Cicero called him the father of history, Plutarch the father of lies. But to me he's more like an affable uncle who's been around and knows what's up and what's gone down. If I could pour a libation out with any Ancient Greek, Herodotus would be the guy. "So," I'd say, hefting the krater in the direction of his goblet, "is it really true that there are Indians who kill no living creature at all? And that their semen is black like that of the Ethiopians?" And H would smile broadly under his resplendent beard and say "I did not see this for myself; this is only what I have heard reported — make of it what you will". And then we'd talk and talk and he'd change the subject by saying things like "so much for the snakes and how the Arabians obtain their frankincense..." and he'd relate how there are three kinds of mice in Libya, and how Peisistratos was brought down by wifely buttsex, and how the Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians... And some of it would be true stories, and some would just be stories, but it wouldn't matter because he wouldn't pretend to be dealing in immutable verities, because nothing unquestionable is very interesting.

And his talk would be full of his favourite words, "amazing", "incredible", "marvel", "astonishment", because those are the words that come closest to capturing the amazing, incredible, marvelous, astonishing heterodoxy of his world and ours. I love the assiduous recording of which rivers the Persian army completely drinks dry (or more pertinently, which ones it doesn't). Was it really 1.7 million men plus several million more camp followers? Of course it bloody wasn't, but that's not the point; the point is, it was an absolute unit of a fighting force. The exaggerations are part of the story. But the father of lies is no fool. I'm an atheist, so I'll never get, like Croesus did, VIP status at Delphi ("priority in oracular consultation and exemption from fees, along with front-row places at their festivals") — but I get the impression from passages like this that my unbelief wouldn't set me entirely apart from old polytheistic H:

...at last the Magi, by offering sacrificial victims and singing incantations to the wind in addition to performing sacrifices to Thetis and the Nereids, brought about an end to the storm on the fourth day — or perhaps it abated of its own accord.

Add the ironic "perhaps" to that list of useful words.

Herodotus's theme is inexorable Fate and how we try and make sense of it — or at least not lose our goddamn minds at how unfair it is — through stories. History for him is very properly a story, instructive and compelling in the way that only stories can be. Truth isn't just subjective, it's peripheral to his project. Of course he's Hellenocentric — what else could a Greek (albeit one from the periphery of the Greek project) be? But the stories he tells us, about how people of all nations tell themselves and each other stories to bring order to their chaotic world, are universal. What goes around in Herodotus always comes around; his Greek mind, like his understanding of rivers and continents, is balanced, symmetrical. Comeuppance might take generations, but up it'll inevitably come. In the speeches, and in particular in the arguments of the Persians Otanes, Megabyzos, and Darius for democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy/tyranny respectively, we get a foretaste of the exquisitely balanced rhetoric of Thucydides. H has his ear to ground still being trampled today. There are also moments of great immediacy, like when we're told about the oars getting tangled in corpses and wreckage at Aphetai, and epic shit like when the Greeks summon Boreas to wreck the Persian fleet, and the fire beacons being lit, and the general large-scale summoning of allies in a Lord of the Rings fashion.

But it's Herodotus the ethnographer who'll always have my ear. Whether he's telling us about the Arabian sheep with trolleys for their massive tails, or Neurian lycanthropy, or the women of the Gindanes and their ankle bracelets ("they put on one of these for every man with whom they have had intercourse, and the woman who wears the most is considered to be the best"), or how the Scythians are "awed and elated by the vapor" of hemp seeds and their women love mud baths, his curiosity and delight in the "the drunkenness of things being various", as MacNeice put it, is what I come to books for. The Persian practice of considering everything once drunk and once sober before deciding has served me well, as has the remark of Artabanos that dreams, contrary to what everyone else in the book thinks, rather than being god-given visions, "tend to be what one is thinking about during the day". The Egyptian Amasis coins for us the phrase "tightly strung". We get an ancient account of the live-burial of children to consecrate a bridge, a rite reported in Medieval times in Andric's "The Bridge Over the Drina". We get 700 Thespians going into battle, and of course ample Lesbians too. And we get it all in the maximalist, thoroughly Herodotean Landmark edition, which gives uncle H the amazing, incredible, marvelous, astonishing widescreen presentation he deserves.

The Landmark Herodotus

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