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History happens in a lot of places.
In political assemblies and royal courts, on battlefields,
at marketplaces and in the home, but for us losers who are stuck here in the present
we need accounts and resources to understand the past or we might as well be flying blind.
So while history happens everywhere all the time, history is made in the pages of books.
And that's what the series is about; the history makers.
Those writers who do the crucial work of keeping the past alive.
And there's no better example of a history maker than Herodotus,
who not only made history, but, he like *made* history.
Unfortunately, like many of the figures we've covered and will cover in this series,
his book can be a mess to read through,
his structure is painfully disjointed in places,
and he has a reputation for being a gigantic liar.
That is a worrying trend with these guys,
but that's also why I'm here making these videos in the first place!
So to set the record straight and to figure out why Herodotus is so foundational to the history of history,
let's do some history.
...wait, what-
You'd think that for a character who wrote so much,
we'd have a decent understanding of where this dude came from.
But, heh, no.
He tells us outright that he's from Halicarnassus on the South West Coast of Anatolia
But WHEN is another matter entirely.
Historians often date him to around 484 BC
but the reason why is...
Aw man
It's- it is really dumb, you guys.
We have a record of Herodotus living in Athens and being sent out to the new colony at Thurii at 443 BC.
So historians just kind of assumed,
"Well, if he was sent out to a colony he must have been about 40 years old.
So that would place his birthday -
Let's see -
40 years before 443, in about 484."
And that's it!
THAT's the reason!
I shouldn't need to tell you how abysmal that logic is.
Takeaway here is that for all we DO know about Ancient Greece,
there are entire swathes that might as well be blank,
and Herodotus' birthday is one of them.
Some records show that he travelled around to a lot of different places,
but for the sake of sticking to information that we actually, y'know, *know*,
We're gonna keep pretty close to the text that Herodotus leaves us.
With that in mind, the typical notion of Herodotus is that
he was the first person to study the past and he wrote a book
recounting the Greco-Persian Wars, but both of those are only partially true.
He wasn't the first writer in the field and he talked about way more than just Greece.
See, Herodotus didn't set out to write history.
Rather, he initially wanted to write a travel guide,
inspired by a work called 'The Travels Around The World', by Hecataeus of Miletus.
That book was a comprehensive look at the lands and peoples around the Mediterranean,
complete with this weirdly accurate map of the ancient world.
And you can see those influences in the way that Herodotus writes.
He's happy to spend entire chapters just telling fun stories about anything from the old Kings of Egypt,
to the proper technique for wrestling a crocodile,
to how much he coughed while hotboxing with the Scythians.
At his core, Herodotus is a storyteller, and everything from his fun anecdotes,
to his inordinately long narrative tangents, to his sweeping assertions of cause and effect, derived from his love of stories.
From his home of Halicarnassus, Herodotus was traveling constantly.
First to the island of Samos, then to the rest of Greece, the Black Sea, Egypt, parts of Persia, and possibly even more.
As he went around hearing stories and writing about the places he saw,
he got the idea to organize all of them in the order that they were conquered by the Persians.
So partway through writing, he radically restructured his travel guide into a loose chronology of the growing Persian Empire.
And funnily enough, you can really see these instances of complete tonal whiplash
between historical anecdotes and fully unrelated digressions about local culture.
The first half of his book is FULL of this.
It's essentially like he's saying,
"Yep, so that's the story of King Cyrus the Great who founded the Persian Empire,
and then his son King Cambyses the Mad conquered Egypt, but before we do any of that,
lemme just tell you a little bit about Ancient Egypt first."
And then he spends the next seventy pages just talking about Ancient Egypt,
and after all that is done, he picks up with the story of Cambyses as if he never stopped,
and then continues on to the tale of his son, King Darius.
So it is a chronology, but ohhh boy, is it a messy one.
That goes on for about five chapters,
but eventually we get to more familiar ground
as Herodotus arrives at Persia's conquest of Ionia in 505 BC.
