Waiting for the Barbarians (20 page)

Anyone, at any rate, was preferable to the Persian overlord Xerxes, who in Herodotus’ narrative is the subject of a magisterial portrait of corrupted power. No one who has read the
Histories
is likely to forget the passage describing the impotent rage of Xerxes when his engineers’ first attempt to create a bridge from Asia to Europe across the Hellespont was washed away by a storm: after commanding that the body of water be lashed three hundred times and symbolically fettered (a pair of shackles was tossed in), he chastised the “bitter water” for wronging him, and denounced it as “a turbid and briny river.” More practically, he went on to have the project supervisors beheaded.

And yet Herodotus’ Xerxes is a character of persuasive complexity, the swaggering cruelty alternating with childish petulance and sudden, sentimental paroxysms of tears, a personality likely to remind contemporary audiences of a whole panoply of dangerous dictators from Nero to Hitler. One of the great, unexpected moments in the
Histories
, evoking the emotional finesse of the best fiction, comes when Xerxes, reviewing the ocean of forces he has assembled for the invasion, suddenly breaks down, “overcome,” as he puts it to his uncle Artabanus (who has warned against the enterprise), “by pity as I considered the brevity of human life.” Such feeling for human life, in a dictator whose casual indifference to it is made clear throughout the narrative, is a brilliant and persuasive psychological touch. And indeed, the unstable leader of a ruthlessly centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it.

Gripping and colorful as the invasions and their aftermaths are, the Greco-Persian Wars themselves make up just half of the
Histories
—from the middle of Book 5 to the end of the ninth, and final, book. This strongly suggests that Herodotus’ preoccupation was with something larger still.

The first four and a half books of the
Histories
make up the first panel of what is, in fact, a diptych: they provide a leisurely account of the rise of the empire that will fall so spectacularly in the second part. Typically, Herodotus gives you everything you could conceivably want to know about Persia, from the semi-mythical, Oedipuslike childhood of Cyrus (he’s condemned to exposure as a baby but returns as a young man, disastrously for those who wanted him to die), to the imperial zenith under Darius, a scant two generations later. (Darius, who had a talent for unglamorous but useful administrative matters—he introduced coined money, a reliable postal system, and the division of the empire into manageable provinces called satrapies—was known as “the shopkeeper.”) From book to book, the
Histories
lets you track Persia’s expansion, mapped by its conflicts with whomever it is trying to subjugate at the time.

In Book 1 for instance, you get the Massagetae, who were apparently strangers to the use, and abuse, of wine. (The Persians—like Odysseus with the Cyclops—get them drunk and then trounce them.) In Book 2 come the Egyptians, with their architectural immensities, their crocodiles, and their mummified pets, a nation whose curiosities are so numerous that the entire book is devoted to its history, culture, and monuments. In Book 3, the Persians come up against the Ethiopians, who (Herodotus has heard) are the tallest and most beautiful of all peoples, and bury their dead in crystal coffins. In Book 4,
we get the mysterious, nomadic Scythians, who cannily use their lack of “civilization” to confound their would-be overlords. (Every time the Persians set up a fortified encampment, the Scythians simply pack up their portable dwellings and leave.) By the time of Darius’ reign, Persia had become something that had never been seen before: a multinational empire covering most of the known world, from India in the east to the Aegean Sea in the west and Egypt in the south. The real hero of Herodotus’
Histories
, as grandiose, as admirable yet doomed, as any character you get in Greek tragedy, is Persia itself.

What gives this tale its unforgettable tone and character—what makes the narrative even more leisurely than the subject warrants—are those infamous, looping digressions: the endless asides, ranging in length from one line to an entire book (Egypt), about the flora and fauna, the lands and the customs and cultures, of the various peoples the Persian state tried to absorb. And within these digressions there are further digressions, an infinite regress of fascinating tidbits whose apparent value for “history” may be negligible but whose power to fascinate and charm is as strong today as it so clearly was for the author, whose narrative modus operandi often seems suspiciously like free association. Hence a discussion of Darius’ tax-gathering procedures in Book 3 leads to an attempt to calculate the value of Persia’s annual tribute, which leads to a discussion of how gold is melted into usable ingots, which leads to an inquiry into where the gold comes from (India), which, in turn (after a brief detour into a discussion of what Herodotus insists is the Indian practice of cannibalism), leads to the revelation of where the Indians gather their gold dust. Which is to say, from piles of sand rich in gold dust, created by a species of—what else?—“huge ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes.” (In this case, at least, Herodotus’ guides weren’t necessarily pulling his leg: in 1996, a team of explorers in northern Pakistan
discovered that a species of marmot throws up piles of gold-rich earth as it burrows.)

