Chapter 1: What drove Herodotus to write The Histories?
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What Herodotus from Halicarnassus has learnt by inquiry is here set forth, in order that so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners, and especially the reason why they warred against each other, may not lack renown.
Herodotus is known as the father of history. Immortalised through his great surviving work written 2,500 years ago, a dramatic narrative of the Persian invasions of Greece An attempt to explain the origins of hostility between Greeks and non-Greeks, what they called barbarians.
An ethnography, exploring beliefs and legends of these foreign peoples who lived across the Mediterranean world and beyond. It's known as The Histories, a paragon work of ancient non-fiction that has fascinated people for centuries. In this episode,
We're going to explore what is known about Herodotus and some of the key themes from his histories with our fan-favourite returning guest, Dr. Raoul Caninodike. Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Herodotus, the father of history. Raoul, it is great to have you back on the podcast. Welcome back. So good to be back, Tristan. Thanks for having me.
You're more than welcome. And this is the second time we've done it in person. We did the Spartan Warrior a couple of years ago now.
Yeah, it was a while ago, actually.
But here we're talking about, I guess, something related to the Greco-Persian Wars. But Herodotus, he feels of all the ancient historical accounts that we have, he feels like the big one, at least with ancient Greek history.
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Chapter 2: How did Herodotus earn the title 'Father of History'?
So do we know at least where he came from? Does he actually come from ancient Greece?
He did not come, strictly speaking, from the Greek world. He came from the Persian Empire, but a Greek part of it, or a Greek and Carian part of it. He opens his histories by introducing himself. He says, I'm Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Right. Halicarnassus is in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey.
So that's Caria that you mentioned.
That's Caria, right. But on the coast, you get sort of more and more Hellenized communities. And so Herodotus, while his name is obviously very Greek, sort of gift of Hera, quite a lot of people suspect that at least one of his parents was Carian. So this is the local population that has sort of interacted with the Greeks for centuries by this point.
It's a community that is ruled by the Persians, but it is locally autonomous. So there are local rulers that govern this area who are themselves sort of Carian, but Hellenized Carian people. And so Herodotus is from this community, but it seems as though his father was involved potentially in a coup in Halicarnassus or in some kind of political upheaval.
So he was driven out, which means that Herodotus actually grew up in Samos, which is very much part of the Aegean Greek world.
And that's an island just off the coast from Halicarnassus.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, you mentioned there in passing, which was really interesting, the name Herodotus, so Herodotus. What did you say it meant?
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Chapter 3: What do we know about Herodotus' life and background?
Herodotus tells this story to kind of indicate more broadly that there are so many different ways of living in the world and there isn't a single one that is right.
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You also mentioned India there. So although Herodotus doesn't seem like, from what you were saying, he visited India, he seems pretty well-researched. What do we know about the extent of his knowledge of the geography of the world at that time? Does he see India right at the edges?
So he does know more than I think most of the other authors of his time. He has a much broader worldview, partly because of his travels and partly because that is what he's interested in. He's interested in particular in describing the Persian Empire and all its pluriformity.
And the Persians would have happily helped him with this because that actually corresponds a lot with their royal ideology. They're always stressing how many peoples they rule over, the vast extent of their empire. They're trying to express the far corners of it in order to say, look at this geographical span. But even for Herodotus, it was very difficult to see beyond that.
So when you get past the borders of the spaces and the peoples that the Persians essentially have interacted with, or the Greeks themselves, but more likely the Persian, you get into very fuzzy territory.
And quite literally, you know, when he goes north inland into Central Asia, he says, okay, first there are the Scythians, but then beyond them, there's the Amazons, and beyond them, there are like people eaters. and then beyond them.
And you get this sort of increasing sort of fantastical idea of people's living in faraway places become more and more extreme and more and more divorced from what's normal and less and less reliable as an indicator of the actual ethnography of the world.
And do we also get a sense then if he's more focused on the Persian Empire and the Greek world in the eastern Mediterranean area? Does he know less then about the western Mediterranean? I'm thinking maybe like, of course you've got Marseilles, don't you? That's a Greek colony and the Carthaginians and Sicily and so on.
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Chapter 4: How did Herodotus' travels influence his writings?
And then we kind of have to wait for maybe not even Thucydides, who doesn't know all that much about Sparta, but for instance, Xenophon in the fourth century, who tells us a lot more in detail. And so Herodotus is one of those great beacons when we were interested in Sparta. And he shows us what it was like in the fifth century, for which we have very little else.
So it's actually really, really helpful, not least because of his ethnographic interest, because he takes an interest in Sparta that goes beyond just what they did. And he tries to find out something about the story of how they got to being the leaders of the Greek world around the time of the Persian Wars, which is invaluable.
Are there things that he finds particularly peculiar about the Spartans compared to other Greeks? As you mentioned, it doesn't seem that he pays other Greek cities, their cultures and traditions as much attention as the Spartans. Is there a key reason for that in what they did and how they acted?
Yeah, so it's very interesting. He's very interested in Spartan kingship in particular, because that is something the Spartans have that most other Greek communities don't. I mean, you get some kings in Cyrene, for instance, in Libya, and you get kings in, or maybe they're tyrants, maybe they're kings in the Greeks of the Bosporan kingdom, so Crimea.
But in mainland Greece, kings have gone out of style. 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.
If we go to the court stories of the Persians next and kind of focus on the Persians in Herodotus' histories, does it feel that he really delves into those fascinating details of some of the more intrigue parts of the stories? Yes, no, stories of certain Persian kings and several narratives about the deaths of some of them and some of them really having pretty brutal deaths.
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