Herodotus II: East is East and West Is Best
Finally, having dispatched the Neopagans and the barbarian hordes and after orchestrating our glorious victory in Afghanistan, I am ready to return to Herodotus. His theme, as I observed in the first installment, is the conflict between Europe and Asia or, more properly, Greeks and barbarians. In a way, his work can be treated as a kind of essay in definition, that is, he is defining Greekness or Hellenism partly by describing Greek behavior and partly by the contrast, often merely suggested, with barbarians.
What seem like long digressions on the histories of the Medes and Persians, Egyptians, and Scythian peoples, thus fit into the overall pattern. These logoi are, whatever historical value they possess, highly entertaining in themselves, but we learn many things about these non-Greek peoples. In the famous Persian debate on government, there is an ethnological subtext that is not always noted: On the one hand, the Persians—unlike other barbarians—are capable of conceiving of free government, but in the end they reject it. Greeks, by contrast, even when they acquiesce in tyranny, prefer freedom. The Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, for example, is described as benign—particularly in his first regime—precisely because he does not interfere in Athenian custom and law. In other words, he acts more like a Spartan king than a tyrant like Periander.
We learn from the Scythian peoples that they are bold in defense of their freedom but they are not capable of self-restraint. One little instance: They pile up bonfires of hemp and dance around breathing the fumes until they get drunk and pass out. Greeks find this strange. They like drinking parties, but they water their wine to avoid getting drunk, and even if they become convivial to the point of drunkenness, they conducted themselves with dignity and spent a long evening of music and conversation with their friends.
I am only hitting the highlights of books 2-4, but we also observe that women play a larger and stranger role in barbarian cultures. There are queens among the Scyths, while Atossa plays a major role in Persian politics—she virtually dictates the selection of Xerxes as heir and is the star of Aeschylus' Persians. There are strong women in Herodotus' world, of course. His native town was ruled by Queen Artemisia—a Greek name for a Carian queen!—but she was not really Greek. Gorgo, the daughter of the Spartan king Cleomenes, warns her father against the wiles of an Ionian diplomat, but Herodotus portrays this as an extraordinarily close father-daughter relationship. Besides, from what we know of the Spartans, fathers do seem closer to their daughters than elsewhere in Greece. Perhaps it is because sons were so early sent off to boot camp and then to the soldiers' messes. (Interestingly, the charming little Gorgo goes on to marry her cousin Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae.)
In the filthy East, otherwise respectable women must do duty as temple prostitutes, and polygamy and incest are common. In the one Greek case of polygamy, a Spartan king who refused to divorce his barren wife was required by the Ephors to take a second wife to continue a blood line that went back to Heracles. I can just hear the monogamous Athenians, who strictly guarded the chastity of their women, saying, "My my, what strange twisted people those Babylonians and Egyptians are, not proper at all."
This is enough to get us onto Book V, where the conflict between Greeks and Persians begins, and we shall be able to look at the narrative both for the history it tells but also for this contrast of national characters. While Persians are happy to slaughter brave people in order to enslave them, the Greeks are willing to die defending their liberty and independence. To the extent we belong to the West, we are still Greek—and Roman in our willingness to fight and die for our wives and children, the bones of our ancestors and the shrines of our gods. In Macaulay's once famous lines:
For how can man die better than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?
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A quality of Herodotus,the Greeks and their heirs is that they did not allow their sense of superiority to abolish their curiosity about other nations or their appreciation for the accomplishments of foreigners (however much they might disapprove of barbarians in general). Other civilizations do not share this quality.
I have been lagging behind on this but thankfully the end of the semester has opened up some time and I should be able to catch up. I have to admit that I have not read any Herodotus before; it's one of many gaps. Hopefully nobody minds some "old business" questions/comments.
In Book I, the exchange between Apollo and Aristodicus piqued my curiousity -- where Aristodicus the Cymaean asks the oracle at Branchidae whether or not his people should hand over the refugee Pactyas to the Persians.
When told "yes", Aristodicus goes around the temple and collects all the little bird's nests that have been made in and around the vicinity of the building (presumably it was an impiety to molest animals who sought shelter & built homes at or around a temple).
When the voice of the god chastises Aristodicus, Aristodicus asks if the god who is so concerned for animal suppliants really wants the Cymaeans to hand over a human suppliant to certain death.
The god's response is something along the lines of, "Yes, so that you may perish for your impiety, and never come here again to ask my oracle what to do about suppliants."
Perhaps I'm inferring to much, but -- is the oracle chastising the Cymaeans for even asking the impious question to begin with?
I'm just thinking of how some questions are in and of themselves immoral -- i.e., if you really need to ask, pal, you're already behind the 8-ball as a human being.
Also I was very struck by Croesus as the adviser to Cyrus -- I had encountered the "Don't count your chickens until you're dead" kernel of the story before in Nicomachean Ethics, of course, but had not really thought about there being so much more to it.
The fact that Croesus keeps reappearing as a sad sage who gives good advice to his conqueror really sticks in my imagination. As a dramatic figure I would conceive Croesus as both spooky and moving -- the shadow of a king giving advice to a current king.
Like the ghost of Tireisias in the Odyssey.
To JDS, the answer is yes, even to imagine it was right to violate the sanctuary of a temple is itself an act of impiety. The Greeks had no international law and only the rudiments of an international morality, but two prime elements of their basic code involve the protection of suppliants in a temple and respect for the rules of Xenia, guest-friendship. When Paris violates Menelaus's hospitality, he brings on war and the destruction of his people. As for the first, there are many instances, perhaps the most famous being the story told by Herodotus about the conspiracy of Cylon to set up a tyranny in Athens. Depending on the version, either Cylon or, more probably, his followers took refuge in a sanctuary but were lured out by the archon Megacles who had them put to death. This brought a curse--probably a formally decreed curse--on the entire family of the Alcmaeonidae. Megacles and the clan went into exile, though they did manage to return. The curse was never lifted, since the Spartans could raise the issue again in calling for the expulsion of Pericles, whose mother was a direct descendant of Megacles.
Herodotus likes to use the figure of the wise advisor who tells the truth to an unwilling power-crazed ruler. Demaratus, exiled Spartan king, is perhaps the most memorable because of the advice he gives Xerxes. Another is Themistocles, who flees to Persia but in the end refuses to betray the Greeks and commits suicide.
So little Gorgo is the one who stabs the rascal Theron to death
in Zack Snyder's trashy 300? That's my kind of charm. Alas, I see from the cast credits that Theron is a fictional character. I guess I really need to read the originals.