Herodotus: The Father of History

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Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. What Herodotus from Halecarnassus has learnt by inquiry is here set forth. In order that, so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners, and especially the reason why they wore it against each other may not lack renown.

Herodotus is known as the Father of History, immortalized through his great surviving work written 2,500 years ago, a dramatic narrative of the Persian invasions of Greece, and attempts to explain the origins of hostility between Greeks and non-greeks, what they called barbarians, and ethnography, exploring beliefs and legends of these foreign peoples who live across the Mediterranean world and beyond.

It's known as the Histories, a paragon work of ancient non-fiction that is fascinated to people for centuries.

“In this episode, we're going to explore what is known about Herodotus and some of the key themes”

from his histories, with our fam-favorite returning guest, Dr. Paul Kanainadak. Welcome to the ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and this is the story of Herodotus. The Father of History. It is great to have you back on the podcast, welcome back. So good to be back, Tristan.

Thanks for having me.

You're more than welcome, and this is the second time we've done it in person.

We did the Spartan warrior a couple of years ago, but here we're talking about, I guess something related to the Greco-Persian wars, but Herodotus, he feels of all the ancient historical accounts that we have. He feels like the big one, at least with ancient Greek history. Yeah, when we're talking about the Persian wars, I mean, it feels like exploring rooms where

this is the building, right? This is basically what we're talking about. There's a lot of other sources that we can draw, and when we're trying to talk about the Persians and the Persian wars, but Herodotus is the one who decided this should be a story, that was worth commemorating, worth writing down in full detail, and we rely on him so much,

I mean, there are parts of this whole story for which we are basically nothing but Herodotus. And so he is the one who gives us not just all the details, but the whole idea that this is a narrative, right? This is something that has a beginning and end, and it has a message, and it has all these participants and all these actors that he describes.

I mean, this is basically his idea of how to tell this story, and so how does he get the

name the father of history? So it's something he's already called in ancient times, right? So this is something that's been around for a long time, because he is the earliest narrative history that survives. Now I really want to qualify this, you can hear me sort of thinking about how I should

put it. He's not the first person to conceive the idea of history, right? Like obviously, there are various people in this world who are already trying to write down ways of talking about the past, and this goes right back to, you know, Mesopotamian empire.

So it's thinking yeah. Exactly. A campaign narratives and talking about what they did in, you know, each separate year,

the writing Chronicles, which basically just goes year by year, this is what happened, because

they are for them.

“It's very important to connect that to astronomical meteorological events, right?”

So there's a lot of, they're understanding of the world is wrapped up in understanding history, but there isn't this sense of a causal narrative. This is kind of what Rodgers's first to bring into it. Is this idea of like things happened for a reason, things happened because other things have happened, and because personalities have an influence on it and other forces have

an influence on it. And so he's trying to construct not just a list of things that happened or a specific sort of stories that are being collected by, for instance, sort of priests and sound trees and places like that, or noble families that are kind of collecting the history of their household, but he's trying to bring all this things together to tell a bigger story that isn't necessarily

like the act of one king or anything like that, but something that is in its conception much bigger or much more all encompassing. And because he's the first one to do that, whose work survives in full, we kind of see him as the person who invents this, right, who invents the idea of what history is and what it looks like.

I mean, that's his significance, and we'll certainly get to his work, the histories. But before that, I'd actually like to ask more about Rodgers to the man.

“Do we actually know much about this figure who he was about his life?”

No, no frustrating, they know, because often with these people, I mean, the only thing that

comes after her roots is obviously right through the Peloponnesian War, we know pretty much nothing about these people except what they drop into their story by themselves, where they drop in a little sort of autobiographical detail, and they describe something they'll say,

“oh, and I saw this myself, or, you know, and I talked to this person, and so that's how they”

found out, sometimes they do this, and that will tell us a lot, and then there are some later

sort of biographical accounts, we're always very shy to accept, uncritically, what they tell us,

because they're much later, we don't know if they derive from any kind of factual information, or if they're just kind of projecting onto these figures, what they want us to know, and so, you know, for earlier poets like Homer, for instance, there are quite substantial biographies that survive, and we don't believe any of that, because these figures themselves were not the subject of history, the details of their lives were lost.

So do we know at least where he came from? Does he actually come from ancient Greece? He did not come strictly speaking from the Greek world, it came from the Persian Empire, but a Greek part of it, or a Greek and Cary and part of it, he opens his histories by introducing himself, he says, "I'm Herodicis of Halikarnasas." Halikarnasas is in the southwest corner of what is now Turkey, and that's Cary, and he mentioned that's Cary, but on the coast, you get sort

of more and more Hellenized communities, and so Herodicis, while his name is a very Greek, sort of gift of Hira, quite a lot of people suspect that at least one of his parents was Cary, and so this is the local population that is sort of interactive, the Greeks for centuries, by this point. It's a community that is ruled by the Persians, but it is locally autonomous, so there are some local rulers that govern this area, who are themselves sort of Caryan,

but Hellenized Caryan people. And so Herodicis from this community, but it seems as though his father was involved potentially in a coup in Halikarnasas, or in some kind of political upheaval, so he's driven out, which means that Herodicis actually grew up in St. Moss, which is is very much part of the Eugenique world. And that's an island just off the coast from Halekenasis.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And also, you mentioned there in passing, which is really interesting.

“So the name Herodotus. So here are Dota. So what did you say, men?”