One reason that what often looks like narrative Rorschach is so much fun to read is Herodotus’ prose style. Since ancient times, all readers of Herodotus, whatever their complaints about his reliability, have acknowledged him as a master of language. Four centuries after Herodotus died, Cicero wondered rhetorically “what was sweeter than Herodotus.” In Herodotus’ own time, it’s worth remembering, the idea of “beautiful prose” would have been a revolutionary one: the ancient Greeks considered prose so debased in comparison to verse that they didn’t even have a word for it until decades after the historian wrote, when they started referring to it simply as
psilos logos
, “naked language,” or
pedzos logos
, “walking language” (as opposed to the dancing, or even airborne, language of poetry). Herodotus’ remarkable accomplishment was to incorporate, in extended prose narrative, the fluid rhythms familiar from the earlier, oral culture of Homer and Hesiod. The lulling cadences and hypnotically spiraling clauses in each of his sentences—which replicate, on the microcosmic level, the ambling, appetitive nature of the work as a whole—suggest how hard Herodotus worked to bring literary artistry, for the first time, to prose. One twentieth-century translator of the
Histories
put it succinctly: “Herodotus’s prose has the flexibility, ease and grace of a man superbly talking.”

All the more unfortunate, then, that this and pretty much every other sign of Herodotus’ prose style is absent from
The Landmark Herodotus
, whose new translation, by Andrea L. Purvis, is both naked and pedestrian. A revealing example is her translation of the work’s Preface, which, as many scholars have observed, cannily appropriates the high-flown language of Homeric epic to a revolutionary new project: to record the fabulous deeds not of gods and legendary
heroes but of real men in real historical time. In the original, the entire preface is one long, winding, quasi-poetic sentence, a nice taste of what’s to come; and in the still-useful 1858 translation of George Rawlinson (which Lawrence of Arabia thought “respectable”), reproduced in the Everyman’s Library edition, this syntax is replicated while faithfully reproducing the rich array of tonal registers:

“Researches” (rather than the blander “inquiry,” one possible alternative) nicely gets the slight whiff of chloroform and lab chemicals that, as it were, still clung to the word
historie
a full century after the Ionian Enlightenment; perhaps even more importantly, the archaic flavoring of “losing their due meed of glory” brilliantly evokes Herotodus’s use of a crucial buzzword of Homeric epic, the adjective
aklea
, “without
kleos
”
—kleos
being the heroic renown for which the heroes at Troy fought and died. In appropriating this word, Herodotus was announcing in a single stroke that the Persian Wars were every bit a match for the Trojan War as a subject of an extended literary work.

Robin Waterfield’s 1999 translation for the Oxford World Classics series, by contrast, breaks up the syntax a little but is beautifully sensitive to what you might call the “scientific” flavor of Herodotus’s prose in this all-important opening—his invocation of the vocabulary of the Ionian Enlightenment in order to bring intellectual legitimacy to his project:

And here, finally, is Purvis:

Apart from breaking up Herodotus’s one flowing sentence into three clanking parts, the rather vague “may the great and wonderful deeds … not go unsung” is disastrously severed from Herodotus’s activity as a researcher; Purvis makes it sound as if the historian is committing the project into the hands of Allah, whereas the point of the original is that his rational inquiry is what’s going to “sing” those deeds—his prose is now doing what Homer’s poetry once did. This flat-footedness makes itself felt throughout the new text.

But in almost every other way
The Landmark Herodotus
is an ideal package for this multifaceted work. Much thought has been given to easing the reader’s journey through the narrative: running heads along the top of each page provide the number of the book, the year and geographical location of the action described, and a brief description of that action (“A few Athenians remain in the Acropolis”). Particularly helpful are notes running down the side of each
page, each one comprising a short gloss on the small “chapters” into which Herodotus’ text is traditionally divided. Just skimming these is a good way of getting a quick tour of the vast work: “The Persians hate falsehoods and leprosy but revere rivers”; “The Taurians practice human sacrifice with Hellenes and shipwreck survivors”; “The story of Artemisia, and how she cleverly evades pursuit by ramming a friendly ship and sinking it, leading her pursuer to think her a friendly ship or a defector.” And
The Landmark Herodotus
not only provides the most thorough array of maps of any edition but is also dense with illustrations and (sometimes rather amateurish) photographs—a lovely thing to have in a work so rich in vivid descriptions of strange lands, objects, and customs. In this edition, Herodotus’ description of the Egyptians’ fondness for pet cats is paired with a photograph of a neatly embalmed feline.

As both a narrator and a stylist, then, Herodotus is supremely sophisticated. A synoptic view of the
Histories
reveals, if anything, that for all the ostensible detours, the first four and a half books of the work—the “Rise of Persia” half—lay a crucial foundation for the reader’s experience of the war between Persia and Greece. The latter is not the “real” story that Herodotus has to tell, saddled with a ponderous, if amusing, preamble, but, rather, the carefully prepared culmination of a tale that grows organically from the distant origins of Persia’s expansionism to its unimaginable defeat. In the light of this structure, it occurs to you that Herodotus’ subject is not simply the improbable Greek victory but, just as much, the foreordained Persian defeat. But why foreordained? What, exactly, did the Persian Empire do wrong?