7.137), confirming Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ remark that he lived “into the Peloponnesian War” (D.H. Th. 5). The tradition is that he moved to Western Greek lands, Magna Graecia, to participate in the colonization of Thurii in 433 bc, where he died. The year of his death is disputed, though most scholars currently put it at about 424 bc.
The historian’s vision is very much a product of his travels and experiences of different Greek and Mediterranean regions. It is of course also
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HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy fostered by his own fervent sense of inquiry and his interaction with the intellectual and cultural currents of his time. He was, above all, an
independent thinker, and at Thurii, a Mecca for Ionian intellectuals, he could maintain a distance from pro‐ or anti‐Athenian partisanship. He
could at once praise pan‐Hellenic cooperation and admire the ethos of
some barbarians, espouse democratic ideals, and denounce imperialism
(Munson 2003: 267–8). Toward the end of his life and his writing, the
historian witnessed the first years of the Peloponnesian War; but he also knew well the decades leading up to the conflict, and both perspectives likely informed his work, critical as it was of the Athenian accumulation of imperial power.
Composition and Structure
Herodotus’ work begins with a proem that deserves close reading, here
in a fairly close, literal rendering:
This is the presentation of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, provided in order that the past events of men should not be effaced by time and that men’s great and astonishing accomplishments, some of them produced by the Greeks and others by the barbarians, should not be without fame, their other accomplishments included but especially the cause why they came to fight one another. (Hdt. 1.1, proem)
In the Greek text, Herodotus’ name and city come first, but he does not, like Hecataeus, make himself the subject of the action of writing. Instead he distances himself twice from the events recorded by emphasizing both his “investigation” ( historie ̄) and his “presentation” ( apodexis; also “production,” “performance,” “publication”). He displays only a portion of
the information gathered, and the investigative process assures readers that he took pains to discover the truth, not saying simply, as did Hecataeus a half century earlier, “I write what seems to be true,” albeit on the more distant subject of legends. Herodotus’ immense and innovative project is justified in two lengthy clauses, first as seeking to preserve human past events from gradual “erasure” over time. Second, alluding to the “imper-ishable fame” sought by epic heroes, he wants to provide “fame” for the
“great and astonishing accomplishments” ( erga embraces both deeds and physical monuments) of Greeks and non‐Greeks. Finally, among the
deeds lies especially the “reason” or “cause” ( aitie ̄) why the two peoples fought one another – in other words, the causes of the Persian Wars.
HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy 29
“Great and astonishing” and “cause” are charged words, which indicate
the criteria for the historian’s selection of subject matter and are dependent on the author’s subjective judgment. What determines magnitude? Extent
of wealth or power, or seriousness of consequences? What makes accom-
plishments astonishing ( tho ̄ masta): the unparalleled nature of the achievement or the degree of good done or harm caused? The very ambiguity of
these terms seems deliberate, allowing for all the options mentioned
above, as is evident in the narrative itself. Most notably, “astonishing”
events include many acts of unrestrained cruelty, greed, ambition, and
revenge, from which readers can draw positive lessons. How is the reader to understand the “cause” of the war? Was the motivation for conflict
military, political, territorial, religious, personal, or ethnic tension?
Exploration of causation, even more than the fighting itself, occupies a great portion of the work. The causation, like the astonishing deeds, is often tied to human nature in its baser and nobler aspects, as defined by Greek values.
Herodotus’ fundamental originality and his greatest contribution to
the genre rest not on the unity or fragmentation of his work, but rather on his being the first Greek, indeed the first Western writer, to attempt and accomplish a prose narrative of such ambitious length, and the first to describe with relatively great detachment a clash of contemporary civilizations. In choice of subject and scale of work he established a pattern for centuries of successors. It is difficult to think away nearly two and a half millennia of historical texts that followed Herodotus and to appreciate the revolutionary step he took in selecting his topic, finding a method, and forging a style.
Some scholars, with a so‐called unitarian approach, have seen the
Histories as essentially cohesive in concept, narrative technique, historical method, and the relation of parts to the whole; other critics – “analysts” –
have emphasized gaps and contradictions in the narrative, shifting interests, and the supposed absence of a central theme. Recently the unitarian and the analyst approaches have been reconciled by a growing number of
scholars acknowledging the author’s consistent desire to serve two aims.
First, he presents the results of his observation of diverse, noteworthy deeds and, second, he reveals historical causation to be based in the
deeper human realities of cultural differences and commonalities, emo-
tional and rational motivations, and in the natural arc of growth and
decline of the great powers. Both aims are implicitly stated in Herodotus’
preface. But he is neither hopelessly mired in irrelevancies nor aloft in grand theory. His obsession with seemingly irrelevant details never strays far from the focus on human motives, and his search for the causes of
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HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy conflict never reaches the unified theory of a coherent philosophy or
ideology. Much is left to the attentive reader, who has to connect the
narrative episodes with broader themes or to take stories as remarkable on their own merit.
