Taking Herodotus Personally

P. A. Cartledge

Classical World, Volume 102, Number 4, Summer 2009, pp. 371-382 (Article)

Published by Classical Association of the Atlantic StatesDOI: 10.1353/clw.0.0131

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* This is a slightly revised, and lightly annotated, version of my keynote ad-dress to the Ranieri Colloquium on Ancient Studies, NYU, March 28, 2007, entitled “Herodotus Then and Now: the Personal and the Political.” Thanks must go—first and foremost—to our sponsors at NYU, Mr. Sal Ranieri and the Center for Ancient Studies (in the person of Dean Matthew Santirocco, together with his indefatigable assistant, Ken Kidd), in conjunction with the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (in the person of Dean Mary Brabeck). Next, to the Hellenic Parliament (who also most generously support my visiting “Global Distinguished Pro-fessorship” chair at NYU) and to the Greek Government’s Ministry of Culture. Finally, to my co-conspirator Phil Mitsis, and to the Colloquium’s other speakers and panel chairs and respondents, some of whom travelled truly Herodotean distances to share the fruits of their historiê and their great wisdom. Since March 2007 I have delivered further versions as lectures, first as the Peter A. Vlachos speaker, Colby College, Sept. 20, 2007; then as the 18th W. K. Pritchett Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Nov. 5, 2007; penultimately as Professeur Associé at the E.H.E.S.S., Dec. 12, 2007; and finally to the Edinburgh and South East branch of the Classical Association of Scotland, Jan. 9, 2008. For their kind invitations and generous hospitality, I am most grateful to, respectively, Yossi Roisman; Erich Gruen and Ron Hendel; Claude Calame and François Hartog; and Gavin Kelly, Sandra Bingham, and Andrew Erskine.

1 Choice of the term “odyssey” was not exactly coincidental or innocent: not for nothing has Herodotus himself been seen as a sort of modern (that is, 5th-century b.c.e.) Odysseus, and I had in mind also Hartog’s brilliant Mémoire d’Ulysse, regarding which I was proud to have had a part in ensuring that it got published in English translation too. I have found my former Clare College student Richard Charlton’s unpublished Oxford M.St. dissertation, “Herodotus: an explorer in the Odyssean mould?” 2007), exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking.

2 The essay is organized roughly by decades, but there seems always to be room for argument over whether e.g. 1980 is the last year of the “1970s” (strictly, it is) or the first year of the “1980s” (intuitively, it seems as though it should be, but again strictly it is not), so I shall not make a fetish of that.

3 C. B. R. Pelling, “Homer and Herodotus,” in M. Clarke, B. Currie, and R. O. A. M.Lyne, eds., Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the epic tradition, presented to Jasper Griffin by former pupils (Oxford 2006) 75–104.

taking HerodotuS perSonally*

ABSTRACT: Herodotus was the modern—that is, fifth-century b.c.e.—Odys-seus. His pioneering investigative “odyssey” of research and travel among the cities of men and peoples, both Greek and non-Greek, is the primary focus of this article. The past couple of decades has seen an extraordinary flowering of scholarship and other kinds of study, both on Herodotus’ work and on the wars, the history of which he wrote up and in a sense invented. The article aims to mark the major signposts, decade by decade, using as an Ariadne’s thread the author’s own life trajectory from the 1960s to the present day.

This essay has three main aims: to conduct the reader, in chrono-logical sequence, on what I have called orally a “personal odyssey” through my own weird and wonderful encounters with Herodotus over the past four or so decades;1 second, to illustrate just some of the (many) cruxes of Herodotean scholarship which I either have been exposed to or have attempted to solve in my own humble way during those same four decades; and, third, in particular to raise once again the old question of “truth” and truth-telling in the writing of history.2

In my own life’s odyssey I personally came to Herodotus relatively late—in comparison, that is, with my first encounter with Herodotus’ ultimate model and inspiration, Homer.3 Or rather, with Homer as “told

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to the children,” since I was in fact aged just eight at the time, in 1955, when I first read my stripped-down (and indeed stripped-off) versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.4 I vividly remember admiring Achilles enormously—not least because the color picture at the front of my little Iliad book showed him off as a radiant blond bombshell, a sort of Brad Pitt avant la lettre (or jupe),5 clad in the wonderfully shiny armour just fashioned for him by the lame craftsman god Hep-haestus. But if my head went out to Achilles, my heart was lost to no semidivine hero, or even god or goddess, let alone any mortal man or woman, but rather to—a dog. Argos (Odyssey 17.290–305) had been the finest and fleetest of King Odysseus’ pack of hunting dogs when his master left for Troy. Twenty years later, though condemned to lie flea-ridden and neglected on a palace dungheap and though dim of sight, he still was able to see through Odysseus’ divinely assisted and otherwise impenetrable beggar’s disguise. However, the effort of recognition and the joy it brought him were too much for the poor old hound, who collapsed in a heap, dead. Odysseus, I read, shed a silent tear; as for me, I howled out loud and wept buckets, in the privacy of my bedroom, for fully half an hour.6

