Herodotus of Thurii

According to Aristotle, the first sentence of the Histories introduced it as the work 'of Herodotus of Thurii'. Thurii was a panhellenic colony founded during Herodotus' lifetime (probably 444/443 BCE) under the guidance of Athens, initially by invitation of the Sybarites, on the site of the former Achaean city of Sybaris. It represented, to a great extent, a brilliant communal experiment. After the departure of the old Sybarites, the colony became, or at least strove to be, a polis for all Greeks, internally mixed, egalitarian and democratic. If Aristotle is correct, Herodotus' identification with this project at the beginning of his work carries certain ideological consequences.

On the eve of the battle of Salamis, Themistocles declares to the uncooperative Greek allies that the Athenians might leave their home and move to Siris (8.62.2). If 'Herodotus of Thurii' is the first Italian reference in the work, Themistocles' threat is the last. In both passages, implicitly or explicitly, Italy is a place where one starts a new life. By travelling the distance between the one and the other, we will begin to derive from the scattered evidence in the Histories Herodotus' unified vision of the Italian West.

Herodotus being so miraculous, and the Herodotean urge to seek origins still being so strong with us, the desire to historicise him remains irresistible. Knowing what lay around and behind him could make clearer what was unique about him; it could, assuming an agreed definition of history, tell us whether he really was its Father. It happens that we do have a certain amount of information - desperately fragmentary, permitting only the smallest number of verifiable hypotheses - about his predecessors and contemporaries. But in truth, if one wishes to know what relationship exists between Herodotus and his colleagues, it is best to look first in Herodotus' own text.

Herodotus is frequently argumentative and judgemental. From the very first chapters he rejects foolish opinions, weighs up conflicting evidence, makes firm pronouncements on method: were it not for his winning charm, one could find all this very irritating (as indeed some readers have). For all its prominence, however, scholars have only recently begun to relate this feistiness to Herodotus' conception of himself as an historian. For it is obvious (now) that he must be arguing with someone, and a close study of the intellectual terrain over which these battles and negotiations are being conducted can do much to illuminate Herodotus' situation as a writer.

The scope of the Histories, covering anthropology and geography, early origins and the grand narrative of Greek-barbarian relations culminating in the Persian Wars, is not to be found in any writer we know of before Herodotus. The story of the Persian Wars themselves has been called 'the greatest continuous prose narrative in Greek literature, and a literary masterpiece', but of course the Histories is more than a narrative, encompassing descriptions of virtually all the peoples of the known world. The Iliad and Odyssey could provide a model for narrative history, and remained the measure against which Herodotus and Thucydides set their histories. Herodotus opens with a promise to tell of the 'great and wondrous deeds' both of Greeks and of barbarians, to preserve the past before it gets forgotten, and show the cause (aitie) of the conflict. That aitie encompasses the many facets of the past, even the remote past, which could explain the Greek-barbarian conflict, and the past and present achievements, lands, peoples, customs, on either side.

It is not easy to pin down the antecedents of the Histories, still less the intellectual background. We can see points of contact between the Histories and certain Presocratic natural philosophers of the sixth-century Ionian Enlightenment, and they share a desire to make sense of the world in non-mythical and non-genealogical terms, which we could call 'rational'. Herodotus' contemporary world is also significant. A writer's background involves looking at earlier influences, but this can marginalise the question of interaction with or reaction to his contemporaries.

Towards the beginning of the fifth century BCE the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus observed that 'war is the father of all things' (VS 22 B 53); perhaps he was influenced by the contemporary turmoil in Ionia, as the burdens of Persian rule increasingly pressed down the eastern Greeks. As John Gould remarks, however, Heraclitus' statement reveals a central truth that in the early twenty-first century we also acknowledge. Like Heraclitus and after him Herodotus, we too see war as 'the ultimate expression and at the same time the ultimate theatre for the “display” of “great and astonishing achievements”, a theatre where success and failure are visible to all and awesome in their consequences'. It was Herodotus' goal that these 'great and astonishing achievements' should not be forgotten, as he notes in the preface to his Histories. Yet while he recognised the heroism of men in battle, he was also an acute and critical observer of the horror of war and of its ironies - including the bitter irony that some conflicts were necessary, while others were not.

