Most quotations from Herodotus in English, and all those in Greek, are
based on the four volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition, translated
by Godley. This translation, alongside early twentieth- century commentaries
by How and Wells and by Macan, is available online at the Perseus Digital
Library ( www.perseus.tufts.edu ). Godley’s translation is also available
through Hestia ( http://hestia.open.ac.uk ). Other translations which are
referred to – by Sélincourt, Waterfi eld, Blanco, Holland and Mensch – are
listed in the bibliography under the translator’s name. Quotations and
references to Homer are based on the Lattimore translations and quotations
from other ancient Greek writers, unless otherwise stated, are based on
those available at the Perseus Digital Library
All dates referring to the ancient world, unless otherwise stated, are BCE.
Approaches to Herodotus
The word ‘unfolding’, explains Walter Benjamin writing about Kafka in 1934, has two meanings: there is the unfolding of a bud into a blossom and the unfolding of a paper boat which becomes a fl at sheet of paper. 1 Two years later, writing ‘The Storyteller’, he says how storytelling is rooted in oral tradition and how the story does not expend itself in the telling but, by integrating itself with the listener’s experience, lives in the memory and is repeated to others. Storytelling preserves what gives it life and meaning and the example that he cites is one of Herodotus’ tales, about the Egyptian king Psammetichus (3.14), noting its ability to provoke ‘astonishment and refl ection’. 2
It unfolds, to use his image, like a bud
Egypt has been conquered by the Persians and Psammetichus is forced to
watch as his enslaved daughter is compelled to fetch water in a pitcher,
accompanied by other girls whose fathers are also compulsory spectators.
Psammetichus is the only one who does not cry out and he also remains
silent as his son, roped and bridled like an animal, passes by on his way to
execution. It is only when he sees one of his servants, now reduced to begging
for a living, that he is stricken with grief and bursts into tears. Benjamin
suggests possible reasons – perhaps the servant is the catalyst for the release
of his pent- up grief – but observes how Herodotus offers no explanations.
Commenting on the absence of psychologizing or emotive reporting, he
acclaims how it ‘shows what true storytelling is’ 3
and compares the story to
seeds of grain that after centuries in chambers of the pyramids retain their
power of germination.
The Histories has been around for 2,500 years without losing its ability
to enliven audiences and, central to its continuing appeal, its storytelling.
Penguin’s fi rst edition of the Histories appeared in the Fiction series,
published in a dark period of the Second World War when readers had
enough non- fi ction to contend with and when imagining the author as a
patriotic teller of tall tales, a racy raconteur, might have been welcoming.
Here was a conversationalist who enjoyed embellishing his accounts while
professing disbelief in what he is about to share with his audience, as in a
tale of a precocious child who will become king Cambyses of Egypt, pledging
revenge on behalf of his mother aggrieved by a slight from another woman.
4 A GUIDE TO READING HERODOTUS’ HISTORIES
Having enjoyed the telling of the tale, Herodotus informs us that he fi nds it
unconvincing (3.3). He presents empirical information but with imagination
and fl air and a modern parody of how he sometimes drew unfounded
conclusions brings out what is also beguiling about his writing: ‘England
being a very cold country, the Londoners live on a food they call curry,
eating it all day long, for it makes their entire bodies feel warm, and when
they begin to feel cold again, they eat some more. This food they get from
India and it is carried from there on the backs of the dogs one sees all over
Britain. This, it seems to me, must be the reason for the great affection the
Britons bestow on dogs’ ( Roberts 2011 : 59).
Precious little is known for certain about Herodotus’ life and while there
is no agreement about the extent or duration of his travels 4
it is very probable
he left his home city, travelled widely, was exiled at least once and spent his
last years in south Italy. He was ‘the product of the culture of walled cities’
but his authority as a historian and ethnographer derives ‘from passage
beyond the walls’ ( Greenblatt 1992 : 123). 5
The language and imagery of
travel pervades his work and characterizes its opening and concluding
sections. The proem (1.1–5) covers a series of sea journeys as abducted
women are carried far and wide and the last chapter of the book sees the
Persians discussing where to travel to and why (9.122). An authorial voice
brings the kidnapped women’s voyages to an end, only to announce another
type of movement: ‘I will go forward in my account, going alike through
cities small and great’ (1.5). The phrasing carries a Homeric echo: the
Odyssey opening with the poet asking the Muse to sing of the man ‘who was
driven far journeys’ and saw ‘the cities of many men, whose minds he
learned’ (1.1–3). Herodotus is not an armchair traveller but one who keeps
on the move, amassing layers of information as he takes byways and
diversions, prepared to be a slowcoach but keeping a destination in mind,
eschewing short cuts in favour of minor lanes and detours. 6
He is ready to
be lured into narrative outings by tales of the uncanny and the fabulous,
places and people on the rim, rerouting on the hoof if an interesting excursion
suggests itself and creating his own signposts as he maps previously unknown
or obscure connections.
Herodotus as a traveller collects stories, learning about the inseparability
of the present from the past, and his journeying, listening and storytelling
become equally inseparable. A term that brings together a set of such
traditionally unrelated temporalities and spatialities is ‘hodology’. The study
of pathways in geography, hodology can also refer to connections in parts
of the brain – a coming together of the physical and the cerebral that can be
seen taking place as a result of social interactions and the exchange of stories
arising in the course of following a path or a trail. We make sense of the
world as we move through it, and we follow a story like a trail. In both cases
there is an ordering of material, the physical steps of the traveller on the
ground mirrored in cognitive movements arising from social exchange
during a journey. A call for a new class of mapping that would build on this
performative aspect to knowledge unites components that can be seen at
work in Herodotus: ‘Knowing is a form of travelling, of moving through
space; and travelling, like knowledge, is also a form of narrative’ ( Turnbull
2007 : 143). Dewald ( 1987 : 149) writes of Herodotus’ logon hodos (‘route
of the logoi) that the reader is guided along as the stories calmly proliferate.
تعليقات
إرسال تعليق
للاستفسار اكتب تعليق