[sect. 11]
Defects and Merits of Herodotus historicus as exhibited in Bks. 7, 8, 9
To the analysis of the Sources naturally succeeds the
estimate of the historian's power of dealing with them, and
generally the merits and defects of his mind and method, as
exhibited in the work, or the portion of the work, here immediately
under review. No ancient historian was really a scientific and
critical historian, as these terms are nowadays understood:
Thucydides himself will not stand untarnished the tests of the
modern analyst. Ancient historians take liberties in the interests
of art, of charm, of literature, which modern historiography has
discarded, and modern students would not appreciate if revived
or imitated. Nevertheless, ancient historians are critical and
competent in widely varying degrees, and their works, tried by
their own best standards, as by ours, deserve careful and discriminating
appreciation. Herodotus has a unique character of
his own, which nowhere shows to greater advantage than in
these Books. To an incomparable style, combined with a happy
empiricism which allows, or seems to allow, every party to a suit
to tell its own story, he adds a critical effort or rational conscience,
not always advertised, and an honesty, or open-mindedness, which
outshines the malignity of his Sources. If he seeks after
signs and wonders, and prefers proverbial wisdom and bons mots
to metaphysic, his work is possibly none the worse a mirror of
the times for that. His rationale of political action, his grasp of
the operations of war, are seldom adequate to our way of thinking;
yet he often enables us to correct or to supplement his own
account from the context. His chronology nowhere else so nearly
responds to modern requirements as in the last three Books; the
topographical conditions of the story of the war are remarkably
[p. lxxvii]
well satisfied, while incidentally a large contribution is made to
the materials of Comparative Jurisprudence, or the early history
of Institutions. Exaggerations, inconsistencies, fictions abound
in his pages; yet this liberty of prophesying, as he practises
it, carries to some extent its own remedy with it, and detracts
surprisingly little from the purely historical results to be obtained.
A more detailed discussion of the points just formulated will go
far to justify the favourable verdict.
(i.) That liberty which Herodotus, in common with most
ancient historians, carried with him into his composition, may be
most significantly tested by an examination of the speeches and
dialogues plentifully introduced into the last three Books of the
work.95 From the purely critical point of view perhaps the best to
be said for them is that they are not quite all equally unauthentic
and fictitious. In some cases there may be a genuine reminiscence
of words spoken on the given occasion; yet, even in passages
apparently the most plausible, the language has taken on so
strong an Herodotean colour that we cannot see in Herodotus a
mere reporter: he has arranged the matter for publication, and
the full copyright is his. Thersander of Orchomenos doubtless
told to Herodotus the anecdote of his experiences at the banquet
of Attaginos, but the conversation of Thersander with his Persian
convive has a native Herodotean ring, which makes it, in its present
form, unmistakeably the author's; unless, indeed, Herodotus learnt
a good deal of his own philosophy from the Boiotian.96 Even less
convincing is the conversation between Dikaios and Demaratos
in the Thriasian plain on the eve of the battle of Salamis, for the
substance of which Herodotus is nevertheless at some pains
to specify his source.97 Few if any of the remaining dialogues
and conversations have an alleged authority; not seldom the
circumstances and conditions in which the speeches are introduced,
no less than their substance or contents, prohibit their acceptance.