The disjointed and the unified approaches, then, with varying shades
in between, have been related to three prevalent theories concerning the composition of the work, namely that (1) Herodotus wrote the ethno-geographical sections on Egypt and Scythia earlier in his career and later decided to write on the Persian Wars and incorporate those studies into it; or (2) he wrote the later books on the Persian Wars proper first (Books 6–9) and later added the earlier parts to complement the war motifs; or (3) he wrote a single, unedited first draft, “correcting in stride” as he proceeded. Richmond Lattimore was the first to propose the third sce-nario, and it still has many adherents (Lattimore 1958; see Lateiner 1989: 2–6 on unitarians vs. analysts, and for an overview of composition theories). The single‐draft theory has the virtue of explaining how such a long work could have the unity it does, with themes in the early books
being recalled in the latter ones. But most who see an overall unity in the work allow that there may well have been revisions. As a youth, Herodotus was undoubtedly fascinated by tales of glorious victory in the immediate aftermath of the war. He plausibly also heard or read the accounts of
Ionian geographers, ethnographers, and philosophers, and yearned to
incorporate both his ethnographic and political interests into one narrative. Herodotus was in effect declaring, by the very length and breadth of his scope, that his project rivaled those of the epic poets. Like Hecataeus’, his prose venture challenged the content and form of the poetic compositions that had dominated until this time.
The narrative can be very gen
erally divided into six sections:
1 Croesus–Cyrus: 1.7–94;
2 Cyrus: 1.95–140; conquest of Asian Greeks: 1.141–77;
3 empire of Cyrus–Cambyses–Darius: 1.178–5.27 (including the digres-
sion on Egypt in Book 2);
4 the Ionian Revolt: 5.28–38; its suppression: 5.97–6.42; Marathon:
6.94–120;
5 Xerxes’ accession; preparations; Artemisium, Themopylae: 7.196–
239; Salamis: 8.40–112; return of Xerxes: 8.113–32;
6 Plataea: 9.1–89; Mycale: 9.90–106.
The many stories ( logoi) and the smaller narratives that comprise each section follow a general unity owing to chronology, connections through
HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy 31
kinship of rulers, and a causal chain of action and reaction among states.
The pattern is set with the earliest legendary account of the abduction of elite women (Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen, at Hdt. 1.1–5) and escalates into the Persian expeditions as the reprisals for Greek offenses against Persia in Ionia. The events in Book 1 begin in the sixth century, with the rise of Croesus, king of Lydia, his fall, the Persian annexation of Lydia, and the imperialist expansion of Persia under Cyrus, who died in 530 bc.
Book 2 largely digresses on the culture of Egypt; this is occasioned by the Persian expansionist aims in that country under Cambyses, Cyrus’ successor. In Book 3, when Cambyses fails to take Nubia and is succeeded by
Darius I, we find a crucial debate on the possible constitutional changes within the empire (3.88–97). Book 4 recounts Darius’ attempts to subdue the Scythians of the Danube region and in Southern Russia, but again
indulges in extensive cultural commentaries on those nomadic peoples.
The Ionian Revolt of Greek cities in the Eastern Mediterranean is the
highlight of Book 5, along with the Athens’ failed attempt to help, which gives the Persians a pretext to invade the Greek mainland (5.97–103).
The defeat of Darius’ forces at Marathon in 490 bc constitutes the apex of Book 6 and leads to the campaigns by Xerxes in 480–479 bc, with their five great battles on land and sea – in Books 7, 8, and 9.
Oswyn Murray (2001: 31–2) plausibly locates the two impulses of
Herodotean narrative, analytical causation and storytelling, on the one hand in a mainland tradition of the political, especially hoplite, class with an interest in rationalism, military action, decision making, and human causation, and on the other hand in an Eastern Greek tradition emphasizing “folk‐tale motifs, recurrent patterns, and deformation for moral ends.” This dualism, which should not be taken too reductively, offers
plausible sources for the historian’s approach: the rationalist aspect interested in human character and the drive for power, and the storytelling
aspect manifest in the engaging tales of the narrative. Of course the mainland rationalism and the Eastern storytelling traditions describe modes of narration that reflect and complement, but do not map neatly onto, the
two “aims” outlined in the prologue and discussed above, namely the
rational search for causation and the recounting of amazing deeds or
customs.
