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The Historian as Philosopher - Herodotus and
the Strength of Freedom
Part of the series The Historian as Philosopher (/taxonomy/term/22226)
By Irene Brown (/taxonomy/term/491) | Published in History Today (/taxonomy/term/43) Volume: 31 Issue:
2 (/taxonomy/term/2999) 1981 (/taxonomy/term/14755)
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HISTORIOGRAPHY (/TAXONOMY /TERM/13946)
ANCIENT (/TAXONOMY /TERM/14834)
(/PRI NT/5659)
(/PRI NTMAI L/5659)
PHILOSOPHY (/TAXONOMY /TERM/194)
ANCIENT GREECE (/TAXONOMY /TERM/14838)
GREECE (/TAXONOMY /TERM/14126)
Irene Coltman Brown begins this series on the historian as philosopher by
taking a look at the Greek historian known as the Father of History.
'History is philosophy from examples' taught the literary historian, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, who worked in Rome some years before the birth of Christ. Some historians
have particularly desired to emphasis the philosophical implications of the examples of
human experience revealed in their reconstruction of the past. Unable to write coherently
without some general conception of the probable causes and effects of human behaviour,
these historians have thought it possible to extract from their knowledge of what has been
done, advice on what should be done, and even to aspire to predictions of what will most
probably be done in the future.
This new series on the historian as philosopher ranges from the ancient Greek and Roman
historians, through their Italian, French, German and North African successors to the
nineteenth-century Russian historian, Plekhanov, but it begins on the note of ambiguity which
is characteristic of the philosophy of historians who draw their principles from the
contradictory nature of what men and women do instead of the smooth consistency of what
they say. Herodotus, who is known as the Father of History, has also been called the Father
of Lies. Thus, from the start, the history of writing history warns that historians also share in
the frailties of fallible mankind, the long record of which they pass on to every succeeding
generation as perhaps their most valuable bequest.
History has always had an anti-obscurantist bias as its practitioners shed their light on
humanity's dark corners, and Herodotus himself wrote in the illumination cast by the Ionian
Enlightenment when, during the sixth century BC, an extraordinary extension of the range of
human thought took place amongst the Ionian Greeks living on the west coast of Asia Minor.
In that much travelled and vulnerable colony, where a host of strangers passed through on
the trade route to Asia, bringing new ideas and ways of life, the Ionian Greeks stood back
from their own society to consider the implications of these differing cultures. The revelation
that instead of the Ionian way of life being the ordained way, decreed by the gods for man to
live and obey their commands, theirs was one of many. This nurtured a scepticism that was
to have fundamental implications.
Though not entirely free from the mythologising they had intellectually abandoned, this
scepticism of the sixth-century Ionian philosophers had the detachment of natural science.
'It made the formation of' the world no longer a supernatural, but a natural event', wrote
Professor Cornford. 'Thanks to the Ionians and no one else, this has become the universal
premise of all modern science.'
Heraclitus called on man in sixth-century Greece to learn the language of nature, aware that
what had happened in Ionia was a great awakening. Men rose from an inhibited sleepwww.historytoday.com/irene-brown/historian-philosopher-herodotus-and-strength-freedom
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walking through the universe to a consciousness of the world order that was available to all.
They now had a heightened awareness of alternatives, of the relativity of many moral
judgements and the validity of different modes of thought. Having taken the leap from
obedience to enquiry, the Ionian philosophers explored the cosmos. They had faith that
observation would bring them understanding of the effects of the past, of the demands of
the present and of the predictable future. Men of science, like Thales of Miletus, believed
that the universe had a natural origin and would have a natural ending. He had learned that
eclipses occur in cycles. Refusing to accept the old belief that the sky was the medium of
divine disfavour, Thales had predicted an eclipse based on scientific observation as being
visible in Asia Minor in 585 BC. Anaximander, the astronomer, also groped for the pattern of
the cosmos. He drew the first Greek map of the world and detected a universal law in the
resolution of its opposing elements. This gave him the courage to welcome change and
accept its destructive creation in both nature and society.