The situation is frequently private and confidential, the interlocutors
Persians, and the conversation of course ex hypothesi
conducted in Persian though reported in Greek. Improbabilities,
inconsequences, even absurdities, occur in the conversations and
[p. lxxviii]
speeches, which it is much more natural to ascribe to the reporter,
or inventor, than to the hypothetical interlocutors. It will be
hard for any one to gainsay the free creative action of the historian
in regard to the deliberations of Xerxes and his councillors. The
two speeches of Mardonios, the three speeches of Artabanos, the
four speeches of Xerxes, which preface the final decision for war,
can hardly be more authentic than the dreams and apparitions
which the historian employs to overcome the king's reluctance
to decide for war.98 The dialogue of Xerxes and Artabanos at
Abydos is but a vehicle for Greek sentiment and ethics concerning
the life of man, for a criticism on the Persian conduct of the war,
placed in the lips of these dramatis personae without any apparent
historical justification.99 Some readers may be tempted to ascribe
a higher degree of probability to the three conversations reported
between Xerxes and Demaratos, in view of this or that special
source connected with the exiled Spartan king, and presumably
accessible to Herodotus.100 Such a source might help doubtless to
explain the prominence of Demaratos in the historian's pages
(where he succeeds Artabanos in the character of Choregos, or
Sage); but the substance of the supposed conversations discredits
their historical claim. The first and second interviews are
transparent devices for expounding in dramatic form Hellenic,
and especially Lakedaimonian, traits and qualities, the better to
explain and to glorify the defence of Greece; the third is a no
less transparent device for conveying a criticism upon the
Persian strategy or plan of campaign: here the Persian admiral,
Achaimenes, appears as tritagonist, in order to provide a spokesman
for the alternative actually followed, and to explain why the
Persians failed to adopt a course of action only too likely to have
been successful. Probably differences of opinion existed in the
king's suite upon the conduct of operations; courses recommended
by Greek exiles, who knew their own countrymen, might, if
adopted, have furthered the king's cause; but a good deal of the
criticism, thus dramatically represented, may be the result of
afterthought, on both sides, coming to the historian ready-made,
and owing to him little more than its dramatic form and
[p. lxxix]
hypostatization. Even the prominence of Artemisia in the King's
councils before and after the battle of Salamis cannot be construed
into an authentication of the speeches, reported for these occasions101 ;
and the remarks fathered on Xerxes at Tempe,102 though doubtless
illustrative of the despotic mind, are as fictitious in this connexion
as his conversations with Pythios,103 which subserve the same
general purpose.104
On the Greek side, where assuredly there was no lack of
speechifying in real life, Herodotus to a great extent has avoided
reporting set speeches, or contented himself with the oblique
oration in reporting them. Given cases make all the better
impression for this abstinence, the feeling produced being that
the historian reports the point and marrow of arguments which
were used, must have been used, or might have been used, upon the
occasion. So with the speeches at Athens,105 at the Isthmos,106 before
the war: so with the Parainesis of Themistokles to the Epibatai
on the very morning of the battle of Salamis,107 or the discussion
with Eurybiades thereafter.108 Where Herodotus breaks into direct
oration professing to give the ipsissima verba of his speakers,
the reports become more and more incredible. The largest set
piece of this kind on the Greek side is the interview between
the Greek ambassadors and Gelon, the tyrant of Syracuse,
where the speeches are no doubt the vehicles for a good
deal of candid criticism, very much in place in the historian's
pages, under one form or another, but not at all likely to have
been uttered by the given speakers upon the given occasion.109
The debates of the Greek Strategoi before Salamis are reported
partly in oblique, partly in direct oration; and it may safely
be said that the former passages have more verisimilitude
than the latter.110 The principal set speech of Themistokles
contains, indeed, an admirable argumentation, but the arguments
must have been used much earlier than the point at which they
occur in the historian's narrative111 ; while the interview and
dialogue between Themistokles and Aristeides is transparent
[p. lxxx]
fiction.112 The discussion in the council of war at Andros,113 like
the discussion in the council of war at Samos,114 both reported
in oblique oration, contain at least veritable points of dispute,
doubtless at issue and debated on the occasion; but the
larger set speeches, of Alexander, the Spartans, the Athenians,
on the question of an Athenian union with the Persian, are quite
unacceptable in their actual form.115 More plausible are the
speeches, briefly reported, in Lakedaimon soon afterwards116 ; but
the great orations of the Tegeatai and Athenians on the battlefield
of Plataia, whatever the historical incident that lurks hid
in the situation, are plainly out of place and time.117 To what
category must the short oration of the Korkyraians before Xerxes
be assigned which is reported ipsissimis verbis albeit ex hypothesi
