Waiting for the Barbarians (21 page)

The answer has less to do with some Greek sense of the inevitability of Western individualism triumphing over Eastern authoritarianism—an
attractive reading to various constituencies at various times—than it does with the scientific milieu out of which Herodotus drew his idea of
historie
. For Herodotus, the Persian Empire was, literally, “unnatural.” He was writing at a moment of great intellectual interest in the difference between what we today (referring to a similarly fraught cultural debate) call “nature versus nurture,” and what the Greeks thought of as the tension between
physis
, “nature,” and
nomos
, “custom” or “law” or “convention.” Like other thinkers of his time, he was particularly interested in the ways in which natural habitat determined cultural conventions: hence the many so-called “ethnographic” digressions. This is why, with certain exceptions, he seems, perhaps surprisingly to us, to view the growth of the Persian Empire as more or less organic, more or less “natural”—at least, until it tries to exceed the natural boundaries of the Asian continent. A fact well known to Greek Civ students is that the word
barbaros
, “barbarian,” did not necessarily have the pejorative connotations that it does for us:
barbaroi
were simply people who didn’t speak Greek and whose speech sounded, to Greek ears, like
bar-bar-bar
. So it’s suggestive that one of the very few times in the
Histories
that Herodotus uses “barbarian” in our sense is when he’s describing Xerxes’ behavior at the Hellespont. As the classicist James Romm argues, in his lively short study
Herodotus
, for this historian there is something inherently wrong and bad with the idea of trying to bleed over the boundaries of one continent into another. It’s no accident that the account of the career of Cyrus, the empire’s founder, is filled with pointed references to his heedless treatment of rivers, the most natural of boundaries. Cyrus dies, in fact, after ill-advisedly crossing the river Araxes, considered a boundary between Asia and Europe.

What’s wrong with Persia, then, isn’t its autocratic form of government but its size, which in the grand cycle of things is doomed one day to be diminished. Early in the
Histories
, Herodotus makes reference
to the way in which cities and states rise and fall, suddenly giving an ostensibly natural principle a moralizing twist:

The passage suggests that, both for states and for individuals, a coherent order operates in the universe. In this sense, history turns out to be not so different from that other great Greek invention—tragedy. The debt owed by Herodotus to Athenian tragedy, with its implacable trajectories from grandeur to abjection, has been much commented on by classicists, some of whom even attribute his evolution from a mere notetaker to a grand moralist of human affairs to the years spent in Athens, when he is said to have been a friend of Sophocles. (As one scholar has put it, “Athens was his Damascus.”)

Athens itself, of course, was to become the protagonist of one such tragico-historical “plot”: during Herodotus’ lifetime, the preeminent Greek city-state traveled a Sophoclean road from the heady triumph of the Persian Wars to the onset of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict during which it lost both its political and its moral authority. This is why it’s tempting to think, with certain classical historians, that the
Histories
was composed as a kind of friendly warning about the perils of imperial ambition. If the fate of the Persians could be intended as an object lesson for the Athenians, Herodotus’ ethical point is much larger than the superiority of the West to the East.

Only a sense of the cosmic scale of Herodotus’ moral vision, of the
way it grafts the political onto the natural schema, can make sense of that distinctive style, of all the seemingly random detours and diversions—the narrative equivalents of the gimcrack souvenirs and brightly colored guidebooks and the flowered shirts. If you wonder, at the beginning of the story of Persia’s rise, whether you really need twenty chapters about the distant origins of the dynasty to which Croesus belongs, think again: that famous story of how Croesus’ ancestor Gyges assassinated the rightful king and took the throne (to say nothing of the beautiful queen) provides information that allows you to fit Croesus’ miserable ending into the natural scheme of things. His fall, it turns out, is the cosmic payback for his ancestor’s crime: “Retribution would come,” Herodotus says, quoting the Delphic oracle, “to the fourth descendant of Gyges.”

These neat symmetries, you begin to realize, turn up everywhere, as a well-known passage from Book 3 makes clear:

For Herodotus, virtually everything can be assimilated into a kind of natural cycle of checks and balances. (In the case of the vipers and snakes he refers to, the male is killed by the female during copulation, but the male is “avenged” by the fact that the female is killed by her young.) Because his moral theme is universal, and because his historical “plot” involves a world war, Herodotus is trying to give you a picture of the world entire, of how everything in it is, essentially, linked.

“Link,” as it happens, is not a bad word to have in mind as you make your way through a text that is at once compellingly linear and disorientingly tangential, in which an information-packed aside can take the form of a three-thousand-word narrative or a one-line summary. It only looks confusing or “digressive” because Herodotus, far from being an old fuddy-duddy, not nearly as sophisticated as (say) Thucydides, was two and a half millennia ahead of the technology that would have ideally suited his mentality and style. It occurs to you, as you read
The Landmark Herodotus
—with its very Herodotean footnotes, maps, charts, and illustrations—that a truly adventurous new edition of the
Histories
would take the digressive bits and turn them into what Herodotus would have done if only they’d existed: hyperlinks.

