Herodotus Vs Thucydides
A History of Mankind (132)
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Herodotus (484-425 BC), the “Father of History,” only published his great work, “The Histories,” five years before his death, after decades of research and consideration. From very early on, the book was compared with the “History of the Peloponnesian War,” published just shy of two decades later by Thucydides, a detailed narrative of the still-unfinished civil war (the book only covers events to 410 BC) that Thucydides’ friend and protector Pericles had willed on the Hellenes.
Comparisons are unfair and they tend to favor Herodotus. Where Thucydides strives for cool assessments while making his powerful friend look good despite his foolishness, Herodotus has few if any favorites. It would have been very easy, and profitable, for him for create a great hymn to the Greeks’ valor and smarts, like several earlier works published on the subject of the Persian wars. Instead, the Histories represent a sea-change in historiography.
Many had written before about the allegedly great deeds of their countrymen and their mythical tribal heroes, but nobody had before paid any significant attention to foreign history, geography and societies.
Earlier and contemporary Egyptian, Babylonian and Chinese chroniclers, so attentive to detail when it came to local matters, displayed almost no concern about the customs, dresses or motives of foreigners, and certainly had no intention whatsoever of traveling to their barbarian lands to see anything by themselves; the Jewish Bible is so uninterested in foreign historiography that it calls all Philistine kings by the same name: Abimelech1. Herodotus thus can be said to have invented universality.
This wasn’t to everybody’s liking: his fellow countryman Plutarch, centuries later, called him “a friend of the barbarian.” Herodotus, a great Ionian in a line of great Ionians who had learned much from the world outside Greece, would have agreed. He himself says as much in the first few lines of his book:
“This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time, and the great and marvelous works of both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, and not least the reason why they fought one another.”
And just a few lines later:
“For the great places of old have often now become small, and those which are great in my day were formerly small; knowing therefore that human fortune never remains in the same place, I shall commemorate each alike.”
These, like so many words pronounced by Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato, are words that only a few Greeks could have written. Not Thucydides who, for all his sharp intellect and ability to explain complex events, never strays from a specific conflict between familiar foes on familiar lands, with no need for translators or explanations of apparently absurd foreign customs.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Relating what was likely an old legend/anecdote, Herodotus recounts a conversation between the wandering Athenian lawgiver Solon and the Asian King Croesus, who showed him his riches and pleasures and asked who was the happiest man Solon had ever met.
Solon cited three virtuous poor men who did young, and Croesus duly expressed surprise. Solon explained that the rich don’t have a monopoly on the truly valuable things in life (“civic service, raising healthy children, being self-sufficient, having a sound body, and honoring the gods and one’s family.”)
Riches tend to create more issues for their bearers, Solon went on. But, most importantly, he argued that happiness can’t be assessed until one’s life is over, since the next day can always bring untold misery. “I cannot answer the question you asked me until I know the manner of your death. Count no man happy until the end is known,” Herodotus quotes Solon as saying.
These excursions by Herodotus may appear pointless, but they are incredibly valuable tidbits of information about his time and age. He’s the only chronicler of multiple important events. In fact, without his testimony and that of other Greeks, there would be practically no ancient Persian history to tell: by the time the classic Shahnameh, a Persian chronicle, was written around 1000 AD, all memory of the Achaemenid era had disappeared in the already Islamized Persia. And the Shahnameh doesn't include any reference to any real Persian kings before Alexander, just to mythic figures largely made up by the author, the poet Ferdowsi/Ferdowzi, lacking any contact with reality2.
Luckily for posterity, Herodotus was interested in everything. Discussing Libya, he’s struck by a question few had ever even approach: “why the people of Libya are the healthiest known to us.” When his foreign hosts show him the local fauna, he wonders “why the most timid animals are the most prolific”; in Egypt: “why the Nile floods in summer … contrary to the nature of all other rivers”; looking at a battlefield, he contains the urge to laud his countrymen and asks: “why, concerning the bones strewn on the battlefield … the skulls of Persian casualties are so brittle they can be broken with a pebble, whereas Egyptian skulls are so tough they can hardly be cracked with a big stone.”
Writing about the battle of Salamis, he notes that Greek casualties were few because many Greeks, a people blessed with warm beaches and tranquil waters, knew how to swim – an extremely important piece of information about a subject few others remarked upon. When Xerxes I’s beasts of burden are attacked by Greek lions, Herodotus is puzzled as to why they only killed the camels.
