The Histories — themes & analysis

What Herodotus invents, more than anything else, is a method. The word he uses for his project, historia, originally meant inquiry — the kind of investigation a witness or a judge undertakes — and Herodotus brings to large historical questions the practice of someone trying to determine what actually happened. He travels widely, talks to people, and reports what they tell him, often by name. When his sources disagree, as they often do, he names the disagreement and sometimes refuses to adjudicate. “I am bound to record the things I am told,” he writes in one famous formula, “but I am not at all bound to believe them.”

The method has been mocked and admired in roughly equal measure for two and a half thousand years. Cicero called Herodotus the father of history; Plutarch wrote a treatise called On the Malice of Herodotus accusing him of crediting too freely the malicious gossip of his foreign sources. The truth is that Herodotus’s method is recognisably the method of every honest historian who has come after him — the painstaking accumulation of testimony from people in a position to know, the comparison of conflicting accounts, the suspended judgment when the evidence is unclear, the willingness to report what may turn out to be wrong because the alternative is to pretend a certainty no inquiry can produce.

The reliability of any individual story Herodotus reports is debated; the reliability of his method is the foundation of every later history. The first pages of Book 1 demonstrate it at once: Herodotus begins by reporting the Persian account of the origins of the quarrel, then the Greek account, notes they conflict, and moves on. He is not a propagandist. He is an inquirer, and the distinction matters.

Modern readers sometimes find the digressions frustrating — why describe Egyptian crocodile-fishing when you are supposed to be writing about the Persian Wars? But the digressions are the method. Herodotus cannot explain Xerxes’s invasion without explaining what Persia was, what Lydia was before Persia absorbed it, what Egypt contributed to the empire, what Scythia meant when Darius failed to conquer it. Every digression is a piece of evidence. The patience required to read them is the same patience the inquiry required to gather them.

Where to follow it: Book 1, Ch. 1 — the opening statement of method, Book 1, Ch. 5 — “I am bound to record what I am told”, Book 2, Ch. 1 — Egypt as extended inquiry, Book 6, Ch. 1 — Ionian sources named, Book 7, Ch. 1 — Xerxes’s deliberation reported from multiple sides.

The opening sentence of the Histories announces that the cause of the great quarrel between Greeks and Persians shall not be forgotten, and the question of cause runs through the whole work. Herodotus’s answer is multiple and unhurried. There is, in the Greek imagination he records, a long sequence of mutual abductions — Io, Europa, Medea, Helen — that the Persian historians cite, half-jokingly, as evidence that Asians and Europeans have always been at one another for the same kinds of reasons.

There is the rise of Lydian power under Croesus and the fall of Lydia to the Persians, which brings Persia to the edge of the Greek world. There is the Ionian Revolt of 499–494, in which Athens supports the rebellion of the Greek cities of Asia Minor against their Persian governors, and which gives Darius and then Xerxes a specific grievance against Athens. There is, more deeply, the Persian conviction that all of Asia is Persian by right and that any free Greek city is therefore an anomaly to be corrected.

And there is the irreducible factor of human ambition and divine reversal — the long pattern, which Herodotus traces with extraordinary care, in which a man or a people grows to greatness, becomes proud, attempts a reach beyond what their condition can sustain, and is brought down. Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes each fit this pattern at different scales.

The narrative of cause is therefore at once political, personal, and metaphysical, and Herodotus does not separate the three in the way later historians have learned to. The war happens because of things people said to each other centuries before the first Persian ship crossed the Aegean, and also because a particular king in a particular mood listened to bad advice rather than good, and also because the structure of the cosmos does not allow any single power to grow without limit. All three explanations are present in the text. Herodotus does not choose between them.

Where to follow it: Book 1, Ch. 1 — the Persian account of Io, Book 1, Ch. 4 — the Greeks refuse the exchange, Book 1, Ch. 153 — Cyrus dismisses Greek traders, Book 5, Ch. 1 — the Ionian Revolt and Athens’s fateful decision, Book 7, Ch. 1 — Xerxes deliberates on invasion.

More than half of the Histories, by word count, is not about war at all. It is about peoples — their geography, their customs, their religion, their forms of government, the strange ways they bury their dead and treat their cattle and reckon their years. Book 2, on Egypt, is the longest sustained ethnographic treatise we have from antiquity, and the first one anywhere in the European tradition that attempts to describe a foreign culture on something like its own terms.

Herodotus believes that customs are local, and that a people’s customs make sense within the conditions of their land — climate, river, terrain, neighbours. The famous example is his treatment of the Persians and the Egyptians, both of whom he respects, both of whom he describes from the inside as much as he can. He records the Persian custom of debating important matters first drunk and then sober so that decisions can be tested under both conditions. He records that the Egyptians do everything backward — women go to market, men weave at home; men carry burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. He is not condescending. He is curious.

The cosmopolitanism of the early chapters has, in modern times, given Herodotus a second life as one of the founders of comparative anthropology. Edward Said, who was sharply critical of much European ethnography of the East, made an exception for Herodotus’s seriousness about the cultures he described. Whether that judgment is right in detail, the Histories is the first work in the Western tradition that takes other peoples as worth careful description and not merely as enemies or barbarians.

