Once again I have proved to myself that I like the idea of reading history much more than actually reading history. Thankfully, however, Herodotus’ Histories are much, much more than just a simple history book.
More than a history of the conflict between Persia and Greece, its a history of minds, of people and their different outlooks and beliefs in life and what that meant for the lives they lead and the world they perceived around them. As much as Herodotus puts words as speeches into his subjects mouths, seemingly out of thin air, I at least feel, that what he has them say is a more accurate depiction of that individuals cultural and personal beliefs, convictions and motivations than any completely unbiased and strictly factual description of them and their actions would be. He brings, what to us at this point are almost an alien race and gives them humanity and us an understanding, while he himself might as well also be an alien being to us.
The Histories is a beginning in moving away from the realm of the gods, and into the realm of humanity being responsible for itself. Only a beginning however, the gods still often are speculated to have had an influence of the events being told, and their influence is one of the main factors in Herodotus’ most clear theme in the text, the ever changing tides of fate. There must be a reason why society’s are forever in a succession of rising and falling, no prosperity or misery lasts forever, and for a man in the 5th century BC, what better explanation for this can there be than the moods of invisible, but all-powerful gods. The mythos is real for Herodotus’, but for the first time the human influence is comparably real, the start of a change and a setting of foundations for absolutely everything that came after.
The main thing you feel reading through this is Herodotus’ massive love and interest in the world around him, the people he shares it with, and the stories unique to each culture and people. His worldview could not be more different and fantastical to pretty much anyone living today, and yet it seems at least to me a much purer and connected one than what we see the world as today. Where Herodotus for me is most enjoyable is in his excursions away from the main thread of the story to tell you about the lands of Egypt, Scythia, Libya, India etc. While it might not all be the most true to what we know now to be the reality of things, things such as the hippopotamus’ which ‘has four legs, cloven hoofs like an ox, a snub nose, a horse’s mane and tail, conspicuous tusks, a voice like a horse’s neigh, and is about the size of a very large ox’ and dog-sized gold digging ants ([Gold-digging ant – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-digging_ant)), and claiming that the reason Egyptian people never go bald is because their skulls are so much thicker than anyone else’s, this is all what not just Herodotus himself believed, but the people who he interviewed in his travels to many of these places had told him or corroborated, of course certain things can be explained as simple mistranslation or misunderstanding, but much has to have been the truth of these people. A vibrant and wonderful world indeed.
Now, when it comes to the pure history aspect of this book, I did struggle considerably. There’s only so many X son of Y son of Z that I can be told about without them eventually all blending into one and losing all meaning. Especially since I didn’t take any notes as I read, and have been reading this book since November last year as my bedside book and sometimes went days without reading a single page, which really is not the best way to go about reading this text, and led to me reading dozens of pages at a time with next to nothing actually going into my head, which of course made certain sections quite a slog to get through. The fault is mine I’m sure, not the text’s. At least I know what to do differently if I decide to re-read this in a few years time, a definite possibility.
3/5
by marqueemoonchild