Charming beyond all other ancient authors, Herodotus surely never sank from view. His home city in Asia Minor was always proud of him: a recently discovered long poem, inscribed on stone and dating from the second century BCE, celebrates the glories of Halicarnassus, including the 'prose Homer, Herodotus'. And his statue stood in the royal library of Hellenistic Pergamum. Did his work continue to be recited in later centuries as it certainly was in his lifetime? We can be certain only of literary reception, but we should not forget that Greek culture continued to be oral long after the arrival of widespread literacy and that this most memorable of historians may have exerted influence in informal ways as well as via the written papyrus roll. The only specific mention of Hellenistic public recitation of Herodotus, in the theatre at Alexandria, is not usable if we adopt the standard emendation to 'Hesiod'. The other author there said to have been recited is Homer, who is the reason for emending the other name; but it is tempting to keep 'Herodotus' and juxtapose the poetic and the prose Homer, as above.

Herodotus' Histories is a work of startling originality; there are no preexisting categories that capture the work's multifaceted nature. It can be read as historiography (tragic and epic, universal and local), ethnography, geography, oracular warning, and much more. To see the work in terms of any of these genres to the exclusion of others would be an arbitrary reduction of the whole to one of its component parts. And to see it as an 'early' instance of any of them would create a retrojection of modern assumptions that would exclude much of the living text's multifaceted reality. What would be lost is the context for which it was originally designed. Herodotus may write for posterity, but he practises historiē - his own unique kind of investigation into the world he inhabits - on his own terms.

What applies to the context of Herodotus' ambitious project of historiē is no less true of its style. Herodotus' own term for his discourse is logos. Epic and prosaic, colloquial and elevated, oral and literate, Herodotus' discourse defies categorisation just as much as content does. Indeed, to make a distinction between the context and its 'style', or between Herodotus' investigations and their linguistic articulation, is misleading. Historiē, the quest for the 'cause' of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians, is achieved in and through the logos that Herodotus presents to us.

The Histories begins with Herodotus' retelling of the Persian account of the origin of the enmity between the Greeks and the barbarians. He traces it back to the abductions of the four mythical women Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. It is, in particular, according to the Persians, because of the Greek decision to retrieve Helen and thereby put an end to a pattern of reciprocal abduction whereby one woman is replaced by another, that a situation of permanent enmity was created (1.4.4):

In this account of the beginning of the conflict, the culmination of the series of abductions and the physical marker of the enmity is the emergence of a fixed difference between Asia, inhabited by the Persians and other barbarians, and Europe, inhabited by the Greeks. Herodotus seems to stress not only the fixity, at least in the minds of the Persians, of this division between the continents but also, and perhaps more importantly, the created nature of this division. This separation between the continents did not always exist but was created by a process of historical differentiation. At the beginning of the prologue Herodotus speaks merely of the difference (diaphorē) between the Greeks and the Persians, but by the end of the narrative of the abductions, this difference has grown into a deep schism marked by an emphatic, though imagined, geographical boundary.

The Histories contains a great deal of information about specific elements of Greek religion, from sacrificial practice to oracles delivered at Delphi, but questions about the general role of religion in the work and about Herodotus' own religious attitudes suggest themselves to every reader and are the natural focus of a brief account. What distinguishes Herodotus' treatment of religion from that of other writers? Is there an overarching religious theme in the Histories? Can we construct a Herodotean theology? Difficulty in answering these questions is caused by the contrast between Herodotus' largely uncritical handling of religious material and his few critical or sceptical statements of general import. Most scholars focus on the former and neglect or explain away the latter; others, notably Burkert, stress the scepticism without adequately reconciling it with the usual, uncritical treatment. I attempt such a reconciliation here, primarily on the basis of Herodotus' ambivalent attitude to custom and convention (nomos).