The fact that the very word barbarian — foreign-tongued, non-Greek-speaking — does not in Herodotus carry the weight of contempt it later acquired is the simplest indicator of how he was working. A barbarian in the Histories can be admirable, wise, and worth listening to. Cyrus is a barbarian. So is Croesus, in his way. The category is linguistic, not moral. That distinction was not obvious to everyone in the fifth century BCE, and Herodotus’s maintenance of it is part of what makes the Histories remarkable.

Where to follow it: Book 1, Ch. 10 — Lydian customs introduced, Book 2, Ch. 1 — Egypt begins, Book 4, Ch. 1 — Scythian customs in full, Book 5, Ch. 1 — Thracian customs, Book 7, Ch. 35 — the great catalogue of Xerxes’s nations.

Herodotus has a doctrine of how power works in time, and the doctrine shapes the entire arc of his narrative. The pattern, which he names without quite naming it, is that human prosperity is unstable — that what rises far must fall, that the gods do not let any greatness go uncorrected, that pride invites the reversal that brings it down.

In Book 1 the Lydian king Croesus, having reached the height of his wealth, is visited by the Athenian Solon. Croesus shows Solon his treasures and asks who in the world Solon would call most happy. Solon names two unknown Greeks who died well, and refuses to call Croesus happy because his life is not yet over. Croesus dismisses him. A year or two later Croesus’s beloved son is killed in a hunting accident; not long after, his kingdom falls to Cyrus; on the pyre on which Cyrus has ordered him burned, Croesus calls out three times the name of Solon, and Cyrus, hearing the name, asks what it means and is moved by the reply to spare him. The whole sequence is a single demonstration of the doctrine.

The same pattern operates at scale. Cyrus dies on a foolish campaign against the Massagetae beyond the Oxus. Cambyses dies in Egypt in disgrace. Darius’s first invasion of Greece is destroyed at Marathon. Xerxes’s vast invasion is broken at Salamis and Plataea. The doctrine has a metaphysical grain and a political grain, and Herodotus does not separate them. To overreach is to invite the reversal; the gods, or fortune, or the structure of the cosmos, do not allow any single human power to grow without limit.

The doctrine is the shape of Greek tragedy moved into prose, and it gives the Histories its moral seriousness without ever turning it into a sermon. Herodotus is not a moralist hammering a point; he is a historian who has noticed a pattern and reports it honestly, including the cases where it is complicated. Themistocles, the architect of Salamis, ends his life as a guest at the Persian court he defeated. The pattern does not always resolve neatly. It is a structural observation, not a guarantee.

Where to follow it: Book 1, Ch. 30 — Solon visits Croesus, Book 1, Ch. 86 — Croesus on the pyre calls Solon’s name, Book 1, Ch. 214 — Cyrus dies against the Massagetae, Book 6, Ch. 114 — Marathon and the reversal of Darius, Book 8, Ch. 1 — Salamis and Xerxes on his throne.

Underneath the multicultural curiosity of the Histories runs a steady, unmistakable preference. Herodotus is a Greek of the fifth century, and he is convinced — and convinces his reader — that there is something in the constitutional life of the Greek city-states that produces, all things considered, a stronger and freer kind of human being than the great empires of the East are able to produce. The argument is made not by polemic but by accumulation.

The Persian system, however magnificent, depends on the will of one man; the Greek system, in the cities Herodotus most admires, depends on the laws those cities have given themselves. He records, in Book 7, the conversation between Xerxes and the exiled Spartan king Demaratus before Thermopylae. Xerxes asks how Greeks can possibly resist his enormous army when they are so few. Demaratus answers that the Greeks Xerxes is about to fight are fighting not for any king but for their own laws, and that they fear those laws more than Xerxes’s subjects fear him. The line is the heart of the book’s political theory.

The famous battles that follow — Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea — are presented less as triumphs of military skill (though they are also that) than as vindications of the proposition Demaratus has stated. A people fighting for its own laws will, in extremity, do things a people fighting for a king will not. The Athenians evacuate their city, watch it burn, return after the war, and rebuild. This is the kind of thing free citizens do.

The doctrine has been read as Greek chauvinism, and it is, but it is also one of the founding statements of the Western political idea that constitutional self-government produces a different and tougher kind of citizen than autocracy can. The doctrine runs straight through to Pericles’s funeral oration in Thucydides a generation later, and from there into every later defence of free institutions. Book 3 also contains the first comparative discussion of constitutions in European literature: Otanes argues for democracy, Megabyzus for oligarchy, Darius for monarchy, before Darius wins and takes the throne.

Where to follow it: Book 3, Ch. 84 — the great debate on constitutions, Book 5, Ch. 1 — Ionian cities prefer self-rule to Persian order, Book 7, Ch. 73 — Demaratus explains Greek freedom to Xerxes, Book 7, Ch. 182 — Thermopylae begins, Book 8, Ch. 1 — Salamis.