public reading of his work there. His work, applauded as a celebration of the Athenian virtues, was actually parodied by Aristophanes. As an Athenian citizen he joined in founding Thurii, a Greek colony in southern Italy. He settled there and was buried in the marketplace. An Asiatic Greek by birth, he was a force of the Ionian Enlightenment in which Greek philosophy and literature first developed.
Out of Herodotus’ own experience as exile and traveler came his grand theme—the struggle between Asia and Greece—between “East” and “West,” between “Barbarian” and Greek. Herodotus would apply to human experience the method of rational inquiry, which the Ionian philosophers Thales of Miletus and Hippocrates of the island of Cos (born c. 460 B.C.) applied to physics and medicine. He had been raised on the myths of Greece in Homer and Hesiod. Then his providential exile set him out on travels across his known world. For the peoples he met, unlike the Greeks, had few myths. Only by inquiry—by asking people, noting their ways, and examining their monuments—could he learn of their past. And so it is not surprising that the Greeks’ first reaching beyond myth into history was not about themselves.
Herodotus’ great resource was boundless curiosity. He went not simply as an
explorer nor to confirm what he already knew, but “to inquire.” The travels that took him all over Asia Minor, to Egypt, and even to the mouth of the Dnieper River alerted him to all peoples’ strange ways, customs, and legends. He took special pleasure in conversing with priests everywhere about their rites and doctrines. When he finally decided to write an account of the Persian Wars, he already had a rich miscellany about the peoples and places in the story. He was actually able to collect information from some who had fought the wars, and so he became the source of all later Greek accounts of the Persian Wars.
The inquiring spirit of Herodotus stands out in stark contrast to the bardic celebration of familiar themes. He rejects some stories because they seem too improbable. But he recounts others (like that of the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians) even if he has doubts. He is also willing to speculate more boldly than Christian doctrine would later allow. For example, he refused to fix a firm date for the Creation. Drawing on the experience of other alluvial deposits from rivers in the Aegean, he speculated on the time it must have taken to accumulate the alluvial deposits of the Nile Delta, perhaps some twenty thousand years. He concluded then that “nothing is impossible in the long lapse of ages.” He doubts the Thracian account that lands beyond the Ister (the Danube) were impenetrable because of bees, for the simple reason that “it is certain that those creatures are very impatient of cold. I rather believe it is on account of the cold that the regions which lie under the Bear are without inhabitants.”
Yet Herodotus does not deny all supernatural forces. The Homeric spirit survives in his combination of human causes with some deference to the prevailing religious beliefs. He respects oracles, and especially the oracle of Delphi. He seems to believe in the predicted fate of Croesus and in the loss of the acropolis of Sardis from the failure to follow carefully the Oracle’s curious prescription to make the city impregnable by carrying a lion cub around its whole perimeter. The supernatural appears again and again in Herodotus’ accounts of the divine jealousy (phthonos) that Aeschylus called “A venerable doctrine uttered long ago.” This was the notion (which we might call nemesis) that the gods begrudge unlimited success to human beings. Therefore, too much success (especially if the lucky person brags about it) is apt to invite calamity. Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.
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