Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

And so he's looking at the Spartans thinking, oh, this is curious.

Like, why do you have it like this?

And there's all sorts of traditions surrounding the kingship that he can describe because other Greeks just don't know them, don't have them.

But you also can really tell that his way of telling the history of the Spartans in this period

is not a history of political campaigns and motives and policies and conquests and sieges and battles.

There is some of that, but most of that history, most of the things he's able to tell us are essentially dynastic stories, right?

So they're stories about how someone came to be born after a long period of infertility in a marriage, or how someone was exiled after a conflict between their rival king, things like that.

And these stories seem very much like sort of the court stories that we hear about from the Persian empire,

They suggest that Herodotus' sources for Sparta were very much these royal households maintaining something of a history of what had gone on with them, which he sort of weaves into his more general narrative about Greek affairs.

Yeah, so we are always a little bit worried about Herodotus already giving us this kind of image of the Persians that the Greeks really reveled in, right?

This idea of these despots with unlimited power who are clearly sort of corrupted by this, right?

Who are turned into these men of great sort of loyalty.

lust and violence and excess and indifference to the lives of their subjects.

He really does indulge in that in some cases, but there's very much this sense of narrative balance.

There are good kings and bad kings.

There is very much this pattern where Cyrus is great, Cambyses is a monster.

Darius is great, Xerxes is a monster.

There's very much that sort of back and forth between the fathers are good, the sons are bad, which also recurs in his stories about Greek tyrants.

So there's always like the first one is actually good and stable and helping people.

And the second one is the despotic excesses of luxury, decadence, and violence.