never delivered?118 To the same category as the message of
Themistokles to Xerxes, addressed by the lips of a messenger
warranted to keep silence in regard to his trust even in the
extremity of torture!119 Many speeches, reported by Herodotus,
are reducible to messages on the battle-field, or diplomatic pourparlers,
where the substance is plainly or plausibly historical, and
the form is comparatively unimportant; others dwindle to the
dimensions and purpose of bons mots (ἔπη εὖ εἰρημένα), with an
immortal right to exist, whatever their unauthenticity!120
Doubtless for the contents of many of the speeches reproduced
in his pages Herodotus had what he believed to be sufficient
justification in the reports or traditions that had reached him
orally, or in writing. In other cases, doubtless, he has more or
less consciously followed the principle formulated by Thucydides,
to put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments (and
ideas) proper to the occasion. This principle is, however, one
no longer consistent with the practice of the historical muse:
it marks a method which even the most rhetorical historiography
of our days will not adopt, despite the examples of Herodotus
and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus. It is a method confined
in our literature to the historical novelist, so called. In some
of the cases above cited it is employed by Herodotus with a
freedom which astonishes us even in the pages of an ancient
author; and such action makes it very difficult for us to suppose
[p. lxxxi]
that this liberty of creation, or of report, was confined to words,
and debarred from events and conduct, or that where speeches
are transparent fiction narrative is all hard fact.
(ii.) One matter of fact, into which fiction has certainly made
way, consists in the numbering of the forces of Xerxes. The
full results are, indeed, presented by Herodotus, not as bare facts
traditionally or authoritatively guaranteed, but in part at least as
products of argument and computation: the data are themselves
manifestly unsound, and the initial mistake naturally generates
a self-multiplying aberration.121 The final result is a miscalculation
rather than a fable, and attaints the author's judgement rather
than the character of his Sources. Yet there was plainly that
in his Sources to start him upon this road to ruin; and the
instance shows at once the licence of his Greek authorities, and
the inability of Herodotus to control or to amend it. One
hundred and seventy myriads of fighting men is the total which
Herodotus accepts at starting as the figure for the infantry of
Xerxes massed and numbered at Doriskos, with eighty thousand
added for the cavalry.122 Such forces the Persian king might
conceivably have levied from his vast empire; but such forces he
could not have taken with him into Greece, nor supported had
he taken them thither. The figure is, however, only an estimate,
based upon an incredible anecdote, and not a total reached by
a summation of various items for the various component parts
of the army. Herodotus, indeed, is not content with the given
figures; but, far from seeking to diminish them, he is shortly
attempting to increase them, and succeeds, to his own satisfaction,
in raising the total of the king's forces by land to upwards of
two million fighting men. The numbers for the fleet are not
perhaps so extravagant, though a total of upwards of half a
million men at arms is a manifest exaggeration. Misjudgement
and absurdity reach a climax in the proposal to double the figures
throughout in order to make allowance for attendants and
followers, raising the total of the men led by Xerxes as far as
Thermopylai and the Thessalian shore to upwards of five millions
and a quarter. This passage is of the utmost importance for a
just estimate of Herodotus' competence as a military historian.
His figures and his computation set conditions of time and space
[p. lxxxii]
at defiance: the initial device, by which the total for the infantry
was obtained at Doriskos, is itself an absurdity. If other figures
for fleets and forces on both sides are more moderate and sane,
that cannot expunge the deliberate and express misjudgement
to which Herodotus is committed in this instance. The total of
the Persian fleet (raised by the European contingent to 1327
vessels) Herodotus reduces by storms and captures before
Salamis to about 600 vessels; but he supposes these losses to
have been fully compensated by the contingents of Karystos,
Andros, Tenos, and other Nesiotes: a manifest absurdity.123
Such arithmetical irresponsibility, in the face of physical and
historical conditions, is not to be condoned by the observation
that the motives of exaggeration in both directions are transparent
enough. The defect of science here is a defect of art likewise,
and almost of common sense. Ars est celare artem. It may be
questioned whether any one has ever taken these figures and
computations for truth except Herodotus himself. The deliberate
effort to make the most of the hosts of Xerxes has drawn
attention to the physical conditions and the recorded facts of the
case, which alike disprove the historian's reckoning. There are
no two pages in the whole work of Herodotus more fatal to his
claims as a sober historian than the pages devoted to these
systematic and elaborate computations. Herodotus is dealing
seriously from first to last in this business; it is not an
exaggerated jest nor an ironical satire: that is the worst of it!