As a boy, I attended the sort of anciently established (1509) private school in London where one started learning Latin at eight, ancient Greek at eleven, and, by the time one left for university, aged seventeen or eighteen, was supposed to be able to compose—sight unseen, no dictionaries, lexicons, or grammar books allowed—iambic Greek trimeters in the style of Sophocles and golden Latin periodic prose at least “in the manner of” Cicero.7 While still at secondary school, I read for translation and comment the whole of Lucan’s Sil-ver Latin verse epic Pharsalia, a then little-read or valued text, but not a word of Herodotus’ Histories. I think probably we were kept away from him because his prose dialect was epic-Ionic and not the more or less “standard” Attic dialect employed by Thucydides and Demosthenes (they being no more easy to translate, actually, but far more relevant for prose composition, to the spills and thrills of which we privately educated schoolboys of the 1960s were of course all still dedicated). So it was not until I went up as an undergraduate to Oxford, in 1965, that I first came to grips with Herodotus—all of

4 Told to the Children: Stories from the Iliad and Told to the Children: Stories from the Odyssey were both by Jeanie Lang, with color illustrations by W. Heath Robinson.

5 Pitt starred memorably in Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Troy (2004): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332452/.

6 Argos has quite a distinguished posterity, including illustrations by Flaxman and Daumier, but no manifestation as extraordinary, perhaps, as the fact that he has given his name to an internet search engine: see Richard Poynder, http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2080429/modern-tools-ancient-historians.

7 I was blessed with two exceptionally able teachers: E. P. C. Cotter and W. W. Cruickshank: something of the latter’s qualities may be appreciated from the Fest-schrift devoted to him by former pupils: APODOSIS. Essays Presented to Dr W. W. Cruickshank to Mark his Eightieth Birthday (privately printed for St. Paul’s School, London, 1992). Contributors included Alan Cameron, Michael Crawford, Philip Hardie, John North, Robert Parker, and Martin West, as well as myself.

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him, I think—in the original. I read him on and off between 1965 and 1969, but mainly during the academic year 1967–1968, when my Greek history tutor was the redoubtable Geoffrey de Ste. Croix.8

Ste. Croix was a dedicated Thucydides man. That is to say, not simply did he prefer Thucydides to Herodotus, so far as the inevitable comparison of the two great fifth-century b.c.e. Greek historians was concerned. He also considered Thucydides to be the ne plus ultra, the ideal type, the Platonic Form, almost, of The Historian.9 Ste. Croix himself “came out” as it were in his near-total and unadulter-ated admiration of Thucydides in his extraordinary, bottom-heavy book, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972).10 And he was fond of joking that he would accept the truth of the Ciceronian tag according to which Herodotus was the “Father of History” (de Leg. 1.5), but only in the sense that History itself (or herself?) was born in the next generation—that is, with Thucydides.

Not that Ste. Croix was entirely anti-Herodotus, by any means. For instance, he much preferred him to a certain Charles Hignett, to name but one of his fellow Oxonian ancient historians whose views he vigorously, if usually privately, contested. Moreover, he agreed fully with R. G. Collingwood that Herodotus was “one of the great innovating geniuses of the fifth century.”11 But when Ste. Croix came eventually to publish an article specifically on Herodotus, in 1977 (in a broadly directed classical journal), he could not resist retelling what he considered a classic exemplification of Herodotus’ deficiencies as a critical historian. This was his account in Book 3 of the diplomatic relations between the Greek ruler Polycrates, tyrant of the east Aegean island-city of Samos in the 530s and 520s, and Ahmose—in Greek Amasis—Pharaoh of still free Egypt.12 The story went something like this. The two protagonists had been thrown together by a mutual fear and loathing of the mighty Achaemenid Persian empire rising to their east; founded by Cyrus the Great c.550, it had reached as far west as the Aegean seaboard—within sight of Samos—inside a decade. As Herodotus told the tale, it was Amasis who broke off diplomatic relations with Polycrates, on the grounds that his Greek friend seemed to him to be simply too fortunate. This fact had been brought home

8 Together with David Harvey I co-edited a Festschrift to mark de Ste. Croix’s 75th birthday: originally published as History of Political Thought vol. 6.1–2 (1985), it was reissued jointly by Imprint Academic (Exeter) and Duckworth (London) that same year, as a book entitled CRUX. Essays in Greek History Presented to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday. Thanks must go respectively to Janet Coleman (HPT) and the late Colin Haycraft (Duckworth).The punning “CRUX” of the title was owed to a suggestion of the late, great Mike Jameson.