Gift of here is a very common thing with Greek proper names that they are. What's called Theoforex? So they carry the name of the divinity. So you have lots of names that are essentially just adaptations of like Dometrius, being an adaptation of Dometrius, something like that. And the very particular one that they use very often is either Doros

or Dota us at the end of a divine name, which means gift of essentially. Or that's how we interpret it anyway. So you have people called Apple Adoras or Deodoras and Herodotus is another version of that. Of course. I thank you for explaining that. I have no idea. But does his exo to Samos? Does that actually allow him to do a lot of traveling around

the Mediterranean? Do we think he's quite a well-traveled man? He certainly is. I mean, this is where we get his autobiographical detail talking about the things that he saw or even just sort of looking at his account and seeing which things he's able to describe in more detail. You get this sense of like, okay, there are things you saw and there are things you just heard about.

And so we get a sense because he's clearly from a wealthy background. Despite the fact that he was in exile, he lived a life of the leisure of gentlemen. So he was traveling around the Greek world quite a bit.

There's always suspicion that he spent a lot of time in Athens, which is widely assumed

because he knows so much about it. But he traveled very far around the Greek world. He was involved later in life in the foundation of Thurio, which is in southern Italy. Right. So it's a new Greek settlement, a new Greek community that's being established there. And it's considered to be one of his great works to be part of that undertaking in the 40s BC.

“It's almost certain that went to Skidia. So what is now Ukraine?”

That he traveled into the East. He went to Egypt. He also traveled into Mesopotamia. We're not quite sure how far he got. But there's huge parts of the Greek Mediterranean world and beyond that he saw for himself. That's quite something for an exiled Greek, or they want who would be in the Persian Empire. To be able to go, say, to Mesopotamia, to Egypt, but then to Skidia.

And Athens, when I don't know if you'd have a bodyguard or something like that. But you think it's probably quite a dangerous world to do that on the seas or overland on these on these road routes, and yet he accomplishes it. Yeah. So on the one hand, we don't really know what that looks like, right? So we don't know if he traveled with a large entourage or with a bodyguard, or if he had someone with him to guide him.

I've seen the impression you get from these travelers is basically just have your personal

servants and somebody presumably to carry around your stuff. But fundamentally, it is on the one hand, the dangerous world that it can be quite lawless in places, especially in the areas that are not under any kind of central control or supervision. But it's also a world that's relatively open, right? So it's not like anybody's checking him at the border and saying, hold on, you can't come here. So there's quite a lot of opportunity to travel as long as you're willing to undertake those risks.

And so by the end, you say he goes to Italy, the story of the Western Greeks, McLeod Gracia, so great degrees. Do we think that's where he ends his story as well? So it's not certain where he dies. Actually, I think most people think that he died in Athens, because some of the details that he gives towards the furthest forward in time in his work all relate to Athenian matters and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

And so it's suspected that even though he was involved in this great foundation settlement, he then traveled back to mainland Greece where he spent the last potentially decade of his life. Is this all happening in the 5th century BC? Do we know any more accurate dates about when he lived or can we just do approximations? It's really hard to know actually. I mean, the most common approximation is that he was born somewhere in the 480s BC. So basically between

scene that I don't remember which scholar wrote this down. It's a great scene imagining what it was like for her analysis as a four-five-year-old boy to watch Artamizia and the remains of her tattered detachment that had fought at Salamis, sailed back into the harbour, how does the queen of Peloponnesia exist? Exactly. And so seeing that, seeing that detachment

“returned home after its defeat and wondering what happened to it, you know, what was this story?”

What was this about? Which I think is a really nice image to imagine but he would have been a little boy at the time. So who knows if he was at any inches yet. But that's when he was born and then when he died, again not entirely sure, some people stretched this as far back down as maybe 400. But most people I think would say it was quite a bit early maybe around 430 that he passed away or at least that is what we can derive from his work that he was still around to see the event

of 431 but then after that very quickly we still being very confident about how much more he saw

and so we assumed that he might have died. So this feels like that's basically all we can say about

Oraditus the man and his life apart from, of course, when we now get to his work, the thing that he's remembered for. And do we have any idea how long it would have taken him to compose his histories? Do we think this was his life work? Generally yes, although we don't know how long he worked at it. Just so we have no idea of like the cities who says I've started taking notes at the beginning of this work because I knew it was going to be important and that wrote it all the way to the end

“which we don't even know I never had. I didn't finish it. But it would have been helpful if”

our artists made some kind of comment like that but he didn't. And so what we have is essentially just as I already mentioned these moments in the story when he looks ahead to things that haven't happened yet at the time where he is in his narrative. It looks ahead to later events in Greek history and we can get a sense from that of how much he saw, like how long he was around for and also what was presumably happening around him for him to be taking notes about these things.

So it's usually assumed that this was a long term endeavor that he was working on this for decades and that he was presenting parts of it as he went. So he was going through different cities and states and essentially saying you want to hear the story of this for that. Essentially presenting it as a piece of entertainment, like you know the rap so it was presenting their poetry, he was presenting his histories. And that may well have meant that he was sort of honing it and

working at it and building pieces of it, building blocks of it for a very, very long time until you know maybe into the 430s or even beyond that. So could he have also been a bit of a celebrity academic travelling academic of the time? You know, people would, oh, her artist is in town.

He's telling the story of his first book in the histories or something like that. Could that potentially

have been happening? May well be true. Yeah. So one of the ways in which we interpret this is we get this sneer from the city. So it was obviously a very serious and very dry and very sort of serious minded person who makes this little job saying, okay, my history is a possession for all time not as a entertainment for the moment. Not as a little bit of, you know, a bit of fun at a symposium or a festival where you have these performances going. And so from that we usually

assume that he's talking about a road that says there. He's talking about somebody who is seeing his history not as a sort of didactic work that everybody should sort of digest and preserve with rather as something that he can present, you know, as a form of entertainment. And so it's quite likely that like famous rap so it's like famous sort of performers in that period that he might have drawn quite an audience. Well, let's explore now his work. Let's explore the histories.