In the middle of the fifth century an historian was reciting his history in Athens. He was
called Herodotus and Halicarnassus on the Asia Minor coast claimed him as its own. His
work had developed from the ideas of these Ionian philosophers in the form of an Historia
or enquiry into the human constructions of the past. Unwilling to accept a single unilinear
story of historical decline as Plato had done, his comprehensive view of the world included
the possibility of change and development, and Herodotus rejoiced that the human race was
so diverse that one man alone could hardly record their myriad customs and experiences.
Involved in the movement towards human equality which was a legacy of the ideas of the
Ionian Enlightenment, Herodotus rejected the mystical exclusiveness of the shaman , the
religious diviner, and the soothsayer and claimed that 'all men can know equally about
divine things' and thus it followed that they were sufficiently equal in judgement to be
trusted with political decisions. This direct knowledge of the world was linked by Herodotus
to the creative power of human responsibility and freedom and it was on this perception
that he built his political faith. In the history of his own people Herodotus saw men tested to
the limit of their nature by success and by disaster. He believed that will and courage
changed the odds. He may have learned this from Thales who taught that lack of courage in
the citizens was a more obvious sign of approaching defeat than a comet.
In 504 BC the expanding Persian Empire absorbed the renowned Ionian Greek colony and
demanded tribute from its citizens. The Athenians thus realised how short-lived their own
freedom would also be unless they could defend their independence from Persian
encroachment. The defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece was therefore considered an
essential part of the history of Greek freedom, and more so because many Greeks did not
consider that they had won accidentally or by a miracle, but they believed they had defeated
the Persians because free men are stronger than slaves.
Set in Herodotus' History of the Persian Wars is a formalised presentation of the arguments
for democracy, aristocracy and kingship. In this historical parable, seven Persians having
made a successful coup against their false king, discuss the government they should now
establish. One recommended that the whole nation should govern themselves. He reminded
the others of the arrogance of tyrants and the temptations for kings who were allowed to do
as they liked. Another conspirator, however, advised setting up an oligarchy. He wished the
Persians to choose the worthiest citizens and entrust the state to them so that, power having
been given to the best men, the best political counsels would prevail.
'Let the enemies of the Persians be ruled by democracies', he concluded, identifying
democracy with weakness. But Darius came forward and said 'What government can
possibly be better than that of the very best man in the whole state? He chooses the path of
justice and moves secretly along it, unhampered by the violent quarrels of aristocratic lords
and the corruption of democracy'. The other conspirators then supported Darius and it was
decided that the one whose horse first neighed after the sun was up should be chosen.
Darius, by a trick, became that one and under his rule the Persian Empire became the most
formidable power in the Near East. However, Herodotus had mentioned in passing that,
even during the coup, Darius at one critical moment had not known what to do and his
History of the Persian Wars shows the concentration of decision-making in one man as a
source of weakness in the Persian Empire. Monarchy did not give the state the strength
which Darius claimed. Such absolute power needed to be exercised with absolute wisdom
which is beyond the power of mortal men. In contrast, the power of Athens grew with her
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freedom so that Herodotus could say 'freedom is an excellent thing'. He claimed that before
the Athenian citizens won their freedom they were no braver than anyone else but, as soon
as they shook off their despotic rule and were equally free to speak on political affairs,
Athens became the first city-state in Greece. While they lived in servitude the Athenians did
not care if they were conquered, for they had nothing to lose, but as soon as they got their
freedom, each man fought to defend it. Asia's recurrent thrust towards Europe was thwarted
by Europe's free institutions and Athens was fated to bear the brunt of this frustrated
challenge.