The foundations of Herodotus’ work in the Ionian science and logog-
raphy of his day were outlined in the previous chapter. Reflecting these models, his inquisitive work seeks clearer bases of truth in a world obscured by abundant cultural diversity and contradictory customs. While the text draws distinctions between myth and empirical observations, it also does not hesitate to present multiple, subjective perspectives based on different
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HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy cultural traditions. Regarding the Ionian “scientific revolution” of the late sixth and early fifth centuries bc, we might pose the unanswerable question: Why did the marriage of science and historical prose narrative not occur even earlier than Herodotus? Partly the inspiration for Greek nonfictional narrative may have been the Persian Wars themselves, which created a new epic legend, but one told from many conflicting perspectives by Greek cities. Partly Attic democracy and oratory may have fostered the investigation of contemporary events. Herodotus was on the other hand not
entirely in step with the new Ionian thought that questioned the predetermined laws of gods and nature (Meier 1987: 52). The historian seems to
have been conservative on these issues and to have held to certain fixed laws of divine and natural behavior, such as the inevitability of cycles of rise and fall in individual and collective human enterprise and the regularity of cosmic justice, in which retribution follows transgressions of human hubris.
His scientific conservatism is balanced by a yearning to learn about and record myriad cultural conventions, mores, or, in Greek parlance,
“unwritten laws,” agraphoi nomoi.
Herodotus does not explicitly state his programmatic method of assess-
ing the truth, as Thucydides does, and so our understanding of his mode of testing sources must be inferred from particular passages. In some
cases he felt that an account had probability, and at times he was certain that a report was true. For instance, Herodotus presents the discrepancies between the Egyptian and Homeric versions of the story of Helen’s
sojourn in Egypt (Hdt. 3.116–20; Hunter 1982: 52–61). Interestingly,
the historian sides with the version of the Egyptian priests, on the basis of probability and reliability: they had knowledge derived from age‐old eyewitness testimony and native tradition, as well as a serious valuation of records in Egypt. The careful choice of one version over another reveals the author’s fundamental method of testing the reliability of a story and of deciding more and less accurate versions, even of distant legend.
Herodotus used all the same rational processes that we have observed
in the preserved traces of the Ionian philosophers, Hecataeus, and others logographers, reasoning from observable evidence, self‐observation, and deduction based on probability. For example, in 2.44, the historian,
“wishing to know something certain” about the antiquity of Heracles,
journeys to Tyre in Phoenicia and to Thasos, where he visits temples and concludes: “My present research shows clearly that Heracles was an old
god.” In 2.31, on the other hand, Herodotus says, of the lack of a reliable account concerning the source of the Nile, that “no one can speak with
certainty” about it. When describing the customs of the Persians (Hdt.
1.131–40), Herodotus again makes the distinction between clear truth
HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy 33
and supposition: “These are the things I hold true about them, knowing
enough to say. However, following are those matters which are secret and not clearly known about the dead” (Hdt. 1.140). Although Herodotus
does not present an explicit, self‐conscious statement about his method, the principles we find by inference in his text indicate an earnest attempt to discern consistently truths, lies, and uncertainties.
We must distinguish the historian’s own espoused view of truth and
falsehood from what we today consider historical accuracy in his account.
Detlev Fehling’s (1989) book, first published in German in 1971, strik-
ingly challenged the historian’s credibility by arguing that his attribution of oral sources (“the Persians say,” “the Spartans say”) are chosen to give invented statements a cloak of respectability. This of course led to controversies in which W. K. Pritchett (1993) defended Herodotus, attributing the inaccuracies to his misunderstanding of non‐Greek sources or to his imprecise recollection of details. Our interests here are less concerned with the establishment of empirical fact by current standards than with an appreciation of how an ancient historical narrative presents an
author’s coherent worldview to his contemporaries. In origin, historical writing was, certainly for the Greeks and Romans, a branch of rhetorical exposition – whose success rested more in its ability to persuade than in telling the truth, to describe things in general terms if not in precise detail (Woodman 1988). In the postmodernist analysis of history in Hayden
White’s Metahistory of 1973 and in the writings of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and others, the historical writer ultimately has no claim to objective truth, but only to a socially determined and personally
inscribed relativistic account. The cultural and personal biases implicit in the selection, arrangement, and incorporation of overall themes is
anything but pristinely objective in this version of historical accounts, which began in the West with Herodotus. We can take here an intermediate position, by acknowledging the inevitably subjective elements of historiography yet at the same time agreeing upon the widely incontrovertible
and uncontroversial factual bases of a proposed historical account.
The closest that Herodotus comes to a statement of programmatic
method occurs at the start of Book 1, just after an account of the leg-
endary reprisals and abductions of European and Asian women, beginning
with the abduction of Helen:
These are the stories of the Persians and Phoenicians. For my part I am not going to say about these matters that they happened thus or thus, but I will set myself upon that man that I myself know began unjust acts against the Greeks, and, having so marked him, I will go forward in my account,
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HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy covering alike the small and great cities of mankind. For of those that were great in earlier times, most have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before. Since, then, I know that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place, I will make mention of both alike. (Hdt. 1.5, Grene)
This passage is almost a second preface, picking up the theme of the
“cause” for the Persian–Greek conflict mentioned at 1.1. The statement
Greek Historiography Page 6
