My Professor of Ionic Greek was a very funny guy.\u00a0 He said that the charm of reading Herodotus is that his prose reminds you of your Great Aunt telling family history.\u00a0 The whole story is one big run-on sentence meandering back and forth and including everything from news of the great war to gossip about somebody\u2019s wife cheating with the milkman.\u00a0 And sometimes it\u2019s difficult to tell which part she feels is more important.<\/p>\n
In the same way, Herodotus starts off the history of the Persian War by claiming its origin was the kidnapping of Helen by the Trojans!\u00a0 From there we get a family history of the first Asian ruler to conquer the Greeks living in Asia Minor.\u00a0 Apparently, the origin of this dynasty involves a King allowing his wife to be seen naked by a commoner.\u00a0 This triggers his wife\u2019s anger so severely that she conspires with the commoner to kill her husband and usurp the throne. \u00a0All of these stories are given with either a tongue in cheek or a storyteller\u2019s desire to be complete.<\/p>\n
But in between all this chatter you get some stories that are told nowhere else and that record the (mostly) accurate exploits of the ancient world\u2019s greatest generation.\u00a0 You\u2019ll hear about Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea.\u00a0 You\u2019ll meet Leonidas and the Spartans, Themistocles and the Athenians and Xerxes and the Persians.\u00a0 And mixed in with that you\u2019ll hear unlikely stories of the origins of historical nations based on the amorous adventures of Heracles and other demigods.\u00a0 And you\u2019ll feel that you\u2019re in the midst of a tumultuous time full of heroes and villains.\u00a0 And you\u2019ll discover the ancient dichotomy of the East vs. the West.\u00a0 It\u2019s freedom versus slavery.\u00a0 It\u2019s nation versus empire.\u00a0 It\u2019s intelligence versus brute force.<\/p>\n
There are places where the story bogs down.\u00a0 You see Herodotus was a world traveler and he relates all the tales he was told in his various travels.\u00a0 During his time in Egypt he collected much material on the rulers and doings in Egypt.\u00a0 Sometimes it gets to be a little much.\u00a0 But mixed in with this minutia will be stories that sound like they came out of the Tales of the Arabian Nights.<\/p>\n
In terms of historical accuracy Herodotus was far inferior to his successor at Athens, Thucydides.\u00a0 His history chronicles the aftermath of the Persian War.\u00a0 This was a sort of Cold War between Athens and Sparta that eventually went hot.\u00a0 Thucydides provides precise details of the military and political actions and forgoes all mythical and religious causes.\u00a0 But the content is basically the story of Athens committing suicide.\u00a0 I much prefer reading the story of its finest hour.<\/p>\n
Every summer I read from two greek classics.\u00a0 I read the Odyssey and I browse Herodotus.\u00a0 Those two books give me hope that the legacy of the West isn\u2019t a myth.\u00a0 Odysseus tells me that the value of the brave man and the faithful wife can overcome the chaos and nihilism of the world.\u00a0 And Herodotus tells me that freedom reappears in this world from time to time and that it is the most valuable substance in the universe.<\/p>\n
In future installments, I\u2019ll select some of the stories that I think make the case that the gossip Herodotus is still relevant and interesting 2,400 years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Professor of Ionic Greek was a very funny guy.\u00a0 He said that the charm of reading Herodotus is that his prose reminds you of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237],"tags":[68,195,196,197,194],"class_list":["post-1101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-classical-history","tag-herodotus","tag-history","tag-western-civilization"],"yoast_head":"\n