And does he want to just make it clear right from the beginning? What is overarching aim? What is purpose is with this massive work? So, hopefully he's very explicit about that, right? He says exactly at the beginning why he's doing this. He says that he wants to preserve the great deeds of Greeks and non Greeks. That is the overall thing that he thinks that there are things worth commemorating things worth seeing and admiring. And his job is just to record it to make sure that it isn't lost.

“Isn't forgotten. That's what he sets out to do. And then he narrows it down and says, okay, these”

are all the kind of things that I'm interested in, but specifically why the Greeks and non Greeks, the Greeks and barbarians, as he calls them, went to war with each other. And so that's where he's talking about the Persian words. Do you think does he have an agenda right from the start? Is it clear that he sees the Greeks as superior? Does he follow that view that he thinks the non Greeks who said you use that word barbarians? Does he seem to view them as inferior in his work?

How do you think he portrays that? Early on in Greek culture and Greek literature, barbarian doesn't have those negative connotations that it has now. That emerges later on. And so when he's talking

about barbarians, I mean, the obvious sort of etymology that we're always told is like it's just

referring to foreign speech, foreign language. It's not negatives, not pejorative. These are just foreigners. And so different translators will choose different ways of translating that barbarians. They might not use the English word barbarian. They might just say non Greeks or they might say foreigners. Harovatives is very, very happy to acknowledge the great deeds of foreigners. As I said, that is explicit from the start. He's saying, you know, both Greeks and non Greeks have done great

things. And I'm going to talk to you about all of them. And so he isn't interested in saying, like, oh, but the Greeks have obviously achieved more. He's actually trying to give everyone their due. This was a very interesting thing that you mentioned there, of course, the word barbarian gets more negative connotations to it. So I'm really glad we highlight to that straight away. Another kind of big question. You've kind of mentioned it already, but I'll ask you because it's

kind of more straight to the point. Can we call the history history? sexually an interesting question.

these are the histories of Herorbitus of Alaconaces. I mean, that's how he introduces the work. But the word he uses there is history, yeah, which means investigations. So this is a Greek word, which is the origin of what we call history, but which at the time essentially means, you know,

“I went around and looked some things out and found some things out. And that's what this is.”

And so we can obviously call it the histories because that's what it calls itself. But at the same time, what that means is a little bit different from what we might say at history. It's a reporter. If it was like almost an ancient Greek reporter in a way? Yeah. Also, there's a lot of different things that has, where could we characterize that? Obviously, there is a lot of history, there's a narrative history. There's also a lot of ethnography. There's a lot of interest in foreign

lands and peoples and customs. And there is also this political dimension of trying to give people's their due, trying to give different states and communities their due, trying to assess the contribution of certain individuals and their character. So there's a lot of interesting things in there that are perhaps more literary in their intentional perhaps more political as well. And all of that kind of goes into the modern study history as well. I mean, we really are still

looking at this as one of the things that tells us how to do our job to some extent. It has all these different facets. It has all these different, there's different moments of focus. It's very complex. And you mentioned that key word there, ethnography that I really

“wants to talk about because I think it's so important to her order to this story. So do you get”

quite a lot of the histories? Does it go into quite a lot of detail, exploring what might seem to him the quite strange, the different customs and beliefs of these non Greek peoples, you know, across the Mediterranean pond and further? Yeah. So he's absolutely fascinated by

that. And there are at least huge digressions in the work. I mean, the most important ones

obviously in book two he goes into the Egyptians, in tremendous detail. Book one actually talks about the Persians quite a lot. Persian customs, religion, habits, kingship, etc. And the backstory of the Persian empire, you know, however much he wants to believe that. And then in book four he talks about the Skidians. So the people of Central Asia that he knows through Ukraine essentially with our Greek settlements. And he talks,

I mean in book five he has another big digression on the Thracians. There are lots of these different bits of ethnography. And he applies that even internally where he has a little piece in his work talking about the Spartans. He's in almost the same terms, right? He's saying, oh, the Spartans, you know, you know, obviously they're Greeks but they're a little bit weird and there's hell, you know. And there's almost explicitly like they're almost like foreigners to me in this way,

you know, in particular when when it comes to their royal houses and things like that. So he's interested in that too. And the whole thing is just the result of that is a narrative that is constantly interrupted with digressions where he says, oh, now I got to tell you the origin about this. Get ready. Yeah. Well, it was like, oh, yes. He's just so fascinated by it. And so a lot of reading it is actually, it's a very nice experience in a way because you can see his enthusiasm

to represent the project, right? It's absolutely just like, oh, and I know this one too. And these other people have told me this and you got to know this because it's great. And it really lives up to this idea, this initial intention to say, if there is anything worth mentioning, anything worth admiring, I will tell you about it. And I'm not going to hold back. The promise, if you're interested in a sort of steady sort of narrative history that explained why things happen, it can

be very frustrating because he does not just stick with his story. He does not just tell you the facts or the events one after the other. This is an episodic narrative full of digression because each of those could have been one of those presentation pieces. Each one of those could have been like the story he told when he went to a different town and said, okay, you want to hear the story of what you guys did during the Persian wars or how you guys got your constitution or, you know,

things like that. And that's obviously part of how it came together, but it's still there as a testament to the breadth of his, as a nation with the world. And does he distinguish between the

types of sources he uses for the information, you know, information that he gets first hand,

information that he hears from someone else telling him that he heard from someone else or she heard from someone else. Does it become clear that he kind of distinguishes the evidence that he has and how plausible he thinks it is? Yeah, so he does this actually quite a lot in the sense that he'll notice this is much more explicit than the cities who suppose to be like the better more scientific story and according to many modern commentators, a lot of this is much more explicit

about what he's doing when he's telling the story. He will often say, where he got it and often this is very vague, you know, the Corinthians told me, okay, that's not very specific, but at least he's trying to tell you like there are different versions that come from different places, often he's comparing them explicitly, says this is what they say and this is what these other people say. And often he will button to sort of add little comments saying like, you know, but I'm not sure