Solvuntur risu tabulae! The thing is ridiculous, and neither
the rivers that failed,124 nor the surpassing stature and beauty
of Xerxes,125 invented apparently ad hoc, can save Herodotus from
bankruptcy on this account.
(iii.) Naturally computation is not the only particular in
which Herodotus breaks down as an historian of military affairs.
Passing over here his description of the arms and accoutrements
of the vast host, his account of its march with the king at its
head leaves much to be desired, even on his own showing.
Despite its colossal size, the host remained, if we are to credit
Herodotus, a chaotic mob, until it reached Doriskos.126 Again,
[p. lxxxiii]
though we may detect in his records evidence that the army was
organized in three corps or columns, and advanced in that order,
it is evidence of which he himself seems unconscious, and the
arrangement is only predicated by him of one short stage on the
route.127 Again, although in one place he indicates that the
Persian strategy treated, so long as possible, fleet and army
as indissoluble,128 he shows practically no consciousness of this
clue in his own narrative of the two campaigns, but treats the
movements of the fleets and armies, on both sides, as wholly
independent, though accidentally synchronous, series of operations;
and while he has incidentally enabled us to relate the battles
of Thermopylai and Artemision to each other, he has left the
relations of the movements of the Greek fleet in 479 B.C. to the
operations on land, a matter of pure speculation. His accounts
of individual battles break up for the most part into successions
of disconnected episodes. His diary of the fighting in front of
Plataia must be pronounced on the whole his chef d'uvre in
this kind; yet it is replete with obscurities and improbabilities,
and indicates very little conception, on the writer's part, or that
of his informants, of the strategic and tactical conditions involved.
It may be that materials for an adequate and reasoned record of
the Persian war hardly existed in the time of Herodotus, or that,
for all his merits and goodwill, he was not just the right man to
collect and to digest them; but neither plea alters the actual
quality of the narrative in question. The best that can be said
of his military essays is that they preserve an outline of events,
which might otherwise have been wanting, and contain scattered
hints showing the actual war to have been conducted on intelligible
and intelligent principles. These hints justify the endless
attempts on the part of Herodotus' followers and commentators
to reconstruct with more or less success the probable plans of the
two belligerents, and the actual contour of the various operations
by sea and by land, in the course of the Persian war.
(iv.) Conditions and limitations, which precluded success in
the attempt to give a true history of the war, have not enabled
Herodotus to present an adequate or accurate version of the
policies of the states or statesmen whose acts and advices he had
to record. Policy is a less technical concern than strategy and
[p. lxxxiv]
tactics; yet states fare little better in the pages of Herodotus
than fleets and armies. It is hardly to be reckoned a serious
fault if he represents the policy of Persia as ultimately dependent
on a despot's caprice; yet his own pages teem with proofs of
the inevitable character of the Persian war.129 Neither the action
nor the inaction of Sparta is traced to any clear motives, or
objects of policy, in these Books; and, as it happens, an important
development of Spartan policy in relation to Athens and
the Persian question is reported, in the sixth Book, in terms
which reduce the account to a mere anecdote; yet among all
Greek states the policy of Sparta is at all times the most easily
explained.130 The conduct of Athens is throughout represented in
the heroic terms accepted from the Attic or philo-Athenian
sources131 ; the material and political interests which Athens had
at stake, and in especial the definite object to resist a tyrannic
restoration under Persian auspices, is barely indicated, or but
unconsciously suggested. The policy of the Medizing states is,
perhaps, more successfully adumbrated than the policy of those
who chose the better part132 : the divisions of Thessaly,133 the feud of
Phokis,134 the anti-Atticism of Thebes,135 the anti-Lakonism of Argos,136
are verae causae, most clearly expressed in the cases of Phokis and
of Argos. Over the political attitudes and sympathies of Makedon
and of Delphi a glamour had been thrown, we cannot but suspect,
in the light of later events and interests, which Herodotus has
accepted somewhat too credulously at its own valuation. Yet
on the whole the political motives of the various states named are
historical problems not difficult of solution in and from his records,
although the truth in regard to the political action of Delphi and
of Makedon in particular may never be quite clearly recovered.
