expansion brought them into contact with their Persian neighbors, by whom they were eventually
conquered. And in his account of the rise of the Persian Empire he describes how the Persians had earlier
been subjects of the Medes, whom they overthrew. The climax, of course, of Herodotus’ history is the
lengthy account of the Persians’ defeat at the hands of the Greeks. The causes of this defeat are manifold
and complex, but the background and the theoretical framework that Herodotus has provided help to
create a coherent story through which those causes can be understood. The land that the Greeks inhabit is
not very productive, so that the Greeks are naturally tough and familiar with hardship. Further, the climate
of Greece (which is located, according to Herodotus, at the center of a more or less circular earth; map
12 ) is temperate, so the energies of its inhabitants are sapped neither by excessive heat nor by excessive
cold. By contrast, the Persians’ long history of successful conquest has furnished them with luxuries that
have rendered them soft, even effeminate. Their previous successes have made them masters of many
peoples, on whose efforts they have come to rely. Herodotus gives a detailed description of the numerous
nations whose soldiers, equipped in many instances with outlandish native weapons, make up the ungainly
invasion force. Because of its heterogeneous nature, the Persian army lacks the uniformity and unity of
purpose that characterize the Greek forces.
Map 12 The world according to Herodotus.
There is one additional factor that has not yet been mentioned, and that is the gods. It would seem that
Herodotus is quite capable of accounting for historical causation without any recourse to the supernatural.
But for an ancient Greek to ignore the gods is dangerous in the extreme, and Herodotus takes account of
the agency of the divine alongside his more “scientific” understanding of the workings of historical
causation. One of the results of success and prosperity is a self-confidence that is to some degree
justifiable but that can lead to the kind of hybris for which Xerxes, according to Aeschylus’ The Persians,
was punished by the gods. In fact, this more traditional form of explanation, in terms of divine punishment
for outrageous violation of accepted norms, has inevitably influenced and helped to shape Herodotus’
more abstract thinking. The pattern that Herodotus has outlined, according to which nations expand and