Herodotus and His Great Work

On one level, this was the trust of the victor: the huge Persian Empire had attempted to earmark the tiny city-states of mainland Greece and been repelled, hence, Greece had bettered Persia - an butt statement of fact. On an early(a) level, it was a conclusion of philosophy.

It was a specifically Greek philosophical worldview that certified Herodotus' historical opinion, although that in itself did not ensure an anti-Persian opinion. In this event of philosophical worldview, writes British historian Michael Grant, "Universal justness seems to him [Herodotus] alone discoverable through this or that human being." Combining this point-of-view with objective facts such as victory/failure leads Herodotus the observer to the ineluctable conclusion that historical evaluation rests on such factors as one man's strength (or Virtue) versus another man's weakness. Thus, consequently, could Herodotus write admiringly of the Persian empire-builder, Cyrus the Great, who had conquered the kingdom of the richest man in the known world, Croesus of Lydia.

It was, of course, a philosophy not untinged by story and mysticism. The Greek heritage had gods behaving exchangeable men and Homeric men performing the deeds of gods. The "myth as history" approach quoted earlier takes into account this eyeshot of chronicle: as the Grimm brothers determined when assembling their Teutonic household t

This approach to history becomes unvarnished in one of Herodotus' more florid exaggerations of the 480 B.C. Persian feed against the Greek mainland:

First there was the ancient complement of the xii hundred and seven vessels which came with the king from Asia ... amounting, if we allow to each charge a crew of two hundred men, to 241,400.

Although such calculations eventually lead to the absurdly large five million, later, as the Persians move on Salamis and their disastrous sea battle there, Herodotus' observations prove possibly more correct than one would think.

If, in fact, the Persian ships were as crowded as indicated above, then that would account for the fact that "on the side of the barbarians more perished by drowning than in any other way." Why did so many drown? Because they were overloaded.

Toynbee, Arnold. A con of History. Revised and abridged by A. Toynbee and Jane Caplan. London: Oxford University Press and Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1972.

It does not devalue Herodotus' Histories to understand its weaknesses; the strengths compensate. Herodotus' criteria is less objective in the unexampled sense - though, as noted, somewhattimes considered too even-handed by the prejudicious standards of his own day - nevertheless it is a criteria that always seeks the truth underlying an event. Within the limits of his worldview, an Hellenic philosophy still exerting some influence in our times, that truth was based on the motivations of single(a) human beings. Once one has understood the criteria, one can buoy use Herodotus' history of the Persian Wars as the learning beam of light it was intended to be - and, perhaps, what all history is intended to be.

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