I can believe this or, you know, but I also saw this and that actually proves it wrong or, you know, just using some basic logic or some other information or just just to add a sort of sprinkle a bit of doubt on these stories just to be like, I'm not sure that that this is actually true. And a lot of that is to some extent is relativism, right? It's this idea of when you talk to

many people, you get different versions of a lot of different stories and you will never know which one

is true, right? Or you will never be able to determine whether there is a single truth or whether there's just all these different versions that suit different people, different agents. But there's always

“also this element of, you know, do we really know? Like who are we to say what the truth is, right?”

And there's explicitly some stories that try to make this point. It has a very famous sort of anecdote

empire to essentially say what you do with the dead, because apparently their habits were opposite, the Greeks burned them and the Indians ate them supposedly. And this is obviously just a story and that we don't really believe this, but there are obviously ways in which you can say, okay, this maybe goes back to some real origin story. And the idea is that the Persian King then told them,

“okay, the Greeks now you must eat your dead and the Indians who must burn them. And they're both”

completely outraged by the idea that we should do this because they both believed very strongly that they were doing right by their ancestors and they were doing right by the deceased. And they absolutely refused to believe that any other way could be true one, but they were in direct opposition to each other. And Rodgers tells the story to kind of indicate more broadly that, you know, there are so many different ways of living in the world and there isn't a single one that is right.

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For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History at the Battle of Bosworth. You also mentioned India there, so although Hordidis doesn't seem like for what you were saying, he visited India. He seems pretty well researched. He seems to, I mean, what we know about the extent of his knowledge of the geography of the world at that time, does he see India right

“to the edges? So he does no more than I think most of the other authors of his time. Like he has”

a much broader world view partly because of his travels and partly because that is what he's interested in. He's interested in, in particular, in describing the Persian Empire and all his plurformity. And the Persians would have happily helped him with this because that actually corresponds a lot

with their royal ideology, right? They're always stressing how many people say rule over the

vast extent of their empire. They're trying to express to far corners of it in order to say, like, look at this geographical span, but even for a rug, this is very difficult to see beyond that. So when you get past the borders of the spaces and the peoples that the Persians essentially have interacted with or the Greeks themselves, but more like the Persian, you get into very fuzzy territory. And quite literally, you know, when he goes north in land into central Asia, he says, okay,

first they're the Skithians, but then beyond them, there's the Amazon's and beyond them, they're like people eaters and then beyond them. And you get this sort of increasing sort of fantastical idea of people's living in faraway places become more and more extreme and more and more divorced from what's normal and less and less reliable as an indicator of the actual ethnography of the world. And do we also get a sense then if he's more focused on the Persian

Empire and the Greek world in the Eastern Mediterranean area, does he know less than about the Western Mediterranean? I'm thinking maybe like, well, of course, you got Marseille, don't you? That's a Greek colony and the Carthaginians and Sicily and so on. But is he a bit less knowledgeable about further West, the further West he goes? Actually, he enumerates the peoples of North Africa all the way down to the Atlantic. It's just that a lot of that again is become more and more fantastical as you go.

So obviously Greeks living in Libya and he knows the Carthaginians and in that sense we have quite a bit of information. You just about the chariot drieders of the Nassimonies and people like that, right? Actually in Libya. So these are people that Greeks and Carthaginians and Persians have interacted with and so in that sense he knows something about them that we can trace back to a source, you know, potentially. But then you get further on and on and you get all sorts of people

that he describes that, you know, people of the Atlas mountains and things like that, which he doesn't know anything much about them. He just knows that the world extends to the streets of Gibraltar and so he has to sort of people it in some way. And then when you're talking about Europe, there is almost nothing like that. I mean, the Greeks are fundamentally not very interested and knowledgeable about inland Europe. So they don't go very far north beyond the settlements on the sea

that you mentioned, Amassilia, Emporion in Iberia and a couple of other places and he mentions,

“actually, this one Samian trader who went all the way to essentially Biaticat, right?”

The Roman provinces. So he went beyond the pillars of Hercules out into the Atlantic and then

traded with a kingdom that had never been opened up essentially to Greek trade. Is this

present-day Portugal area which are to this southern Spain? So yeah, yeah. So I mean, the name is case, you know, the actual Greek name. But fundamentally he's trading with this kingdom that no one's ever touched and so he came to us. It's just a mystery. Right. So he arrives in this

traded with the Greeks. And so he got to sell his cargo for immense prices. And so he says, that's one of the people who came back with the biggest hole ever, right? So he's interested in people who are sort of trying to push those boundaries, but he himself struggles to articulate that. And there's this really interesting anecdote where he clearly shows the extent of his knowledge and the limits of his knowledge and the extent of his ignorance when he says that north of the

Thracians, there's the Danube, the ISTER. And you can't live north of there because of bees. Bees. Bees. All the things. It's one of the killer bees. As soon as you touch the northern bank of the Danube, there is a done. He will be taking no further questions at this. If you wanted to know what kind of bees these are, Herodians doesn't know. What are you also mentioned in passing the Amazons? And we recently did do an episode with David Braun all about the Amazons

in Greek mythology. And he mentioned the story in Herodotus about how Herodotus links a particular city in people to the Amazons and Amazons in women, the Sarimatai, I think, the Sarmations. So is Herodotus? He's not afraid at some points to talk about Greek mythology and link it to actual historical people to the ethnographies of certain non-greed peoples.