It is in dealing with the behavious and motives of individuals that
his sympathies, or his sources, betray Herodotus into something
like superficial injustice. The attitude and action of Alexander
[p. lxxxv]
of Makedon have been reported probably from sources deeply
coloured by the political results of the Persian war. The record
of Themistokles does little justice to the political objects and
abilities, or even the patriotism, of that statesman, and Herodotus
has failedhas not attemptedto get behind the traditions and
anecdotes which dated from his fall, or were the outcome of the
hostilities that helped to fell him. The political action of Gelon
in relation to the Persian and national question has been obscured
in the Herodotean record by the general Hellenic antipathy to
tyrants, though fortunately in this case later and local knowledge
has led Herodotus to supplement the general tradition,
current in Athens or Sparta, with a special variant, which proves
at once good history and good politics, more than justifying the
non-appearance of Gelon at Salamis, justifying also the doubt
whether his co-operation was ever invited at all. The character
of Xerxes, as a politician, has been reduced, in the conflicting
tradition preserved by Herodotus, to that of a paradoxical puppet,
partly swayed by supernatural interventions and agencies driving
him on to his doom, partly led by evil councillors more astute
and ambitious than himself, partly the creature of his own
capricious and ungovernable passions. That there was no real
precedent for such a portrait it would be rash to affirm; but it
is safe to say that the particular motives assigned for many of
the King's undertakings and actions are unduly prejudiced, and
that where good reasons were forthcoming, Herodotus did ill so
often to prefer the worse reason for the conduct of Xerxes.137
(v.) It is, in short, not unfair to say that Herodotus was
primarily neither a military nor a political historian, and does
not always show to advantage beside a Thucydides, a Polybios,
a Caesar, or even a Tacitus. Herodotus prefers the concrete to
the abstract, the particular to the universal, the anecdote, the
episode, the bon mot, the gnome, to the reasoned description of
military movements, or the conscious rationale of political events.
Even his record of the second Persian war, much the most closely
connected and best sustained achievement in his logography, teems
with sportive items.138 Such things are not history, though they
may be, if rightly authenticated, a part of the materials out of
[p. lxxxvi]
which history is to be made, or at least to be made agreeable.
In a sense, indeed, they are better than history, they are mostly
too good to be true; but in general they are at once either too
artful or too artless to rank as good historical evidences. In
the one case they betray the moral, and in the other case the
malignity, which has been at the making of them; or at best
they drop out of serious account as pure sports of the humorist,
or raconteur.
(vi.) Again, the record of the Persian war as told by Herodotus
suffers detriment, from the strictly historical point of view, by
the too ready admission of the marvellous, the miraculous, the
special intervention of the other world, in one shape or another.
To justify Herodotus from this charge, in a certain sense, is easy
enough. Granted that Xerxes was not hounded on by divinely
ordered dreams and apparitions to carry out the pre-ordained
purpose of Heaven in the invasion of Greece139 : granted that the
deliverance of Delphi was unaccompanied by special apparitions
and miracles140 : waiving the reported interventions, omens, portents,
that cluster round Salamis and its story141 : rationalizing the
telepathic Phem at Mykale, and its reputed synchronism with
the victory of Plataia142 : yet still, it may be said, Herodotus had
failed for all time to represent a notable and perfectly historical
feature in the traditions of the war, aye, in the souls of the
victors themselves, had he omitted to reproduce these irrational
elements in the story as it reached him from the age of faith.