9 “Almost,” because he judged Plato to be one of the three greatest enemies of mankind—the other members of his unholy trinity being (St.) Paul and (St.) Augustine.

10 It was weighted and freighted with Appendix after Appendix, no fewer than 47 all told.

11 R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History, 2nd ed., (Oxford, 1993) 28. Colling-wood’s order of preference exactly reversed that of Ste. Croix; indeed, he felt that, whereas Herodotus was the inventor of “scientific” (his term) history, Thucydides’s work came dangerously close to being anti-historical.

12 Hdt. 3.39–43, with Ste. Croix, “Herodotus,” Greece & Rome2 24 (1977) 130–48.

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to him, typically enough in Herodotus, by the sort of moral fairytale that appealed greatly to our historian. For when the exceptionally, or rather excessively, fortunate Polycrates had gone to great lengths to hurl a valuable finger-ring of his into the sea, precisely in order to try to avert the bad luck that proverbially attended excessive fortune, it was nevertheless returned to him in mint condition from within the belly of an extra-large fish.

To Ste. Croix, however, this story was just a miserable attempt to fabricate pseudo-history out of a widespread folkloric tale (the returned ring motif was not even exclusively Greek, let alone peculiar to Polycrates)—just the sort of thing that Ste. Croix’s hero Thucydides had castigated as “the mythic,” and had deliberately sought rigor-ously to exclude from his own work.13 A further reason for doubting the veracity of the storyline was that it involved the application of the wholly Greek doctrine of “nothing to excess,” a doctrine utterly inappropriate therefore for the mentality of an Egyptian pharaoh (of all personages). And finally, to cap it all off, Herodotus had got the historical sequence and therefore its causality exactly the wrong way round. For what must really have happened—argued Ste. Croix—was that tyrant Polycrates, seeing Persia under Cyrus’s possibly crazed son Cambyses poised to swallow the much bigger fish of Egypt, had broken off diplomatic relations with Amasis, in the hope—vain, as it was to prove—of persuading the Persians to leave him and his tyranny alone. Thus, for Ste. Croix, Herodotus in this one emblem-atic passage was guilty of multiple historiographical sins, not the least of them being a lack of that rational historical judgment with which his beloved Thucydides was so richly endowed. So much for those Oxford colleagues of his—George Forrest not least—whom he accused scornfully of committing Herodot-olatry, an unquestioning hero worship of the historian from Halicarnassus.14 Given that sort of outlook in my principal ancient Greek history teacher, it is easy to see why I, when I graduated from Oxford in 1969, should not have been entertaining the rosiest possible perspective on our man.

By the time the above-mentioned article of Ste. Croix was pub-lished, eight years further on, I had completed my Oxford doctorate (1975) and was indeed already holding my third full-time, and second potentially permanent, job.15 Which brings me to my second Herodo-tean encounter. While researching my doctoral dissertation, from 1969

13 Thuc. 1.22.4 (το µυθωδες).14 P. Derow and R. Parker, eds., Herodotus and his World. Essays from a Confer-

ence in Memory of George Forrest (Oxford 2005) is an excellent collection dedicated posthumously to George Forrest, who had been one of my two Oxford DPhil examin-ers. Forrest never did complete the historical commentary on Herodotus that was once promised, but he did write an exemplary brief introduction to him, as the introduction to the “Great Histories” series selection (New York 1963).

15 Having been a research fellow of University College Oxford and then a junior lecturer in Northern Ireland, I had moved down south in Ireland to Trinity College Dublin, where I taught from 1973 to 1978. While there, I finally completed my DPhil, on early Spartan archaeology and history, under the expert guidance of John Boardman (plain “Mr.” then, now Professor Sir John and rightly full of honors).