Herodotus notes that the Persians were fond of mulling important decisions while drunk – not such a puzzling trait in a world long accustomed to extispicy – but later reviewing them while sober3. They also learned a thing or two about imperialism: after subjugating Croesus, King Cyrus asks him how best to subdue the Lydians, and the defeated ruler recommends that he forbids them to own weapons, that they are required to dress expensively and take up music, “and that they are to raise their sons to be traders.” Before long, Croesus explains, “you will see them become women instead of men, and so there will be no danger of them rising against you,”4 as indeed was the case.
Herodotus – who defined ‘‘Greekness’’ in terms of shared blood, gods, cults, and customs – had a sense of humor, too, and has this to say about the same Lydians, hereditary enemies of Ionian Greeks such as his own ancestors:
"Apart from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the Lydian way of life is not unlike our own."5
Herodotus’ boundless curiosity would inspire Ephorus of Cyme, who wrote a 29-volume universal history in the Fourth Century BC, that is partly preserved only because Diodorus Siculus copied large parts of his writings6. Thucydides, meanwhile, is a duller, brilliant chronicler who did his homework, interviewed his witnesses and used his own experiences to create something similar to what in the late Second Millennium AD would be called a journalistic chronicle.
Thucydides, a close friend and protegé of Pericles, became famous among modern democrats, as the proponent of a theory that rationalized Athens’ rudderless foreign policy and its open hostility towards Sparta as the concept of Thucydides’ Trap – a tendency by established powers towards war against emerging powers before they become too dangerous. He wasn’t without valuable virtues: he knew men; he wasn’t afraid of testing the limits of what he could write without offending his own supporters; and, as befitted a man raised among Atheists, he also ignores godly explanations entirely7.
Confusingly, the same name is used for the Jewish son of Gideon and king of Israel that destroys and salts the rebel city of Shechem in the Book of Judges.
In “On Forgetting Cyrus and Remembering the Achaemenids in Late Antique Iran,” an essay in “Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore” edited by M. Rahim Shayegan, 2019, Touraje Daryaee writes that, by the 6th century AD, at the apex of Sasanian power, a Nestorian Christian ecclesiastic council convened in Iran hailing its political patron Khosrau/Khosroes, whom they saluted as the “New Cyrus,” an indication that Cyrus loomed large in the minds of Christian Iranians (and Jews, as other sources show). But even the Sasanians only had a rough knowledge of the Achaemenid past: Arthur Christensen, a modern scholar, believed that the idea of Persians having continuously warred against Greece was perhaps the only enduring memory of such a past in late antique Sasanian Persia. Shapur I, founder of the dynasty, mentions his ancestors in an inscription, but it's only three of them, while later genealogies drift into the pure fantasy. Ardashir I cites a Darius among his ancestors, that may be Darius III or a conflation of them all. Later Persian converts to Islam like Tabari and Balami don't write about Cyrus but they do cite two Darius, father and son, perhaps a reflection of the memory of Alexander's overthrow of Darius III, transferred via Zoroastrian magi.
Tacitus (in “Germania”) attributed a similar process to northern barbarians.
Histories, 1.155.4.
The comment is partly provoked by the distaste shared by all upper-class Greeks for the gross commercialism of the Lydians, the first people known to have kept permanent retail shops in their cities; like Napoleon said of the English over two millennia later, the Greeks thought they were “a nation of shopkeepers.” In “The limits of Hellenization” (Cambridge UP, 1990) Arnaldo Momigliano laments that Herodotus never visited Jerusalem: “A page of Herodotus would have been sufficient to put a battalion of biblical scholars out of action.”
Herodotus surely also inspired Ctesias, a Greek physician who resided at the Persian court for seventeen years while attending Artaxerxes II. His “Persica,” a comprehensive treatise on the history and ethnography of the East, was written at the beginning of the fourth century BC and included a history of Assyria. Only fragments have survived, in works by Diodorus, Eusebius, and others, and sadly they are of doubtful merit.
His boundary-testing is most evident in, for example, the famous "Melian Dialogue." There, he touches upon a subject already depicted in fiction by Euripides, that Thucydides’ friends and political allies weren’t comfortable with; but Thucydides paraphrases the Athenian arguments, as presented to the vanquished Melian leaders, thus: “For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses - either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede [Persians], or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us - and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians [Spartans], although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”