Herodotus and the Invention of History
As we have seen, the outcome of the Persian Wars was unexpected. Even the responses of the Delphic
oracle, which the Greeks considered to be the expression of divine wisdom, seemed to predict victory for
the Persians, an outcome that appeared inevitable even to those endowed with merely human wisdom.
Somehow, the surprising success of the Greeks had to be accounted for. In The Persians, Aeschylus
represented the Persian defeat at Salamis as an instance of divine punishment occasioned by Xerxes’
insolent disregard for propriety and due measure, or what the Greeks call HYBRIS. The Persians is a
work of poetry, and it is a traditional theme of Greek poetry that the gods severely chastise mortals who
exhibit hybris. Since the Persian Empire could be thought of as little more than an extension of the person
of the Persian king, this type of explanation could be accepted as adequate, particularly in the context of a
poetic and dramatic text. But the Greeks were well aware that not all political entities were absolute
monarchies. How could the fate of states like democratic Athens or oligarchic Sparta be accommodated
within a scheme that traditionally concentrated on individual, personal responsibility?
HYBRIS Wanton behavior aimed at the humiliation of another person for the sole purpose of
asserting one’s own actual or imagined superiority in status, power, wealth, and so on.Some such question as this must have been what prompted Herodotus to embark on the composition of his
massive and revolutionary history of the Persian Wars. Herodotus was born some time around 485 BC
(that is, during the time of the Persian Wars) in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, on the southwest coast of
Asia Minor. Halicarnassus is only about 60 kilometers, as the stork flies, from Miletus, so that Herodotus
was born into an intellectual milieu in which the ideas of the earliest philosophers were readily
accessible and still fresh. Those philosophers had attempted to account for the workings of the universe
by applying something resembling universal laws of nature. In particular, Anaximander had written about
the compensatory “retribution” that natural entities suffer as a result of their encroachment upon the realm
of other entities. For example, the hot and the cold prevail at different seasons, but in the course of a year
they balance each other out and create an equilibrium as each pays an equal penalty to the other.
Anaximander, in other words, had tried to account for natural phenomena using concepts, like “penalty,”
“retribution,” and “justice,” that are familiar from human interactions. What Herodotus did was to turn
this around and to account for human interactions in the more “abstract” terms appropriate to natural
phenomena. In doing so, Herodotus invented not only history, but the social sciences as well.
“She gave birth to Herodotus, a Homer who wrote histories in prose; she nurtured Andron,
renowned for his literary powers; she brought forth the splendid lord of epic verse Panyassis; she
was the mother of Cyprias, singer of Trojan tales.” (SEG 48.1330.43–6, a verse inscription from the
second century BC, first published in 1998, singing the praises of Halicarnassus)Like all innovative work, that of Herodotus is firmly based in a tradition, from which it takes its
departure. In the case of Herodotus, the literary tradition of which he is a part is, perhaps surprisingly,
that of Homeric epic. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, a conflict between forces from opposite
sides of the Aegean Sea, and is on a very large scale. In fact, Homer’s Iliad is the longest literary work
the Greeks of Herodotus’ day were familiar with. Herodotus’ history is even more ambitious, being some
64 percent longer than the Iliad, so in terms of size alone it demands comparison with the most illustrious
work of Greek literature. Since Herodotus, too, is concerned to recount a war between European and
Asiatic forces, comparison with Homer is inevitable and seems to have been courted by Herodotus