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A review by generalheff
The Histories by Herodotus
4.0
Herodotus of Halicarnassus is famous as the proto historian. His book, The Histories, is generally held to be the first attempt at writing history based on a process of evidence gathering.
This, at least, was the vision of the author I had when tackling Tom Holland’s extremely accessible translation of the text and it is clearly an important dimension to the work. Yet the real charm of this book was in what I wasn’t expecting: the lengthy asides, the direct engagement with the reader, the tolerance of religious explanations. For what could have been a musty, dreary 2,500-year-old book actually turned out to be an often riveting read, periodically weighed down by excessive detail.
“Speaking of oracles …”. What first grabbed my attention was Herodotus’ affable direct-to-reader style. Often this marks a digression. These are both a blessing and a curse. When brief, these enrich The Histories and endearingly pull the reader into Herodotus’ world.
At other times, the digressions mire the reader down in needless detail. Perhaps the worst instances of this are where Herodotus turns anthropologist and insists on describing in painstaking detail the characteristics, religions, diets of a particular people (Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans, Indians and so on). All of this is as accurate as you’d expect for something written in about 430BC. The geographical asides are, likewise, action-interruptingly dull.
This issue is very much concentrated at the beginning of the book, where we hear about the far histories of the Greek and Persian conflict. Once we arrive at Darius and Xerxes and their invasions, these asides, thankfully, largely disappear and we are left with Herodotus’ still personable, reader-directed style but without the baggage of these earlier chapters.
“The resulting clash was, in my judgement, the most terrible that has ever been fought between two rival barbarian peoples; and the tactics deployed, thanks to my researchers, are a matter, not of opinion, but of record”. Sentences like these are what Herodotus is best known for. He is often at pains to describe the efforts he went to, be it travelling to the far reaches of Egypt, or tracking down a particularly knowledgeable individual, to substantiate his claims.
What I find so interesting about these comments is not particularly the early attempts at ‘doing history’ – I’ll leave that to the academic historians. Rather, it is the window opened onto Herodotus’ world. You almost feel like you are there with the author as he voyages around Greece. I, for one, find this strangely exhilarating given how unlikely the availability of such an old book is and the world it describes impossible remoteness.
“If one absolutely must touch upon the dimension of the divine, then my own interpretation of the matter would be that the goddess refused entry to the men who had burned down the palace at Eleusis”. Herodotus is certainly not above allowing divine explanations for events, an aspect of his writing that took me by surprise. I was fascinated to see the curious mix of emerging evidential standards in Herodotus’ writing mixed with sudden allowances for godly intervention. It certainly made the book feel authentic and ‘of its time’; I can, similarly, see why Thucydides writing just a few years later considered Herodotus a credulous fool, even if I find it a delightful quirk, marking a curious midway point between Homer and later historians.
So much for my survey of the many sides of Herodotus. It is precisely the many facets of the author that drew me in and made me persevere. Yes, at times the book gets bogged down (occasionally excruciatingly so) in mindless detail. But if you can get through these, you will be rewarded: firstly with a revealing, over-the-shoulder look at the lives of the ancients; and secondly, through an increasingly gripping narrative of a titanic struggle between civilisations that emerges as the author breaks into stride in the latter sections of the book.
This, at least, was the vision of the author I had when tackling Tom Holland’s extremely accessible translation of the text and it is clearly an important dimension to the work. Yet the real charm of this book was in what I wasn’t expecting: the lengthy asides, the direct engagement with the reader, the tolerance of religious explanations. For what could have been a musty, dreary 2,500-year-old book actually turned out to be an often riveting read, periodically weighed down by excessive detail.
“Speaking of oracles …”. What first grabbed my attention was Herodotus’ affable direct-to-reader style. Often this marks a digression. These are both a blessing and a curse. When brief, these enrich The Histories and endearingly pull the reader into Herodotus’ world.
At other times, the digressions mire the reader down in needless detail. Perhaps the worst instances of this are where Herodotus turns anthropologist and insists on describing in painstaking detail the characteristics, religions, diets of a particular people (Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans, Indians and so on). All of this is as accurate as you’d expect for something written in about 430BC. The geographical asides are, likewise, action-interruptingly dull.
This issue is very much concentrated at the beginning of the book, where we hear about the far histories of the Greek and Persian conflict. Once we arrive at Darius and Xerxes and their invasions, these asides, thankfully, largely disappear and we are left with Herodotus’ still personable, reader-directed style but without the baggage of these earlier chapters.
“The resulting clash was, in my judgement, the most terrible that has ever been fought between two rival barbarian peoples; and the tactics deployed, thanks to my researchers, are a matter, not of opinion, but of record”. Sentences like these are what Herodotus is best known for. He is often at pains to describe the efforts he went to, be it travelling to the far reaches of Egypt, or tracking down a particularly knowledgeable individual, to substantiate his claims.
What I find so interesting about these comments is not particularly the early attempts at ‘doing history’ – I’ll leave that to the academic historians. Rather, it is the window opened onto Herodotus’ world. You almost feel like you are there with the author as he voyages around Greece. I, for one, find this strangely exhilarating given how unlikely the availability of such an old book is and the world it describes impossible remoteness.
“If one absolutely must touch upon the dimension of the divine, then my own interpretation of the matter would be that the goddess refused entry to the men who had burned down the palace at Eleusis”. Herodotus is certainly not above allowing divine explanations for events, an aspect of his writing that took me by surprise. I was fascinated to see the curious mix of emerging evidential standards in Herodotus’ writing mixed with sudden allowances for godly intervention. It certainly made the book feel authentic and ‘of its time’; I can, similarly, see why Thucydides writing just a few years later considered Herodotus a credulous fool, even if I find it a delightful quirk, marking a curious midway point between Homer and later historians.
So much for my survey of the many sides of Herodotus. It is precisely the many facets of the author that drew me in and made me persevere. Yes, at times the book gets bogged down (occasionally excruciatingly so) in mindless detail. But if you can get through these, you will be rewarded: firstly with a revealing, over-the-shoulder look at the lives of the ancients; and secondly, through an increasingly gripping narrative of a titanic struggle between civilisations that emerges as the author breaks into stride in the latter sections of the book.