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on, I had spent many happy hours in the old Ashmolean Museum library in Oxford, and no small portion of those hours in poring over the unusually rich card catalogue. Flicking through it one day, s.v. “Herodotus,” I came across a treasure, a “wonder,” as Herodotus himself might very well have called it: namely, a short prizewinning essay of 1907 entitled “Herodotus at the Zoo.” This had been com-posed by one John Davidson Beazley, a scholar fated (as Herodotus surely would have put it) to become the leading Classical art histo-rian, not just of his generation—or generations (he lived to a great age)—but, some would say, ever (so far). Employing the Herodotean trope of describing in a deadpan manner various natural phenomena that seemingly beggared description, so outlandish or unnatural did they at first blush appear, the young Beazley solemnly described some of the animals that Herodotus would have encountered had he visited, say, the London Zoo. And all that in more than passably Herodotean Greek: this remains for me possibly the single most extraordinary item in the enormous Nachleben or “legacy” of Herodotus.

On the cusp betwen the “seventies” and the “eighties,” in 1980, Herodotean scholarship was almost literally turned on its head, by the appearance of the original French version of François Hartog’s Le miroir d’Hérodote. Using a deadly penetrating combination of French post-Saussurian structuralism and equally French (in origin) narratology, Hartog destroyed—for good, I would hope—the myth that Herodotus was merely a simple, let alone a naive, storyteller. If he was the Father of Lies, as his ancient and modern enemies liked to label him (below), then, Hartog showed, his lies were remarkably knowing and sophisticated and, above all, culturally revealing ones. Small wonder that, when translated into English in 1988, Hartog’s large and substantial monograph was included in a University of California Press series, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, as a shining example of the then New Historicism.16

Further signs of the continued upswing of Herodotean studies became apparent in the late 1980s. In 1987, a whole issue of the theoretically vibrant classical journal Arethusa was devoted to him.17

The English translation of Hartog’s Mirror appeared, as I have said, in the following year.

I should have liked to pass quite rapidly, on the other hand, over a strange book that appeared in English translation in 1989: Herodotus and His “Sources,” by the German scholar Detlev Fehling. But fate has decreed otherwise. For Fehling’s book or rather perhaps Fehling himself was shortly to become the prime target—along with the work

16 F. Hartog, Le miroir d’ Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l’Autre (new ed Paris, 2001, with new Preface: “Le vieil Hérodote: de l’épopée à l’histoire,” 9–35) [originally 1980]. English translation (by J. Lloyd): The Mirror of Herodotus. The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley and London, 1988).

17 D. Boedeker ed., “Herodotus and the Invention of History,” Arethusa vol. 20, special issue (1987). See esp. Boedeker, “The Two Faces of Demaratus,” 185–201; C. Dewald, “Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus,” 147–70; D. Konstan, “Persians, Greeks, and Empire,” 59–73; and K. A. Raaflaub, “Herodotus, Political Thought, and the Meaning of History,” 227–48.

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of Hartog, O. Kimball Armayor, Stephanie West, and an assortment of benighted topographers and archaeologists—of an excoriating 1993 monograph by the then distinctly venerable Kendrick Pritchett: The Liar School of Herodotus. This late and by no means entirely satis-factory work nevertheless constitutes a quite distinctive landmark in Herodotean studies and Herodotean reception.18

Pritchett’s “School” was not, as an innocent reader might perhaps have surmised, an ancient educational establishment for pupils taught by Herodotus (which would presumably have been located on the is-land of Crete, home of the proverbial nation of liars). The reference was, rather, to the contemporary 1980s “school” of so-called scholars who not only believed Herodotus to be, but had the effrontery to call him, a liar—in quite unflattering, as Pritchett saw it, senses. In origin, this was actually a very ancient “school.” For in succession, and in direct opposition, to Cicero’s “Father of History” label had come the ultimately Plutarch-derived tag “Father of Lies.”19 But Pritchett, as mentioned, had in mind such modern exponents of the liar hypothesis as Armayor—according to him, Herodotus never in fact visited Egypt; West—according to her, Herodotus seriously garbled his epigraphy; and imprimis the aforementioned Fehling—his principal claim was that Herodotus never in fact talked to anyone he said or implied he had talked to, and that what he described supposedly from autopsy he had either read up in published works or simply made up out of whole cloth, and then given it a spurious veneer of authenticity by citing his supposedly authoritative, ideally autoptic “sources.”20

Pritchett in my view got very much the better of those three. His superior, indeed quite formidably impressive, scholarship was able to demonstrate that Herodotus, when judged—as he should be—by the best contemporary (that is, fifth-century b.c.e.) standards of research and verification, had done extraordinarily well overall. Where I feel his riposte was very much less persuasive was in not addressing the intellectual, conceptual issue of truthfulness itself, whether in the sense of correspondence with the ascertainable facts, or in any other higher or deeper sense of truthfulness, as applied either to the spirit of the age or to the meaning(s) of the events and processes he described. For example, Pritchett could and, I think, should have addressed Herodotus’ own notion or principle of ατρεκεια, unerringness (4.152; see 1.57, 5.9, 54, 6.1, 7.60, 187, 214), which he explicitly proposed as