The Persian wars started when the Ionian Greeks revolted against their far-away Persian
rulers to whom they resented paying tribute, and Athens sent twenty ships to help the
rebellion. The rebellion failed and their burning cities showed the risk of challenging Persia
and the risks of that love of freedom that blazed up from the Ionian awakening. There was a
general impression that it pleased the Persian King to have a pretext for invasion, so that
Darius' punitive expedition against Greece in 490 BC was recognised as the first move
towards absorbing all of Europe in his empire. The fleet sailed with orders to reduce Athens
to slavery and to bring these new slaves before the King. When the enormous Persian army
landed near Marathon twenty-four miles north- east of Athens, near an open plain where
they could deploy their terrifying cavalry, and made ready to advance on the unwalled city,
some sections of the population thought it wiser to surrender without bloodshed. But the
Athenian representative Assembly took the decision to resist.
Until this time, said Herodotus, the very name of the Persian had frightened the Greeks, but
at Marathon they were defeated by the Athenians who had obeyed the order of the
Assembly to 'take provisions and march' and sent ten thousand infantrymen to attack the
invading force. Although the Athenians had sent messages to Sparta, the independent Greek
warrior state, for assistance, that aid, delayed by a ritually unpropitious moon, did not
arrive. The Athenians realised that if they waited longer for help from others, the Persians
would use the time to consolidate their European foothold. So the Athenians attacked alone
with brilliant success and, as Herodotus said, describing one of the turning points of history,
'the Persians departed and sailed away to Asia'.
The Battle of Marathon was a devastating blow to Persian prestige, and this unexpected
defeat made Darius more anxious than ever to lead a new army against Greece but he died
before doing so and, according to Herodotus, the new King Xerxes was at first more
interested in the wealth of Egypt. It was his cousin Mardonius, who wanted to become
governor of Greece, who persuaded the Persian Emperor of Europe's riches. It would be
fitting for the Great King to possess the West and fitting for the West to be a jewel in the
imperial crown rather than a collection of city-states.
Xerxes then called together an assembly of Persian nobles and told them of his plan to be
revenged on the Greeks. He made it plain that this was less of a punitive expedition than a
once-and-for-all attempt to conquer Greece. By defeating Greece he would turn Europe into
a province of Asia and absorb its free states into his oriental despotism. 'Once let us subdue
this people, and those neighbours of theirs who hold the land of Pelops the Phrygian, and
we shall extend the Persian territory as far as God's heaven reaches. The sun will then shine
on no land beyond our borders; for I will pass from one end to the other, and with your aid
make of all the land which it contains one country.'
Greece was the only obstacle to the Persian conquest of the known world. If it were once
permanently subjugated, no other city or nation would dare to oppose the might of Persia
and 'by this course then we shall bring all mankind under our yoke...'. Xerxes was assured
that he was certain to be victorious and that he had nothing to fear from the Greeks as they
had neither men nor money, and the other Persians were silent, as Herodotus points out,
because in the Persian despotism they were all afraid to raise their voices against any plan
of the Emperor.
In the spring of 48O BC the Persian King crossed the narrow Hellespont straits between
Europe and Asia over bound pontoons, lashing the waves in fury because a storm destroyed
the first bridge and crying 'King Xerxes will cross thee, whether thou wilt or not'. Herodotus
implied that there was something unnatural in this presumption. Xerxes had also dug a canal
across the isthmus which joins Mount Athos to the mainland. He thus marched armies
across the sea and navies across the land in a violation of the natural order, and Artabamus,
Xerxes' uncle and the only one who spoke against the invasion, said that Xerxes' enemies
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included the land and sea and that the Emperor was defying the universe. It was the essence
of despotic hubris , or arrogance, to will what could not be willed: the transformation of
reality by will alone. Xerxes, however claimed that great empires were only won by taking
great risks and declared boldly that when the Persians had subdued Europe, they would
then return safely home.
There had never been such an army before, said Herodotus. All the armies of Asia had been
brought together and led by the Ten Thousand Immortals, the warrior élite, glittering in
gold. It took them seven days and seven nights to cross into Europe until it seemed as if all
the world were marching against Greece. 'Was there a nation in all Asia', asked Herodotus
rhetorically, 'which Xerxes did not bring with him?'
