Introduction
Herodotus was a Greek historian widely referred to as ‘The Father of History’. He lived in the fifth century BC and was a contemporary of Socrates. A major figure in Greek history, he was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigation. He collected his materials systematically and critically, and then proceeded to arrange them into a historiographic narrative. Even though he is known to have produced only one work, ‘The Histories’, a record of his “inquiry” on the origins of the Grecco-Persian Wars, this single work is regarded as the first great narrative history produced in the ancient world. He was believed to be a wide traveler, wandering over a large part of the Persian Empire, covering Egypt and Elephantine, and also visited numerous other places like Libya, Syria, Babylonia, Susa in Elam, Lydia, and Phrygia. He spent several years of his life exploring far away kingdoms and empires, and gained extensive experience and knowledge. One of the Herodotus’ remarkable features was that he narrated history in a storyteller’s manner, often inserting amusing anecdotes and interesting dialogues. Even though some of his accounts are believed to be inaccurate, he remains the leading source of original information of Greek history for the period between 550 and 479 BC.
Childhood and Early life
Not much is known about Herodotus’ life. Scholars often turn to his own writing for information about his life. He is believed to have been born at Halicarnassus around 484 BC. According to some sources, he was the son of Lyxes and Dryo, and the brother of Theodorus, and was also related to Panyassis, an epic poet of the time. His family was an influential one. His writings reveal love for the island of Samos which is taken as an indication that he might have lived there in his youth. There is a chance that his family was involved in an uprising against Lygdamis, leading to a period of exile on Samos. The family, influential as it was, might have even had a personal hand in the tyrant’s eventual fall.
Later Years
Herodotus probably began travelling as a young man. He went to Egypt sometime after 454 BC or possibly earlier. According to his eye-witness accounts, he might have been associated with Athenians. He is believed to have travelled next to Tyre and then down the Euphrates to Babylon. During this time he became involved in local politics which made him unpopular in Halicarnassus. So he migrated to Periclean Athens, a city known for its democratic institutions, in 447 BC. There he became acquainted with leading citizens such as the Alcmaeonids clan. He soon became a respected citizen in the region and was granted a financial reward by the Athenian assembly in recognition of his work. He migrated to Thurium as part of an Athenian sponsored colony in 443 BC, or shortly afterwards. He visited many places over his lifetime. In addition to Egypt, he also visited Libya, Syria, Babylonia, Susa in Elam, Lydia, and Phrygia. He also travelled up the Hellespont (now Dardanelles) to Byzantium and went to Thrace and Macedonia. In addition he journeyed along the northern shores of the Black Sea as far as the Don River and some way inland. He was a prolific writer, best known for ‘The Histories’, his narrative on the Greco-Persian Wars. The work is believed to have taken several years of his later life though it is not known when, where, or in what order it was written. It is probable that he began working on it much earlier in life though it was completed only during his last years. His seminal work covers the wars between Greece and Persia (499–479 BC) and their preliminaries. ‘The Histories’ is divided into nine books, each describing a different aspect of the wars. The work also contains considerable material on the description of geography, social structure, and history of the Persian Empire. Even though he is acclaimed as an important Greek historian, the accuracy of his works has been controversial since his own era. Several prominent personalities like Cicero, Aristotle, Josephus, Duris of Samos and Plutarch have commented on this controversy. However, modern historians and philosophers generally take a more positive view.
Nature of His Investigations
Herodotus’ work is known by the Greek word ‘historia’, which essentially means researches, or inquiry, though the word later on came to mean ‘story’, or account. Thus the classical Greek ‘historia’ mean ‘a learning by inquiry: knowledge or information obtained by inquiry’ and also ‘a narration of what one has learnt’. This word, of course, became our word ‘history’, and in this sense the modern discipline of history was born directly from the long tradition established by Herodotus (though reborn with new archival and rationalist inputs after the Renaissance). If so, Herodotus is one of the most formative thinkers ever born, since for history as the systematic analysis of past events remains one of the dominant paradigms of modern thought.
The opening lines of the Histories reads::
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, his Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict.
This simple statement may seem very ordinary; it is exactly what we would expect an historian to do. This is what is surprising: the first Western historian whose work has come to down to us in any detail demonstrates a self-conscious role in relation to posterity, i.e. the preservation of an understanding of the past for present and future generations. This suggests that there had been considerable shifts in thinking and awareness in the fifth century B.C.E. to allow this mode of analysis to develop. Notice also that Herodotus has provided himself with three rather distinct tasks; ‘a general concern with the preservation of records of human affairs; the more particular interest in the deeds of Greeks and barbarians; and the aetiological or scientific interest in discovering the cause of conflict’. Beyond this, however, Herodotus is also concerned to provide an investigation of the moral claims and values of his key protagonists; the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes are both imbedded in the theme of dangerous and unjust military campaigns which rebound against them.
Arnaldo Momigliano argues that the works of the two first major Greek historians known to us, Herodotus and Thucydides, are ‘rooted in the intellectual revolution of the fifth century and derive their full significance from it. This is the time in which tragedy, comedy, medicine, philosophy and eloquence were either created or transformed. Even if we did not know that Sophocles was a friend of Herodotus, we would perceive the latter’s connections with the former in moral, religious, and political feelings.’ Eloquence, here, refers to the arts of oratory of public speaking, which were a crucial part of Greek education and the political life of the Greek city-states. However, there are very real differences between history in its method of investigation and expression to these other disciplines, even though it was influenced by their achievements. In particular, the assessment of causes, and the distinction between mere symptoms and underlying ‘real’ causes may have been influenced by the body of medical practice and medical tracts which emerged in the 6th and 5th centuries, perhaps especially influenced by Ionian medicine. This trend, however, is stronger in the later works of Thucydides than in Herodotus.