“Yeah, in fact that's how he starts his story, right? So the thing about his narrative is that”

he struggles at first to kind of know where to start the story of Greeks coming into conflict with non-greed, right? Coming into conflict with the Persian. But what he chooses to do at the very beginning

is to say like there was always this kind of conflict because you have all these stories that come

from myth essentially of abductions between Greeks and agents. So Phoenicians will sail to Greece and abduct some princess in August or the Greeks obviously sail to Phoenicians or to the coast of Lydia and they abduct some people there. And these are the kind of stories that he thinks are sort of the ultimate beginning that there's always this sense of, you know, different tap and there's an injustice been done and instead of trying to negotiate an arbitrate that conflict they tried to

kind of do it back at them and that sort of escalates. And so he says the ultimate reason why Greeks and Persians went to war is that, you know, when the the agiatics did it again, when they took Helen from Sparta and took her to Troy, the Greeks escalated, they went to war. And that is ultimately what started this sort of cycle of injustice because they're the ones who said okay well we can't just let this go, we have to actually do massive violence to you and that starts this cycle of

essentially, you know, Greeks and peoples from Asia doing massive violence to the other in retaliation. And so how does he therefore structure his book? You really mentioned the big digressions and of course we can't go into absolutely every story today or we need several podcast episodes I think and too much of your time. But how does he overarchingly give us no review of how he structures the whole histories and how he lays it out? So he's really interested in origins as I

said. So he starts with that and that means the origin of the Persian Empire first of all. So book one.

Book one yet. So it's absolutely involved in like who's Cyrus the Great? What is he doing? How does he come into contact with the Greek world? Because of course from Cyrus on where do you have Greeks living under the Persian Empire under Persian rule? And he's interested in how that came about. And so that's the first beginning for him. And then he has to start telling the

“story of all the different peoples that are encountered that way and that's why he has all this sort”

of, it still progresses chronologically forward slowly. You still start talking about later events in the history of this period. But he's taking his time because he really wants to populate this world before he starts bringing out the conflict. But does he also then talk about people who he might immediately think from Greek mythology like Cresus, like kind of the King Cresus of Lydia, who's actually historical figure. So he's probably a good source for someone like Cresus at the

same time. Richard's Cresus. You know, I'm already simplifying the sense I say he starts with Persia. He starts with Cresus, right? That is his the first story is the rise of the Lidian kingdom, which goes back to the 7th century BC. And then the Lidian kingdom provokes the Persians. And then he has to start talking about Persians. So the Persians come in from that side. And then you see all these other peoples, everybody else that is becoming, there's going to be a big player later on this

introduced early also Athens in Sparta. You get this kind of little forward-looking like Anna

goes about their early origins as well. So this actually quite a lot going on. I'm always

having to kind of simplify this in one way or another. It can pretty interesting. It starts with the Lidians then the Persians. And then he starts to sort of progressively populate this world. While he's also talking about politicalities of Samus and other figures who increase this kind of intense conflict between Greeks and the Eugen and the Persians. And then eventually essentially he moves towards, firstly obviously through the early Persian king Cyrus then can buy season

“then you have to talk about Egypt. And then he comes to Darius. And then of course you have to”

talk about the Skidians because the Darius crosses into Europe and invades Skidia. But that is when he gets to the actual meat of it, which is from book five on, which is about the halfway point. He starts talking about the Aionian revolt. And this is the moment when a number of these Greek states in Western Asia Minor rebel against the Persians. And this essentially brings this increasing desire for retaliation and revenge and further expansion. It brings it down

onto the Greeks. So it focuses the Persians on the Greek world. And this is what sets in motion this series of events, which is the Aionian revolt, the invasion of marathon, which is in book six. And then Xerxes invasion, which covers book seven eight night. So as much of them ethnography

the stories of these different peoples that the Persians encounter with the Greeks as well.

“And then it is more laser focus on the Greco Persian wars that existed just before.”

There's no laser focus in a rhodotism. I mean, this is nearly not how he goes about it. No, so it's actually then that you get, oh, you comes back and says, oh, you know, actually there's a lot of other stuff that happened in, you know, with Spartans and Athenians in the meantime. So I'm going to tell you about that. And then also whenever anybody comes into the narrative, like the Thracians that's beginning at book five, and you also get these moments where, for instance,

the Greeks send people out to Sicily, where there are a lot of Greek communities and they ask them, will you help us against this coming invasion? And then, of course, he has to talk about what's been going on in Sicily. And so he starts talking about the Donominate Tyrants. And these kinds of things are, you know, they just pop up and as they become relevant, he will talk

about them. And so he's never done. He's never done giving you ethnographic details. He's never

done giving you the back stories of political systems and individuals. He's never done telling you about things that might happen later, that are relevant to the story that show the kind of aftermath, or the consequences of these actions. There are some stretches of the story that are more straightforward, especially in the later book. So especially from book seven egg nine when he's narrating Xerxes invasion, a lot of that is more straightforward. But even then, if you're looking for

“that one bit of eroticists where you're like, I remember he talked about this one thing at one point.”