Six years later, the Athenians gave a helping hand to their fellow Ionians in an attempt at anti-Persian revolt,
and from here, Herodotus dives into the customs, government and origins of the great cities of Athens and Sparta,
leading up to Persia's attempted invasion of Greece in 490 BC, and this is where it all comes together.
The last four chapters of Herodotus' book is all about the Persian Wars that you know and love,
Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, all that jazz.
We've been through before so I'll skip over most of the details,
but that's effectively the way that Herodotus' book goes down.
Half of it is a sweeping account to the Persian Empire's rise interspersed with a travel guide,
and the second half is a direct narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars.
And he states his objectives most clearly at the very start of his book.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his inquiry so that the deeds of mankind may not be forgotten in time,
and that great and marvelous works, some displayed by Greeks, some by Persians, may not be without their glory
and to show why the two peoples fought with each other.
Gotta say, I really appreciate when ancient authors just lay their cards out of the very start of the book.
Herodotus wasn't just describing the world or chronicling events like writers before him,
he created a method of inquiring into the past to find out why those events happened.
Homer had actually asked a similar question at the beginning of the Iliad,
wondering to the muses why it was that Agamemnon and Achilles were so butthurt with each other.
But whereas Homer was happy to attribute cause and effects to divine will,
Herodotus grounded his inquiry into the observable mortal world,
and that word 'historias' in the Greek is where we get the word 'history'.
So, Herodotus invented big age history
and told the centuries-spanning story of Persia's great rise and eventual defeat by the Greeks,
But then why do so many people think that he's a massive liar?
I mean even Thucydides threw shade at Herodotus for stooping to cheap storytelling
and for not properly checking his sources.
Well, despite his best attempts to ground cause and effect in mortal actions rather than the obscure will of the gods,
Herodotus still fell prey to some mythical exaggerations
In one tale, the singer Aryan sailed from Corinth to Tarentum and found himself on the receiving end of an armed robbery by his crewmates.
They let him sing one last song and then tossed him overboard so that he could go swimming with the fishies in classic monster fashion,
but Orion surprised everybody by actually swimming with the fishes
when a dolphin sent by Apollo arrived to escort Aryan safely to shore.
There's also an account of Persian ants the size of foxes who dug up gold,
and other stories of a turf war in Central Europe between griffins and cyclopes, also over gold.
So why does Herodotus include all of these weird myths in the middle of a history book?
Well, it's in the way that he did his research.
He gathered eyewitness accounts, hearsay and local folktales during his travels,
and he was committed to relaying all of the stories that he heard,
even when he didn't strictly believe them and even when they conflicted.
He outright says, 'In all cases I am bound to report what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.'
Now this attitude towards research habits may well give other historians a heart attack,
but I honestly respect that commitment to complete information.
Unlike the travels of Marco Polo, where all of the embellishments came after the fact,
Herodotus captured a complete picture of what the ancients thought their world was like, myths and all.
And even so, researchers in the 90s figured out that those giant gold-digging ants were most likely a type of Himalayan 'marmot' that digs up gold dust,
And the ancient Persian word for 'marmot' and 'mountain ant' would have been nearly identical to a Greek speaker like Herodotus.
The dolphins story is a little more dubious, but there's art in Corinth and Tarentum showing a singer on a dolphin,
so it may be an exaggerated story rather than an outright myth or a fabrication.
As for the gold hoarding griffins...
yeah, I got nothing.
The second big bit of wackiness is the relationship between Athens and Sparta during the Persian Wars.
Even though the cities were closely allied against their invaders,
Herodotus often shows them bickering over who gets to be in charge,
and goes out of his way to show how slow Sparta was to arrive for the Battle of Marathon,
only getting there to congratulate Athens a day after all the hard work was already taken care of.