Then again, Herodotus’ work may have presaged another genre altogether. The passage about lions, hares, and vipers reminds you of the other great objection to Herodotus—his unreliability. (For one thing, nearly everything he says about those animals is wrong.) And yet, as you make your way through this amazing document, “accuracy”—or, at least, what we normally think of as scientific or even journalistic accuracy, “the facts”—seems to get less and less important. Did Xerxes really weep when he reviewed his troops? Did the aged, corrupt Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens now in the service
of Darius, really lose a tooth on the beach at Marathon before the great battle began, a sign that he interpreted (correctly) to mean that he would never take back his homeland? Perhaps not. But that startling closeup, in which the preparations for war focus, with poignant suddenness, on a single hopeless old has-been, has indelible power. Herodotus may not always give us the facts, but he unfailingly supplies something that is just as important in the study of what he calls
ta genomena ex anthropon
, or “things that result from human action”: he gives us the truth about the way things tend to work as a whole, in history, civics, personality, and, of course, psychology. (“Most of the visions visiting our dreams tend to be what one is thinking about during the day.”)

All of which is to say that while Herodotus may or may not have anticipated hypertext, he certainly anticipated the novel. Or at least one kind of novel. Something about the
Histories
, indeed, feels eerily familiar. Think of a novel, written fifty years after a cataclysmic encounter between Europe and Asia, containing both real and imagined characters, and expressing a grand vision of the way history works in a highly tendentious, but quite plausible, narrative of epic verve and sweep. Add an irresistible antihero eager for a conquest that eludes him precisely because he understands nothing, in the end, about the people he dreams of subduing; a hapless yet winning indigenous population that, almost by accident, successfully resists him; and digressions powerfully evoking the cultures whose fates are at stake in these grand conflicts. Whatever its debt to the Ionian scientists of the sixth century BC and to Athenian tragedy of the fifth, the work that the
Histories
may most remind you of is
War and Peace
.

And so, in the end, the contemporary reader is likely to come away from this ostensibly archaic epic with the sense of something remarkably familiar, even contemporary. That cinematic style, with its breathtaking
wide shots expertly alternating with heart-stopping closeups. The daring hybrid genre that integrates into a grand narrative both flights of empathetic fictionalizing and the anxious, footnote-prone self-commentary of the obsessive, perhaps even neurotic amateur scholar. (To many readers, the
Histories
may feel like something David Foster Wallace could have dreamed up.) A postmodern style that continually calls attention to the mechanisms of its own creation and peppers a sprawling narrative with any item of interest, however tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Then there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Except, of course, the expectations of those who have read the
Histories
. If a hundred generations of men, from the Athenians to ourselves, have learned nothing from this work, whose apparent wide-eyed naiveté conceals, in the end, an irresistible vision of the
way things always seem to work out, that is their fault and not the author’s. As he himself knew so well, time always tells. However silly he may once have looked to some people, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh.

—
The New Yorker
, April 28, 2008

DAYLIGHT WAS FADING
on June 3, 17 BC, when there suddenly ascended into the soft air above the Palatine Hill in Rome the pure and reedy sound of fifty-four young voices singing a most unusual hymn. Anyone in the audience that evening who knew his Greek literature—and you can suppose that many did—would have recognized the syncopated, slightly nervous meter of the song being sung as the one invented and made famous six centuries earlier by the Lesbian poet Sappho, who used it to convey some of her most famous lyrics of erotic yearning. (“That man seems to me to be like a god / who, sitting just across from you, / when you’ve spoken sweetly / hears you.”)

On this particular summer night, however, burning desire was not on the poetic menu. That much became clear as soon as the two choirs of twenty-seven singers—one of boys, one of girls, each corresponding to one of the deities invoked in the hymn—called upon Apollo and Diana, “world’s brightness and darkness, worshipped forever,” to

The singing of this hymn was, in fact, the high point of a magnificent and solemn civic occasion: the
ludi saeculares
, Centennial Games, which the First Citizen, Augustus Caesar (né Octavian), had ordered to be held that year—a celebration of Rome as the capital of the world, meant to commemorate the beginning of a new era, a new
saeculum
, in the affairs of humankind. And why not? Fourteen years earlier, Augustus had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at Actium, thereby establishing, for once and for all, Rome as the single great Mediterranean power and putting a hundred years of civil conflict to an end. Since then, he had been consolidating his power abroad and at home, traveling in the East, legislating ethical and moral reforms. Only now, in the year 17 BC, could Rome and the world—and his own position as de facto emperor—be considered secure enough to announce the beginning of what was clearly a New World Order.

We happen to know an unusual amount about the commissioning and performance of the hymn that was meant to celebrate Augustus’ achievement because of the survival of two objects from antiquity: a book and a stone. The book, by Suetonius, the historian and biographer of the emperors, was written about a century and a quarter after the evening in question, and in it the author describes how Augustus “approved so highly” of the works of a certain poet and was so “convinced that they would remain immortal that he bade him to compose … the
Carmen saeculare
.” The stone, discovered in 1890 and visible today in the Musée des Thermes, is a chunk of the official catalog of the
ludi saeculares
, and with respect to the hymn it notes that on the third day, after a sacrifice offered on the Palatine Hill,