18 Apart from Hartog (above, n.16), the chief works against which Pritchett’s ire was directed were: O. K. Armayor, Herodotus’ Autopsy of the Fayoum: Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth of Egypt (Amsterdam 1985); D. Fehling, Herodotus and His “Sources”: Citation, Invention and Narrative Art, trans. J.G. Howie (Leeds 1989) [German original 1971]; and S. West, “Herodotus’ epigraphical interests,” CQ n.s. 35 (1985) 278–305.

19 See A. D. Momigliano, “The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiog-raphy” (1958), repr. in his Studies in Historiography (London 1966) ch. 8; and J. A. S. Evans “Father of History or Father of Lies: the Reputation of Herodotus” CJ 64 (1968) 11–17. Plutarch’s essay “On the Malice of Herodotus” begins (Moralia 854) as translated by D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford 1972) 534: “To enumerate all his lies and fictions would need a library.”

20 For an admirable riposte, see N. Luraghi, “Local knowledge in Herodotus’ Histo-ries,” in Luraghi, ed., The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford 2001) ch. 7.

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an alternative, or rather complement, to αληθεια or not-forgettingness; and likewise also those several consciously epistemological passages, from 1.5.3 on, where Herodotus’ “I know” was really intended to do a lot of hard explanatory or justificatory work.21

But where I think Pritchett, who was no doubt allergic to any tincture of postmodernism, probably went most palpably astray was in his dismissive treatment of Hartog’s subtle symptomatic, subtextual and inter- as well as intra-textual readings of Herodotus’ narrative.22

At any rate, in the late 1980s I myself embarked on a project that culminated in my The Greeks. A Portrait of Self and Others, which was based on a set of final-year undergraduate lectures at Cambridge and was originally published, coincidentally, in the very same year as The Liar School, 1993.23 This relied quite heavily—though not I hope in a merely crude and derivative way—on Hartog’s “mirror” trope, and on the notion—derived both from modern symbolic-cultural anthropology and from a deeply engrained habit of thought of the ancient Greeks themselves—of binary conceptual polarization. If I may sum up the book’s structuring thesis, very laconically, “We” are what “Others” are not (and vice versa); and the Greeks of my title whose collective portrait I was aiming to limn were the Greeks as they had been represented ideologically, and often quite disparately, to themselves by—above all—the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, but also by the non-historian, indeed anti-historian Aristotle. In other words, I was not claiming to be telling the truth—or not the whole of it, anyhow—about the real ancient Greeks, but to be describing and analysing how they were represented, or how they represented themselves, ideologically, in and through the works of contemporary analysts and historians such as Herodotus.

Also in 1993 (clearly, and probably not coincidentally, a big year for the study of ancient truth—and lies) there appeared a major essay collection, with a strong historiographical component, entitled Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World. In my review I asked “Where lies the boundary, if indeed there is a determinate boundary, between fact and fiction, mendacity and truth, in creative literature as in other forms of writing?”24 That question had particular relevance and resonance in a fifth-century b.c.e. Greek world in which History had not yet

21 I should make clear that Herodotus did also employ the concept of alhqhih (alhqeia) notably at 7.104.1 (where, anticipating Thucydides 1.23.6, he also uses the rhetorically overdetermined superlative adjective alhqestatouV). R. Zelnick-Abramovitz (“Lies Resembling Truth: On the Beginnings of Greek Historiography” in G. Herman and I. Shatzman, eds., Greeks Between East and West. Essays in Memory of David Asheri [Jerusalem, 2007] 45–74) has ably discussed precisely those issues, with par-ticular reference to Herodotus and the beginnings of Greek historiography. See now also C. Darbo-Peschanski L’Historia. Commencements grecs (Paris 2007).

22 A dismissive reference to Hartog’s “facile literary theory” (Pritchett, Liar School, 225) really will not do.

23 A second English edition (2002) incorporates both the new material introduced into the German translation (1998) and an entirely new chapter on visual material, together with numerous bibliographical updates.