Xerxes hoped to wrest some advantage from the weakness of Greek political society. His
army was conscripted from a united empire. The Greek armies came from numerous
independent city-states and peoples. He looked forward to the divisions that would arise
from their conflicting counsels and from the uncertain and fluctuating policies of their
democratic assemblies. He did not understand their strength. His army crossed the
Hellespont under the lash and he could not see what would hold the Greeks together. Even
Apollo, the god of the Delphic oracle, warned of terrible disasters if the Greeks resisted, but
the Greeks had faith in themselves. Although all suspicion could not be dispelled overnight,
nor all ancient hostilities forgotten, the Greeks had sufficiently patched up their quarrels at
the conference which met in 481 BC under the headship of Sparta to form an organisation of
Greek unity for their mutual defence.
During the years when news had seeped into Greece of the Persian preparations for
invasions, the Spartans had held assemblies to ask 'Is anyone willing to die for the
Fatherland?' At the pass of Thermopylae separating Thessaly from Phocis, where there was
scarcely twenty yards between the sea and its sheer cliff face and the sulphur springs, the
Spartan King Leonidas took up his position as if to answer the question. He led to
Thermopylae his elite royal guard of three hundred young warriors, a few allied troops,
theperioikoi from other cities in Lacedaemonia who accepted Spartan hegemony, and the
Helot shield-bearers. Sparta at this time could count on scant support from estranged allies,
and once again the Spartans were restrained from full participation in the defence of Greece
by religious prohibitions. This was therefore to be an advance guard until the whole Spartan
army could be used, but Leonidas must have realised he was probably marching to his
death, for he chose only guards who already had sons to live after them. Since the spring the
Greeks had watched each other as closely as they watched the enemy. As they advanced to
the pass, these men could not be sure that the rest of Greece would not give up the fight.
It was hoped that the Persians would be halted by the Spartan holding action while the
Greeks made preparations for a naval battle, and on August 17th, 480 BC Xerxes ordered
the Persians to advance. For two days the Persian army attacked, and the Greeks beat them
back, so that even the Immortals, the Emperor's own bodyguard, were defeated. It is said
that three times Xerxes leapt from his throne in terror lest the whole army be lost, for at any
moment panic could have sent all his conscripts scrambling away into the mountains. Yet on
the third day Leonidas was betrayed. He had posted his local Phocian allies to watch if the
Persians came over the mountain track, but they, unaware of the enemy advance until they
heard the dry leaves fallen from summer trees rustling in the still air beneath their marching
feet fled as a spy showed the Persians the way they could attack the Spartans from the rear.
Even though he had been betrayed, Leonidas did not surrender. He sent away most of his
forces and Herodotus describes how he and his remaining guards were then killed fighting
to the last. A monumental inscription said 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as
they would wish us to and are buried here' and, although three days afterwards Xerxes was
marching south destroying every village as he went, and the way lay open for Persia to
march into central Greece, the Spartan resistance was a moral appeal to other Greeks that
did not go unanswered.
When the enemy attacked Atheas the Athenians showed that they were a city-state with a
unity that resided not in ancestral soil but in their laws. Together with traitors who wanted
to overthrow the democracy and restore a tyranny, the Persian army entered the city and
burned the sacred Acropolis. The Athenian commander, Themistocles, who had to persuade
the Athenians to leave their homes and carry on the struggle outside their city, was taunted
as a man without a country. He answered that his country was in his ships, for Athens was a
united people not a place. The wooden walls that the oracle said would save Athens were
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not her city defences but their hulls. Aristides, his political opponent, then made common
cause with him against the Persian peril, and the great Greek naval victory at Salamis on
September 20th, 480, one month after Thermopylae, showed, said Herodotus, that the gods
did not want one man to be the ruler of Asia and of Europe.
After the burning of Athens the Athenians took refuge on the island of Salamis, and under the
Emperor's eyes the thousand Persian ships were lured forward into its narrow waters.