I mean, good luck finding it by just looking for it in the chronologically obvious position because it very likely isn't there. Is he also a really important source for you for any experts when trying to understand more about ancient sparters in this period, not just during the Greco-Person wars, but also before as well, because, you know, you have other sources of data like Plutarch, the famous Spartan Mirage, the creation of what the Spartans were believed to have been in

English great warriors and so on. But it's who wrote it to some more reliable source for understanding more about the Spartans in this period. So he's the main source for the Spartan in this period, really. I mean, you have the Spartan poets in the Arcade period, which tells us quite a lot, and you have quite a bit of archaeology in the 6th century in particular, but then that kind of dries up around the time of the Persian wars, and there's not a huge amount of stuff from

spot during the classical period, so the 5th and 4th centuries BC. And so you really need these people who give you this sort of moment, this little beacon in the fog of saying, like, okay, this is a time at which I actually investigated the Spartans, and this is what I found out. And obviously, these are still outsiders talking about them, but they are still, you know, capable of finding out quite a bit. And so it's a relative talking about Spartan in this period, early 5th century,

and then we kind of have to wait for maybe not even to cities who doesn't know all that much about Spartan, but for instance, Xenophon in the 4th century, who tells us a lot more in detail. And so who wrote this is one of those great beacons when we were interested in Spartan. He shows us what it was like in the 5th century for which we have very little else. So it's actually really, really helpful, not least because of his ethnographic interest, because he takes an interest in

Spartan, that goes beyond just what they did. And he tries to find out something about the story of how they got to, to being the leaders of the Greek world around the time of the Persian wars, which is invaluable. I mean, other things that he finds particularly peculiar about the Spartans compared to what the Greeks, as he mentioned, doesn't seem that he pays other Greek cities,

“their cultures and traditions, as much attention as the Spartans, and is that a key reason for that”

in what they didn't how they acted. Yeah, so it's very interesting. He's very interested in Spartan kingship in particular, because that is something that Spartans have that most other Greek communities don't. I mean, you get some kings in Cyrene, for instance, in Libya, and you get kings in now, or maybe their tyrants, maybe their kings in the Greeks of the Bosparin kingdom, so Crimea. But in mainland Greece kings have gone out of style. And so he's looking

at the Spartans thinking, oh, this is curious. Like, why do you have it like this? And there's all sorts of traditions surrounding the kingship that he can describe, because other Greeks just don't know them, don't have them. But you also can really tell that his way of telling the history of the Spartans in this period is not a history of political campaigns and motives and policies and conquests and sieges and battles. There is some of that, but most of that history, most of the things

he's able to tell us are essentially diagnostic stories, right? So there stories about how someone came to be born after a long period of infertility and marriage, or how someone was exiled after a conflict between their rival king, things like that. And these stories seem very much like sort of the chord stories that we hear about from the Persian Empire. And they suggest that her auditors' sources for a Sparta were very much with these royal households maintaining

something of a history of what had gone on with them, which he sort of weaves into his more general narrative about Greek affairs. If we go to the chord stories of the Persians next and kind of focus on the Persians in her auditors' histories, does it feel that he really does into those fascinating details of some of the more intrigue parts of the story? Yes, stories of certain Persian kings and several narratives about the deaths of some of them, and some of them, really, having pretty

brutal deaths, and he really goes into that. Yeah, so we are always a little bit worried about

her auditors already giving us this kind of image of the Persians that the Greeks really reveled in, right? This idea of these despots with a limited power, who are clearly sort of corrupted by this, right? Who are turned into these men of great sort of lust and violence and excess and

but there's very much this sense of narrative balance, like there are good kings and bad kings. There is very much this pattern where Cyrus is great, can biases is a monster. So Dorias is great, Xerxes is a monster. There's very much that sort of back and forth between, you know, the fathers are good, the sons are bad, which also recurs in his stories about Greek

tyrants. So there's always like the first one is actually good and stable in helping people,

and the second one is, you know, the despotic excesses of luxury, decadence and violence. So there's often that kind of pattern that you see in those stories repeated in the stories about the Persian court as well. So that's one aspect of it. And the other part is, as I said, I mean, he is really actually quite interested in Persia and in giving Persians their due for their achievements. And so even figures like Xerxes, although they commit a lot of horrors,

which may or may not be part of how they profile themselves, they're also presented as people who are really quite keen to do the right thing. They're driven by forces beyond their control. They're also very interested in the things they do. They're always investigating. They're always

looking at things and always asking about things. And so it's not a single-minded profile of,

you know, this sort of cartoon villain that he gives of any of these rulers. He is sort of

“interested in creating fully fleshed out characters, I think, who are at some extent faded to be who they are.”

Now we're going to look at a little bit of an idea about the fact that we're going to deal with things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do, and we're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do.

We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. And we're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do.

We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do. We're going to look at a lot of things that we're going to do.

For Alinar and trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores.

For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan's search history here. So, if generally speaking, it seems that Herodotus is quite a good opinion of derise the first derise the great the Persian king. It doesn't have a good opinion of zerxes. I must then ask, does Herodotus treat the portrayal of the Persians differently in the first Greco-Persian war compared to the second one. The first Greco-Persian war causes that expedition.