24 Edited by C. Gill and P. Wiseman for the Exeter University Press. My review appeared in TLS, Dec. 17, 1993.

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emerged as a distinct disciplinary genre with its own self-policing rules and regulations, and in which the very concept of Fiction was open to both wholly positive and wholly negative interpretations. It has been answered in a variety of ways from varying perspectives by modern scholars—by Rosalind Thomas, for example, who has fruitfully and positively explored the extent to which Herodotus may usefully be viewed as a kind of intellectual Sophist; and by John Moles, who concluded after a careful comparison of Herodotus with Thucydides over the issue of “truth and untruth” that “the relationship of ancient historiography to external reality is shifting, ambiguous, multifaceted, messy.”25

Others have done a much better job than I of reading Herodotus’ subtexts and intertexts as well as his text itself, using the same sorts of tools and methodology. Apart from Hartog himself, I cite honoris causa (and among English-language works only) Rosaria Munson’s Telling Wonders, a brilliant exploration of the political as well as ethnographic discourse of—and in—Herodotus; and Leslie Kurke’s no less brilliant Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold, which is—among much else—a cul-tural history of a number of pre-Classical Greek literary, numismatic, and other kinds of inventions that are peculiarly revealing of Greek mentality and values, and of the rationale behind certain fundamental social or economic institutions.26 But I must not refrain from adding that those two outstanding books are just part of a veritable explosion of Herodotus-related research and publication over the past decade or so, including no fewer than five collective volumes of essays, and a major new multi-authored Commentary (in Italian and English).27

I myself have returned to Herodotus, too, since the turn of the new millennium, in two main ways. First, and most obviously, I have had recourse to him as the principal extant ancient historian of the Graeco-Persian Wars, indeed of all Greek-barbarian relations between about 550 and 479 b.c.e. I chose, for various reasons, to focus on one particular encounter, the battle of Thermopylae in August 480.28 This was a choice by no means determined only by Herodotus’ peculiar reliability, though I do argue strenuously that Herodotus was not just the main, but indeed mostly our sole, usable extant historical source. Without believing unquestioningly in the (almost all and only) truth-telling Herodotus of Pritchett, in other words, I should not—indeed I

25 R. Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge 2000); J. L. Mole, “Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides,” in C. Gill and P. Wiseman, eds., Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter 1992) 88–121.

26 R. V. Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor 2001); L. Kurke Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton 1999).

27 E. J. Bakker, I. De Jong, and H. Van Wees, eds., Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Leiden 2002); P. Derow and R. Parker, eds., (above, n.14); C. Dewald and J. Marincola, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge 2006); N. Luraghi, ed., (above, n.20); and E. Irwin and E. Greenwood, eds., Reading Herodotus. A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (Cambridge 2007). D. Asheri, A. B. Lloyd, A. Corcella, O. Murray, and A. Moreno, A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV (Oxford 2007).

28 Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World (London and New York 2006; corr. pb. 2007).

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could not—have even begun to write my book, had I not adopted the working assumption of Herodotus’ essential veracity, subject though it of course was to the usual constraints of bias (his own as well as his informants’), forgetfulness, and, not least, his literary artistry—though the latter was by no means only, or most importantly, a (negative) constraint.

However, more even than the “truth-telling” Herodotus I personally cherish Herodotus the Enlightened Social Thinker, for so I, at any rate, like to see him. At the end of my Thermopylae book I included as an Appendix (“Herodotus—Antidote to Fundamentalism”) a version of a talk I gave originally at the Museum of the History of the University of Athens. Here I concentrated on an invented Herodotean anecdote (3.38) that beautifully illustrates a typically acute dictum of Edward Gibbon, that “Herodotus sometimes writes for children, and sometimes for philosophers.”29 It is both a wonderful story in itself and, at the same time, an object lesson in moral philosophy on a truly global scale.

Once upon a time . . . Persian Great King Darius (r. c. 520–486) summoned to his royal presence representatives of two of the many peoples who had been attracted to his administrative capital of Susa, to wit, Greeks and Indians. This he did in order to carry out a com-parative cultural-ethnographic experiment.30 To paraphrase Hartog, “tell me how you die (that is, how you dispose of your kindred dead), and I will tell you who you are.”31 Darius’ experiment, that is to say, was ultimately religious in nature, involving one of the most deeply felt and therefore most identity-revealing areas of all our human social conventions: funerary customs. How much money, Darius first asked the Greeks, would it require for him successfully to bribe them to abandon the traditional funerary custom of their ancestors, namely cremation, and adopt instead the custom of these Indians here, namely cannibalism of their relatives’ corpses? The Greeks replied indignantly that they would not do so, however much money they were offered. Putting the same question later on in reverse to the Indians, Darius received an even more indignant, even more horrified, response.

