Herodotus, The Histories

It's interesting that Ernst Breisach concludes his joint assessment of Herodotus and Thucydides in Historiography with the claim that "while their sympathy for Athens was obvious, it never turned into petty bias" (21). Having not read Thucydides in the better part of ten years, I will reserve judgment on that opinion until next week, but in the case of Herodotus the claim sits uneasily when weighed against his account of the Persian Wars, in particular his depiction of the character and actions of Themistokles in book 8. Breisach also claims that "both Herodotus and Thucydides knew that truth seen as conformity with the events in the past was a sine qua non of history; it alone separated them from the poets" (21). Again, weighed against the Themistokles episodes, this claim seems to be in need of qualification.

Breisach is correct that Herodotus certainly has an obvious Athenian bias, but the numerous statements in defense of liberty and (limited) democracy scattered throughout the whole work must be weighed in the historical context of Herodotus' own time, in which the Athenian empire was consolidating its hegemony over the Greek oikumene and both liberty and democracy must have looked much more uncertain than they did in the wars about which Herodotus chiefly wrote. The grand irony of Themistokles' speech at VIII.60 is that under his command the Greek armada did save Greece, only to have it fall under an Athenian tyranny. One suspects that Herodotus, as a native of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, a city much closer to the Persian threat, must have felt the Athenian betrayal of their own ideals more keenly than some.

Themistokles undoubtedly shares in the retroactive blame for Athens, but comparing Herodotus' treatment of stories about his actions during and after the Battle of Salamis versus Xerxes' in the same circumstances, clear bias abounds: hearsay stories about Xerxes are evaluated and dismissed as such, while in Themistokles' case they are allowed to stand or even embellished upon. Clearly H. did not approve of Themistokles' decision to spend his exile in the Persian court, and had no compunction about bringing that disapproval into his inquiry. In this Breisach's assessment of him - namely, that H. is much more likely to find causes in human emotions, whereas Thucydides seeks structural factors to furnish explanations (15) - holds up well. To us, that even Athenian exiles would seek sanctuary in Persia seems normal given the geopolitical situation and social norms of the time; to Herodotus, in the case of Themistokles, it was an abject betrayal of his grand narrative about liberty versus tyranny, a symbol of the Athenian moral decline that led to the creation of the empire, and Themistokles' character and actions had to be made congruent with that.

I am, perhaps, overstating the case to make a point, and I should make clear that despite these reservations I find it quite appropriate to term H. the "father of history" - libeling one's subjects to make a point being merely another long-lived historical tradition which he clearly inaugurated. It's interesting, though, that he does combine an evident love of ethnography and linguistics (two other fields which, one suspects, he could plausibly be claimed to have spawned), he never makes a leap from social description to social history. All in all, I share the dissatisfaction with Breisach's claim that H. is focused on the commoners - although he may not be a monarchist, he is very much aristocratically focused, even if his aristocracy is not exclusively one of birth, but of actions and ideals.