And in the lead-up to the Battle of Plataea, he gives Athens several stanzas
to humble brag about how great and honorable they've been throughout the war effort.
Beyond this, Sparta doesn't exactly cut a regal figure in Herodotus's accounts,
since they kind of always lose unless big boy Athens is there to save them.
This is uneven storytelling at best and outright bias at worst, but there's a very good reason for it.
Herodotus was living in Athens around the start of the Peloponnesian War,
so his sources would have turned up all kinds of Athenian-Spartan rivalry just from contemporary animosity.
With Sparta and Athens jockeying for control of Greece,
both cities would logically want to claim the moral high ground,
and the result is the retroactive insertion of all this weird intercity rivalry
where there probably wasn't all that much in the first place.
It's the rough equivalent of a Cold War-era historian showing some narrative bias about America's cooperation with the Soviets in the Second World War -
the present invariably shapes opinions on the past.
But there's one last tiny instance of total historical fabrication.
See, the Histories begins with an account of a conversation between the Athenian lawgiver Solon and King Croesus of Lydia.
Croesus was rich.
Stupidly rich, in fact, because his mints and mines produced the first coins in the ancient world.
When the two met, Croesus asked Solon who he thought the happiest person in the world was,
very much expecting the answer to be himself, you know, with all the money and whatnot.
To his shock, Solon's answer was instead some comparatively humble Athenian guy,
on the grounds that you can never count a person happy until they're dead
because fortune always finds time to screw somebody over.
Croesus was obviously displeased but he would soon find Solon to be all too right,
as Croesus hubristically set out to conquer the growing Persian Empire
and succeeded only in losing all of his land and money and power.
The moral of the story being, don't count your empires before they hatch.
The main problem here, and it's a tiny problem, is that this whole conversation is well...
categorically impossible.
Solon left his native Athens in the mid 590s BC and Croesus would have been an infant at the time,
He didn't even become King until the year that Solon died,
so the notion of the two having a full conversation was ludicrous.
That begs the question - why'd you put it in a history book?
A couple of quick clues clear up what's going on.
For one, it plays out like a scene in a play with full dialogue and everything, it's very dramatised.
Two, it features prominently in the first chapter of the book, as if to kind of set the stage for everything that comes later.
And three, most of the ancient audience would have known that the two characters were separated by a good couple decades,
so they probably wouldn't have taken it too literally.
What Herodotus might have intended was to use this scene as a symbolic framing device
to establish the recurring theme of, hey watch out for hubris, it'll get you.
This idea crops up again, and again, with Darius and eventually King Xerxes,
and little that Herodotus know, it foreshadowed the later fate of the Athenian Empire.
Spoopy.
Still pretty uncool to play it off as something that actually happened,
but back in the day most Greeks would have known to take this figuratively,
as a tone piece to set the stage for the rest of the history book.
So as long as you know to look out for tales that sound maybe a little bit too mythical,
and for an anachronistic depiction of Athenian and Spartan rivalry,
you can essentially read through Herodotus and get a pretty good picture of the classical Greek world.
Is it confusing and weirdly structured?
Yes, dear God, the man speaks in layers upon layers of narrative digressions,
but I do genuinely think it's worth reading if you're curious,
and generations of historians have Herodotus to thank
for being the first person to look into the past and inquire, why?
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On the subject of the Persian Wars, now that the video is over, I've just got to dish on this Philippides nonsense.
There was no runner who came back to Athens, announced that they won the battle and dropped dead.
That was made up centuries afterwards and it's dumb.
What really happened was that Darius sent his fleet around Attica to attack Athens after the battle,
so the Athenian army had to run, exhausted from fighting at Marathon, in full armor, all that 26.2 miles to Athens
in order to defend it AGAIN for when the fleet arrived.
There's no reason people should be getting this wrong. It's literally in the book.
So if you ask me, it's not actually a marathon unless you're shlepping 50 full pounds of bronze to save your city from a sacking.
Get on their level.