What is significant for my argument here, is what Herodotus does not then say. He does not castigate—as a typical (adult male citizen) Greek of the fifth century b.c.e. surely would have done—the ghastly barbarity of these Indian savages, who rather than cremating their dead relatives actually eat them (thereby sinking several cultural levels lower than they would have done if they at least had had the comparative decency to cannibalize members of other families or, better, nations).32 Instead, Herodotus introduces the anecdote with

29 Footnote 52 to Chapter 24 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Ro-man Empire (originally 6 volumes, 1776–1788), in the splendid three-volume edition of D. Womersley, vol. III (London 1994) 924–25.

30 M. Christ, “Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry,” ClassAnt 13 (1994) 167–202.31 Hartog (above, n.16) 133–56, 251–53, on funerals.32 R. Thomas in her new introduction to The Landmark Herodotus (below, n.40)

rightly emphasizes several times just how exceptional was Herodotus’ tolerant attitude to non-Greeks and their ways. See also T. Rood, “Herodotus and Foreign Lands,” in Dewald and Marincola, eds., (above, n.27) 290–305; and generally T. Harrison, ed.,

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the remark—delivered with perfectly enlightened evenhandedness—that this story goes to illustrate how every people always prefers its own traditional customs to those of all other peoples, believing them indeed to be not just relatively superior but absolutely the best possible. Or, as Herodotus sums it up in conclusion in an aphorism (which he lifted from the Greek lyric poet Pindar, fr. 169), “Νοµος (custom) is king (βασιλευς) over all.”33

The other way in which I have been reading Herodotus more recently is as a source of political ideas or thought, even political theory properly so called, especially as this political thought or theory may be seen in process of being worked out, and applied, in practice in concrete political situations. Above all, I have been exercising myself over, and been exercised by, the problem of the origins of democracy in Greece, and that means specifically at Athens.34 When, how and why did Athens become, in the first instance, a democracy, the first such Greek polity, indeed the first example of such a pol-ity anywhere in the world.35 To cut a very long story very short, it was—in my view—in 508/7 b.c.e., and by means of the reform bill associated with the Alcmaeonid aristocrat Kleisthenes.

But is it as a democrat (ancient Athenian-style) that Herodotus paints Kleisthenes, and as democratic that he represents his decisive political reforms? He both does—and does not. On the one hand (µεν), he states baldly, as a matter of fact, that Kleisthenes “intro-duced the tribes and the democracy for the Athenians” (6.131.1). On the other hand (δε), he represents Kleisthenes himself as doing so in a wholly opportunistic, not to say self-interested, self-aggrandizing, and certainly undemocratic, way. For, according to Herodotus, Kleis-thenes (in an extraordinary, I would say oxymoronic, phrase) “added the Demos [the masses, the common people] to his etaireia [faction of supporters based on close personal bonds]” or, in an alternative translation (even more literally impossible, I would add), “made of the Demos his comrades (εταιροι).”36 In other words, Herodotus

Greeks and Barbarians (Edinburgh 2002). As a matter of fact, those Indians probably did not cannibalize their dead, and certainly not all Greeks cremated theirs, but here it was a higher or deeper than merely factual truth that Herodotus was after.

33 J. Allan Evans, “Despotes Nomos,” in Evans, The Beginnings of History: Herodotus and the Persian Wars (Campbellville 2006) 129–42 [originally Athenaeum n.s. 43 (1965) 142–53]. See generally T. Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford 2000).

34 Cartledge, “Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate,” in K. A. Raaf-laub and R. W. Wallace eds., Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece: Interpretations and Controversies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006) ch. 6.; and see now Cartledge, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge 2009) ch. 5.

35 As I would want to insist against such relativists as Marcel Detienne or my venerable Cambridge colleague Jack Goody: M. Detienne, The Greeks and Us: A Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Eng., and Malden, Mass., 2007); J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge 2006).

36 The most recent translator, Andrea Purvis (below, n.40) has a shot at mak-ing sense of the senseless: “he enlisted the common people into his association of supporters” (5.66.2), and “he now brought them [the Athenian people] into his own

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melded—I would say, confused—the political with the personal in his account both of how Kleisthenes gained the necessary support to get his reforms adopted, and of why—from what motives—he did what he allegedly did. The truth, in my view, was very different from that. Herodotus was, I would argue, both misled by his pro-aristocratic oral informants and willing to be so misled, because that personalized, factional style of politics was what he automatically assumed as the explanatory template for political action and even radical political change on the basis of his own personal experience, in his native Halicarnassos and elsewhere.