Xerxes may have been too anxious to clinch the Greek defeat. Pressing eagerly forward as if
to 'imperial victory, the Persians found themselves exposed to a brilliant manoeuvre of
Themistocles who, having feigned withdrawal so as to lead on the great ships of the enemy,
now watched as in that narrow strait they rammed each other in a futile effort to evade the
Greek attack. When they were unable to move they lay exposed to the well-armed Greek
hoplites – the citizen militia – who leapt upon their decks. The Persian navy was crushingly
defeated and the Persian army, which had been relying on the fleet to maintain its supplies
and its lines of communication, retreated.
At the final battle of Plataea in 479 BC Mardonius, Xerxes' ill-fated adviser, learned how
wrong he had been, as he was defeated by treachery on his own side and the bravery of the
Spartans. He was killed in the fighting by a Spartan stone and, as the Persian survivors fled
to the coast, a last naval battle marked the end of Persian aspirations, and thenceforth
Europe was safe from any further danger from its emperors. The Persian wars were the high
noon of Athenian patriotic history. The dramatist, Aeschylus, fought at Marathon and
Socrates at Salamis. Victory made Athens the leading power in Greece but tempted her into
the Imperial hubris and pride of the Persian emperors, as her greatest historian,
Thycydides, was to record.
Historians since Herodotus have protested at his inaccuracies. Sometimes these are due to
his Ionian love of curious travellers' tales, but some of the errors derive from mistaken
numbers. The Cretan say all Cretans are liars. Herodotus says that 'neither the Ionians nor
any of the other Greeks know how to count'. Classical scholars claim that his figures of the
vast Persian host are wildly exaggerated. Also, as Paul Cartledge emphasises, he had
overlooked the nine hundred to a thousand men who advanced with Leonidas to
Thermopylae who came from Lacedaimonia but were not Spartan citizens. Besides the
subject Helots and the few allies stood the perioikoi , the free men from other
Lacedaimonian cities, who were nonetheless subject to Spartan suzerainty and were
therefore in some sense forced to defend them against their foreign enemies, and probably
even against the Helots if ordered to. This oversight or disregard raises a more serious
allegation. Herodotus, it has been said, abandoned history for myth. He forced the record of
the Persian wars into a mould which justified his political creed. In fact it was not only free
men who defended Thermopylae, nor was Greek freedom absolute.
Herodotus blurred the fact that the perioikoi also stayed with Leonidas, as did the Spartan
Helot shield-bearers whose name is synonymous with slavery. For, denied political liberty
themselves, the freedom of the Spartans rested on their forced labour, as the magnificent
resistance of Athens came from a participatory democracy that denied that participation to
all its women and to all its many slaves. Freedom inspired the Spartans to fight bravely, but
Xerxes' Persians had also advanced courageously against the Spartan line. Was it not the
longer spears, as Herodotus claims, and the great bronze shields of the defenders, as Ernle
Bradford describes them, that forced back the Immortals until the Greeks were
overwhelmed by treachery and a superior force? It may be difficult for future historians to
find a place where love of freedom and one's native land tipped the balance in a nuclear
war.
The myth of the few free men who miraculously withstand the many could be a more
dangerous falsehood than Herodotus' statistical errors, because it idealises out of existence
the implacable mathematics of power and the ultimate despotism of fortune. The winds of
Greece that buffeted the Persian fleet proved a natural check to Persian aspirations, but the
uncertain elements cannot always be relied upon to protect human freedom. Battles have
been won or lost through a sudden storm. As a character in one of Conrad's novels protests,
as spokesman for the author, but also expressing the conviction of Thucydides, 'Life is not
for me a moral romance'.
And yet Persia, the mighty empire, was defeated against all the odds...
Further reading:
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Herodotus, The Persian Wars
Ernie Bradford, The Year of Salamis (London, 1980)
Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia (London, 1979)
Historical dictionary: Herodotos
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