Travels with Herodotus (10 page)

It is this principle of an irreversible passing away that Herodotus understands perfectly, and he wants to set himself in opposition to its destructive power:
to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time
.

Still, what boldness, what a sense of self-importance and mission: presuming to
prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time
. Human events! But how did he know that any such thing as “human events” even exists? His predecessor, Homer, described the history of a single, specific war, the one with Troy, and then the adventures of a solitary wanderer, Odysseus. But human events? That term in itself represents a new way of thinking, a new concept, a new horizon. With that sentence, Herodotus reveals himself to us as anything but a provincial scribe, a narrow-minded lover of his own little polis, mere patriot of one of the dozens of city-states of which Greece was then composed. No! From the very outset, the author of
The Histories
enters the stage as a visionary on a world scale, an imagination capable of encompassing planetary dimensions—in short, as the first globalist.

Of course, the map of the world which Herodotus has before him, or which he imagines, differs from the one confronting us today. His world is much smaller than ours. Its center consists of the mountainous and (at the time) forested lands around the
Aegean Sea. Those lying on the western shore constitute Greece; those on the eastern, Persia. And so right away we hit upon the heart of the matter—Herodotus is born, grows up, and just as he starts to figure out everything around him, one of his very first observations is that the world is sundered, split into East and West, and that these halves are in a state of dissension, conflict, war.

The question that immediately suggests itself to him, as well as to any thinking human being, is “Why should this be so?” And it is this very question that informs the foreword of Herodotus’s masterpiece:
Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus…. in particular, the cause of the hostilities
…

Precisely. We can see that this question, oft repeated since the dawn of history, has vexed humankind for thousands of years now: Why do peoples wage war against one another? What are the origins of wars? What do people hope to accomplish when they start a war? What drives them? What do they think? What is their goal? An unending litany of questions! Herodotus dedicates his life, diligently, tirelessly, to finding the answers. But from among the many issues, some quite general and abstract, he selects the most concrete to investigate, the events that took place before his very eyes or of which memories were still fresh and alive or, even if slightly faded, still very much available. In other words, he concentrates his attention and his inquiries on the following subject: Why does Greece (that is, Europe) wage war with Persia (that is, with Asia)? Why do those two worlds—the West (Europe) and the East (Asia)—fight against each other, and do so to the death? Was it always thus? Will it always be thus?

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.

S
eeking 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 define 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?
”