From high politics I return, penultimately, to a more descriptive level of factuality in Herodotus. One problem, to put it mildly, for what one might call “fundamentalist” readers of Herodotus has always been that he chose to include such tall stories as the ones about humans with dog’s heads (4.191) or about huge, gold-digging ants (3.102–5), none of which seems even faintly inherently plausible according to the usual standards of empirical inference and verification. True, an attempt was made not so long ago to save the allegedly historical phenomenon of the gold-digging ants, by identifying them rather as marmots (a kind of rodent).37 But the Dog-Heads are presumably unrescuable on any naturalistic, scientific criteria—even if Herodotus had given himself a universal “get-out clause” by declaring that he should not be assumed personally to believe in the truth of any of the stories he told, his duty being (merely) “to tell what was said” (7.152.3; at 4.191 he enters the qualification “at least that is what the Libyans say”). It was therefore with some relief that devotees of the “truth-telling school of Herodotus,” if I may so call it, learned very recently of yet another historically fascinating application of DNA analysis: to the people and the livestock living today in Tus-cany, i.e. in what was anciently Etruria (Herodotus’ Tyrrhenia). This recent scientific evidence shows—or rather proves, we are told—that the Etruscans who gave their name eventually to Tuscany (Toscana) did indeed originally come from Lydia, part of what is now Western Turkey, just exactly as Herodotus (1.94.2) had reported they did.38

That probably would have been a suitable point for me to end this personal odyssey, conscious as I am that Herodotus, famously, made one of his characters—the sage Solon of Athens—argue that one should always “look to the end” (1.32.9) before coming to a fi-nal judgment (in this case, on the value of any person’s life). Unlike Solon, however, though perhaps quite a bit like Herodotus himself, I shall end rather with a beginning. In 2007, Penguin Books launched yet another series of pocket-size booklets, the theme of which was travellers’ tales. Rightly enough, Herodotus (or extracts therefrom) was included in the series, thereby guaranteeing that several tens of

faction” (5.69.2); but, as is all too likely to happen, a sober-sounding English version obscures the vitally odd force of the original Greek.

37 See Pritchett, Liar School, 90 ff.38 See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/03etruscan.html.

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thousands more readers, who otherwise probably would not have done, will now gain access to at least a smattering of this extraordinary figure’s writings.39

But in which translation will they get to know him? Unsurpris-ingly, it will be in a Penguin Classics translation, the readably free version originally done by Aubrey de Sélincourt in the 1950s that was brilliantly revised (that is, corrected) and annotated by John Marincola in the 1990s. But it could just as well have been (to cite only transla-tions made in the last two decades) in the idiosyncratically archaized version by David Grene (University of Chicago Press, 1987), or the idiomatically Englished Oxford World’s Classics translation, by Robin Waterfield (with introduction and notes by Carolyn Dewald, 1998).40

Or, if I may end on a very personal note, had Penguin been prepared to wait just a few years, it could, should, and surely it would have been in the forthcoming, brand-new Penguin translation by Tom Holland, which will be accompanied by an introduction and notes by the author of this essay.41 Of the making of translations of Herodotus—and thereby of the continuing vigorous and vital study of Herodotus—there is in fact no, or at least no immediately foresee-able, end. Herodotus lives!42

Clare College, Cambridge P. A. CARTLEDGE Classical World 102.4 (2009) pac1001@hermes.cam.ac.uk

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39 Herodotus, Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants (London 2007). This recalls the way, a decade or so back, the cinematic English Patient’s carrying of a nineteenth-century edition of Herodotus when he crash-landed produced a temporary burst of interest in reading him (usually in a specially produced Penguin Classics abridgment).

40 The latest to appear, only after the latest Penguin selection, is the plain and accurate version by Andrea L. Purvis published as The Landmark Herodotus, edited by R. Strassler (New York 2007). I must “declare an interest,” since I contributed Appendix B, “The Spartan State in War and Peace.”

41 Holland is the author of the deservedly bestselling Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (London and New York, 2005).

42 Telling testimony of that is not only The Landmark Herodotus, which is after all written almost entirely by professional scholars, but two other works published by Penguin Books in 2007, both by distinguished non-experts who give Herodotus at least his due: the (late) Polish journalist R. Kapuscinski’s Travels With Herodotus; and the modern intellectual-cultural historian J. Burrow’s A History of Histories. Yet a further nonspecialist work is a Herodotean travelogue by the historically trained journalist J. Marozzi, The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (London 2008).