When derises on the throne, the second one is the great one under zerxes, the moppoli and so on. Does Herodotus portray the Persian forces in the Persian army differently between the two wars

“because of the monarchy in control? I mean, it's a really interesting question. Actually, I think there's just”

not enough detail in his account of the first of those expeditions to say, okay, or you would have done it differently if he had given all of those, because the fact is simply that he spends so much more time on zerxes invasion force and so much more time on the leadership of that force and its failing. And so, when we hear about the marathon campaign, you do hear some of the way that these Persian commanders, ladies and gentlemen are to French who commanded that expedition,

how they manage things, how they conducted themselves, but you don't hear much about how their forces are composed, and we don't hear that much about what kind of councils they had among themselves, which we get much more for zerxes. So this is obviously more distant in time for Herodotus, but it's also just not the meat of his account, so it's not the main event. And so, he is to some extent holding back some of those later conflicts he's really going to

spin out, like why does zerxes attack the Greeks? Why does he decide to do the things he doesn't do it the way he does it? That is really where zerxes comes to the fore in book seven eight nine as the main character. And so, it is the second Greco Persian War book seven eight nine, is that really the true climax of Herodotus's work? How does he portray, so it's such a big question and we don't have time to go into all the details, but how does he portray the second Greco

Persian War in his histories? So it's this huge campaign narrative, right? And this is the first time we actually get a detailed campaign narrative in any sort. So marathon in for 90 BC is the first battle for which we have an actual description, right? Then the script of what happens and how it was won. There is nothing. The champions are there with the Spartans of this. I mean, but you don't know how it was won, right? So you get battles that are mentioned. No, it's a very good point. I mean,

obviously there are battles that are mentioned and the outcome is mentioned, but you don't get any

“sense of like, okay, how are the troops deployed? Have what kind of decisions that the generals make?”

What happened in the thick of it? You don't really get much of that. So there is no earlier

about what battle was like in general rather than the specifics of, you know, what was done in order to win a particular battle, defeat a certain vote and solve a certain tactical problem,

whatever. Marathons, the first one of those. And then the Persian wars, or rather the invasion

“of searchies, is the one where we get this full detail of the count of like, okay, how do they march?”

How do they build their camps? Where do they decide to move? What are their options in terms of geographical advances? And then what do they do when they encounter the enemy? And, you know, the battle of Thermopylai, first of all, which is described in almost excruciating detail, you know, to down to the final blows. But then you have the battle of Salam is similarly on the sea, Artemision, first, and then Salamis. And then finally you have the battle of Latia, which is,

you know, in terms of Greek history, this is the longest most detailed battle description that we get. Right, it goes on for such a long time. All of the different moves and counter moves across 12 days of fighting across this plane. And so you get so many little details and vignettes about what it was like to be there. This is clearly his virtuoso piece, right? He's really talking

about a decisive moment in Greek history and he wants to give it all the space it can.

He's absolutely extraordinary, he's such an interesting narrative, isn't it? And it, like, following that with the end of Robinson's histories, does he finish it there and then, or does he then almost kind of do a conclusion? I don't know, wrapping up his work or saying exactly what happened next, how the Greco-Person wars have ended, Greeks of Victoria's, I say Greeks of Luke seeks, I know they're a great conclusion side as well. But does he have an

almost an end note or a conclusion after that? So it's actually the ending of Robinson's history is in enigmatic, since ancient times, if people don't really get away, ends with the way he does. So what he does is he describes the aftermath of the battle of Latia and then Mikale, whether the Persian fleet is decisively defeated, which supposedly happened on the same day, so this is this big decisive moment. But then there are further campaigns after that. So

we see after that, the allied Greeks were in this fleet, start to retaliate and start to push

back Persian control. And this is kind of the start of the story that the city's picks up, which is the story of the Athenian empire, right, on the rise. And so there is that moment of looking forward, at least one more campaign season, right, he goes on to 4-7-8 and describes the campaign on land to subject the Thibons and the campaign on the sea to start liberating parts of the Greek world that have been subjected to the Persians. And he ends with this brutal scene of a

siege of Cestos, where the Athenians really commit all sorts of atrocities on the Persian garrison. That's one of the dogs knows, that's right, on the Hellespont, essentially. So this is strategically

“super important for the Athenians, this is where they get their grain from. So they actually”

really care about this area and liberating it, or liberating, or taking back control of it. And so they really commit some atrocities of their own, which has often been interpreted as sort of mirror images, like look, you know, if you object to imperialism, if you object to a figure like Xerxes behaving as he pleases, you shouldn't then sort of do the same thing. But the lure of imperialist power is kind of drawing in that direction. That's usually how it's interpreted,

but there are different ways that we might see this. But then he ends with, you know, there's some vagaries of Xerxes's travel back to Asia, where he gets into this spot, because he's having, you know, he's trying to have an affair with somebody who's married to a relative or the daughter of that person. It's a really complex little sort of court story that kind of maybe anticipates the murder of Xerxes some years later. But more likely he's just kind of looking ahead to the

decadence and the sort of corruption within the Persian court, which is also a theme that obviously runs throughout. And then weirdly he has a little flashback to Cyrus the Great, receiving someone in his court. And this seems to be a sort of general programmatic statement about what he's trying to say. There is this person who supposedly was trying to lure Cyrus into further conquest and said you can conquer these places, because the people who live there,

you know, they live in luxury, and so they're easy prey, and you can just take them. And Cyrus objects to this and he says, I don't think we should do this, because we are living in Iran, which is a hard place, right? We are living in Paris and it's arid and it's dry and it's high up and it's a hard place and so we become a hard people, right? We become very tough. We could