Herodotus wrote in ‘simple speech’, that is, prose rather than the poetic forms preferred by Homer, Hesiod. As well as other early philosophers and poets. Dionysus of Halicarnassus, a later literary critic who wrote during the age of Augustus, stated that Herodotus had several predecessors and contemporaries in this kind of writing. They wrote accounts of their own and other cities, of Greek and foreign peoples, and published official records as well as legends.
Herodotus as “The Father of History”
The origin meaning of the word historia had been that of an investigation. The discipline of history as we know it today simply had not existed in Greece before this time. Nor were the religious records and king-lists of Egypt and the Near East anything like what we would call history, though the royal annals of the later Hittite Empire do come close in the critical recording of information.
Exactly what history is and should be is a debate which has raged from ancient times through to major contemporary debates. For some history is basically a kind of social science which deals with past events in a meaningful way, while for others history is an interpretative art which can never quite achieve a scientific status. Without discussing these positions in detail, we can note that there were there are three significant ways in which Herodotus does something very similar to modern historians::
* Herodotus preserves a range of evidence, accounts and opinions, even if he is doubtful of some of this information, or in the end disagrees with the received account. In this way, historia is not merely a personal viewpoint on past events, but an investigation from which others can profit even if they don’t agree with that particular historian’s conclusions. His notion of preservation of ‘data’ shifts Herodotus away from a presenter of mere opinion to a preserver of evidence and viewpoints.
* The historian, even though he looks at a wide range of information, is nonetheless selective in what he includes in his account. This selectively should not be based so much on personal bias, but as part of an attempt to structure a meaningful narrative which can provide some coherent picture of past events. If the historian in the end is unable to completely explain what has happened, he is still obliged to provide as accurate a description as possible of the relevant events.
* The historian is able to critically assess the evidence he marshals by a variety of means; either through the use of logic and common sense, through personal inspection of whatever evidence remains, or by critically comparing different accounts which he has received.
Herodotus at times engages in each of these three critical activities, though his account is still tinged with religious and mythical viewpoints. However, he will sometimes cite a source, such as Hecataeus to explicitly disagree with them, and at other times recounts stories but states that he doesn’t believe them.
In brief, Herodotus is quite effective in meeting the first two criteria: his evidence is both extensive and molded into a large-scale account of the background and the conduct of the Persian War. He also begins to look at this evidence critically; for example, he assesses the idea that Egypt is the gift of the Nile by quoting soundings from ships which show that silt from the Nile extends for many miles out to sea north of the Delta, indicating that most of southern Egypt had been built up from the layers of silt brought down by the river over aeons, i.e. the Delta really is ‘a gift of the Nile’. Likewise, he will not accept that there is a sea to the north of Europe because he has not been able to speak to someone who has seen it with his own eyes (although Herodotus in the end was wrong on this point, his principle of research remains valid). It is this critical assessment of the evidence which allows an advance in the systematic analysis of the past.
Herodotus was also one of the first Greek writers, along with Hecataeus, to effectively build an extended prose narrative. So far as we know he “was the first European historian and remains, in many respects among the greatest; he was also the first European writer to use prose as an artistic medium. The art of Greek prose was Herodotus’ invention. At the same time his prose was not without poetic phrasing. Thus he is often viewed as the most Homeric of writers, using a wide range of expression that would made aid his reading aloud of sections of the work.
Momigliano states that Herodotus ‘seems to have been the first to produce an analytical description of a war, the Persian war. Furthermore he was probably the first to use ethnographical and constitutional studies in order to explain the war itself and to account for the outcome. Beyond this, his study represents a major shift away from mythical and poetic narratives as a means of experiencing the past. He attempts to explain events in the light of a wide-ranging study of cultural, political and military affairs, making him something of the ‘social historian’. Many of his comments may seem rather naive to us today; but this does not reduce the fundamental break between the type of account provided between Homer and Hesiod on the one hand, and Herodotus and Thucydides on the other. Furthermore, Herodotus tends to build up complex accounts where different events in Egypt, Persia, Asia Minor and Europe all converge to create a great period of crisis. Instead of a narrow view of immediate causes, we have a much stronger picture concerned with ‘social facts’ and with a ‘structural causality’ where historical processes rather than a mere chronology are fundamental.
Conclusion
History and the writing of history (historiography) is one way of capturing the present for the future, and alternatively of making the present more meaningful by relating it to the past. It is both a powerful and dangerous tool – used properly, it empowers us with a deeper perspective of the relationships in our world, misused, it can become a kind of trap from which holds us in an invented and biased past.
– Dr. N. AmuthaKumari
Asst.Prof of History, Scott Christian College (Autonomous), Nagercoil.
References
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2) Aubrey de Selincourt, Herodotus, The Histories, Harmondsworth-Penguin, 1972.
3) Godley. A., Herodotus Histories, London-Heinemann, 1960.
4) Africa. T.W., Herodotus and Diodorus, Egypt, 1963.
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6) Alan. B., Herodotus’ Account of Pharaonic History, Historia, 1988.
7) Lloyd. B., Herodotus Book II, Leiden, 1976.
8) Marwick, The Nature of History, 3rd ed., Chicago, 1989.
9) Lloyd, Alan B., Herodotus Account of Pharaonic History, Historia, 1988.
10) Hunter, Virginia Past and Process in Herodotus and Thucydides, Princeton, 1982.