The Histories

The Histories is the (only known) work of one Herodotus, and comprises three main elements: the nature and people of the world (as Herodotus understood it), the origins of war between Greece and Persia, and an account of those wars.

The first of these is concentrated in the early parts of the work. I’ve already mentioned the curious Egyptian mortgage laws. Much of it is interesting; some of it may be true. (It’s probably safe to dismiss the gold-digging giant ants as fictitious!) Indeed,Herodotus often expresses scepticism although it must be said that on occasion it plays him false:

After all, Libya is demonstrably surrounded by water, except for the bit of it that forms the boundary with Asia. King Necho of Egypt was the first to discover this, as far as we know; after he abandoned the digging of the canal from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, his next project was to dispatch ships with Phoenician crews with instructions to return via the Pillars of Heracles into the northern sea and so back to Egypt. So the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed into the sea to the south. Every autumn they, they would come ashore, cultivate whatever bit of Libya they had reached in their voyage, and wait for harvest-time; then, when they had gathered in their crops, they would put to sea again. Consequently it was over two years before they rounded the Pillars of Heracles and arrived back in Egypt. They made a claim which I personally do not believe, although someone else might - that as they were sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right.

Of course, their claim would be correct. One might reasonably be sceptical of their claim to have circumnavigated Africa, but their story about the sun does not support the doubts.

Many words, too, are spent on the history of the Achaemenid (i.e. Persian) Empire - an ancient precusor of modern Iran. Herodotus covers Cyrus’s rise to power, his conquests, and his death in central Asia; followed by the actions of his successors and the eventual turn of their attention across the Aegean.

The latter part is, largely without interruption, an account of the conlict in Greece, culminating in the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. As the notes to the translation indicate Herodotus’s account is highly partial, even within the Greek side. However in places it is very detailed - the author was almost certainly getting his information directly from the people who were there on the day.

As an aside, Pheidippides’s athletics are even more excessive here than in the traditional 26-mile version: he arrives in Sparta a day after leaving Athens, well over a hundred miles away! He does however have the advantage of meeting the god Pan along the way - although this is something else Herodotus seems sceptical about.

Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice that this translation uses the name Philippides for this famous runner and mentions in the notes that Pheidippides (which is closer to the name I was originally familiar with) appears “in some manuscripts, but the name is very rare”. But it seems to me that this could be not simply a copying error, but rather the effect of the same sound shift as between Odysseus and Ulysses?

So much for Philippides. The work is full of digressions, varying from single paragraphs to multiple pages themselves containing further nested digressions. I don’t know what a modern editor would make of it! It works well, however.

The story ends with the ejection of Xerxes’s armies from Greece. Over a century later the Greeks were to take the revenge on Persia, conquering it under Alexander. I think this would have fit well into Herodotus’s worldview: Persia’s ascent could only be the precursor to its fall.