“easily conquer these people who live in, you know, Mesopotamia where it's fertile and where life is,”

you know, abundance and rich. But we would start to become like them. We would conquer them and enjoy the luxuries that they possess, we take them for ourselves, and we would go soft. And the result of that is that we would become prey ourselves, that we would become corrupted by this. And this is one of the things that Herodus believes, you know, that he believes that that sort of governs the cycles of history, that people from difficult places like Greece will be victorious in

war against people who are not as tough, not as hard and by their conditions, they will conquer them, they will become soft in turn and then another hard people will come in and will conquer them. And so this is kind of what he envisions as a warning to the Greeks like this has happened to the Persians, and it could happen to you. Right. I love although all the details that Herodus has and all the stories he has, that there are still those overarching messages that you can understand

about Herodus's personal beliefs. Given that Herodus goes into such detail about the Greco-Persian Wars, does he give a sense of whether he thinks one particular city state or one particular Greek

you get a lot of Americans saying, oh, the US with the May 1s, who won World War II, or the Soviets,

“sometimes the Brit is involved as well, does Herodus come down on one side or the other?”

He does very explicitly. I mean, it's very interesting when you consider this in light of his framing at the beginning saying, I'm going to talk about all sorts of cities because we don't know

which ones are going to be great later on, right? There's always big cities of fall and small cities

have become great. And so there's always that kind of thing in the background of like, you know, fortune vary, but in the Persian wars, he says, you know, there's two of these leading states in the Greek world who took on this alliance obviously, you know, who led it. It's the Spartans and the Athenians. The Spartans obviously claimed that they did the most because they won this great victory at the tier, but according to Herodus' and he's almost shy about it. He says, I know a lot of people

disagree with me on this, but it is because the Athenians committed everything they had, you know, even after their city was taken and raised to the ground, they evacuated their people, they fought on. And because they were committed to this fight, they're the ones who brought it to a close. So he says, it's the Athenians and the Athenian willingness to serve under Spartan leadership and to fight on after everything and been lost. That is what made the difference. Wow. But I do also like

the D. says, lots of people will disagree, but this is my thoughts having done all the research is interesting to get his first hand beliefs. It's he's thought it's interesting and quite refreshing to hear quite frankly. Absolutely. And people give Herodus a bad rep for all sorts of reasons. I mean, especially the size of the Persian army is often yet mocked for this. I was like told about asking you that question, but I'm thinking about this. Yeah. Well, it's specifically

I want to bring that up because, you know, he is the first person to criticize that narrative. He actually says, when he goes through this, towards the end, when he gets so total of over 5 million, he says, but I don't really know if I should believe this because I don't think they could have fed that many. So when you're looking for criticism of Herodus, you got to start with Herodus, that I love that about him. I mean, he's just very open about his, it is thinking, it's just

it just creeps in every time. One word, two word, three word answer. I mean, what we actually think was the size of the Persian army. If we also include, then, you know, attendance, people manning the fleets, soldiers, maybe 300,000? There's no, yeah, 300,000 words you mean. There's no way,

“there's no way to say this in a short, in a short way. But all of these armies, you have to at least double”

the size of the fighting force just to include. And this is what Herodus does as well as simple math, you know, basically just doubles the numbers to give a rough approximation of how many people are there, just to support the effort right there, just come followers and servants and attendance and entertainers and whatever else. So we're definitely talking about an enormous number of people, but whether we should be close to 200,000, 300,000, I mean, we really don't know. And there's not

going to be any additional evidence that it's going to solve this decisively for us. It's certainly going to be more in that bull park, though, than Herodus is just five and a million. Okay, good. That's a bit of us not really for me, because I had a quarter of a million and I was intrigued about it a few months ago. So roughly around the maybe, so it's probably about right. As long as you do not mean, it was over 250,000 fighting men, because that is, it was a big distinction to make. Thank you for that.

Lastly, as a scholar of the Greco Persian Wars, and you know, someone, you know, main interest is on classical Greece and military history in particular, how do you personally, how do you view Herodus as a source and also just having studied him for so many years? I mean, he's lovely,

he's one of the ones who's really fun to read, because he's always going to give you something

else. And he's one of those people who every time you go back to him and read him again, you'll find something you forgot he said, but it's actually, it's actually in there. And there's so much wealth of detail and information in every single passage that he offers. And you see scholars doing this all the time. They come back to Herodus and they'll find something that completely overturns some of the way that they've interpreted things for a long time. There is so much

you can do with it. It's such a rich source. On the other hand, it's also immensely frustrating, because of all the things that you would like him to add that he doesn't, or that you would like him to talk about in more detail that he doesn't, or where you would like him to have done a little bit more to try and get some kind of hard evidence, some kind of documentary evidence, you know, sometimes he'll cite that the city does is more often cite inscriptions and other

documentary evidence that we find a little bit more reliable than the hearsay of this noble family against that noble family or stories about the Persian court. But these kinds of things, I mean,

you can obviously say, it could have been better. That is always possible for every piece of

history. But if this is the first complete one that we have, I mean, we are so lucky. This is such an immense thing to possess. He's an incredible source. He has said the father of history, and I'm really glad that we can finally dedicate an entire episode to a rototus. Indeed, we didn't really cover it, but the rototus in Egypt and all the detail he goes from Egypt. That's where the of another episode in its own right. I mean, there is more so much more

“to rototus history, but you've given us a wonderful introduction overview to this incredibly important”

ancient Greek historian. And rule, it just goes me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. It's been a great pleasure, Jason. Thanks so much. Well, there you go. There was the fan favorite and ever popular, Dr. Rul Kananadike, returning to the show to talk all the things, horror artists, and his histories. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the ancients,

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