These elements are features in the story, because such elements,
the same in kind if not in amount and prominence, were factors
in the life of Greece in the fifth century. Oracles, dreams,
portents, with their interpretation, counted for something, not
insignificant, in the actions of living men and women, and in the
policy of states, in a pre-metaphysical age. And what fault could
be found with Herodotus if he but reported the cases where the
oracle was appealed, and helped to determine action, or failed to
do so, as might be; if he but recorded marvels, or supposed
marvels, or any other religious excuse, as actual motives of
action, and even of policy? The suspicion is unavoidable
that, strong as was the belief in the direct intervention of
[p. lxxxvii]
gods and heroes in human affairs, important as was the rle
played by oracles, divination, the interpretation of portents,
dreams, and so forth, in real life, yet all these things nevertheless
played less part in men's actions and fortune than
the logography of Herodotus would lead us to suppose. The
charge is rather that, owing to an idiosyncrasy, a personal
penchant for such things, he has given them an undue prominence
in his narrative to the exclusion of more genuinely historical
elements; he has preferred a supranaturalistic story, or version
of a story, to a more natural one; he has transfused his whole
conception and representation of the course of affairs so as to
bring it into agreement with a somewhat thin and antiquated
view of the action of the God in History; and, both in what
he inserts and in what he omits, in the form he has given to his
materials, or the forms he has accepted and preferred, the bold
miracle has too often taken the place of the better reason.143 It
may be some compensation to us that by this very miscarriage
and shortcoming Herodotus all the more fully represents the
popular mind of his age and people, and so becomes, in a fresh
application, historical in our eyes; but this consolation is tantamount
to admitting that, in the first instance, he presents to
us an imperfectly historical mind, and represents an imperfectly
historical age, or rather the less instructed side of an age, which
was already in all its leading minds essentially scientific.
(vii.) Of the worst charge against the good faith of an
historian Herodotus stands acquitted: personal bias, personal
ill-will, should never have been alleged against him. As
formulated in the pages of Plutarch's tract de Malignitate Herodoti
this charge, a monument of critical incompetence, collapses upon
the Boiotian critic's own pate. A good deal of malignity is,
indeed, preserved in the pages of Herodotus, but it is there as
evidence, for the most part, of the surpassing candour and
simplicity of the writer's own mind. Kretans were not the
only liars in Greece: Greeks all told stories at each other's
expense, Athens to the discredit of Sparta, of Korinth, of Thebes,
each of which doubtless returned the compliment with interest:
oligarch maligned democrat, and democrat maligned oligarch, and
both united to blacken the tyrant's fame: feuds of clan with clan.
[p. lxxxviii]
and rivalries of man with man, gave constant vogue to the worse
report and the worse interpretation of each other's actions. It was
a part of the price paid by the Greeks for their enfranchisement.144
All this carnival of calumny is reflected in the pages of Herodotus,
thanks to his direct reproduction of the local version, the partisan
story, the rival's anecdote, the apologist's retort. But there is
little or no malice in his own private judgements, nor is a malign
spirit consistent with the general tone of his work. That
Herodotus betrays no political or personal preferences it would
be too much to assert: such a miracle of impartiality would be
more or less than man and than Herodotus; but he errs by
excess rather than by defect of admiration. His two worst
offences in this connexion are to have taken too easily the
current Athenian transfiguration of Athens, and the current
Athenian denigrations of Themistokles. For the rest, Herodotus
preserves somewhat more than a benevolent neutrality. Who
can say that he does less than justice to Lakedaimon, if he
reproduces too faithfully one Athenian jibe at Sparta's honour?145
Or to Korinth, if he reports the Athenian scandal, with the
universally received dmenti in immediate juxtaposition?146 Or to
Argos, for whose conduct he apologizes with, perhaps, half an
eye to the Attic question?147 Or to Thebes, whose medism was
past whitewashing, even though the account of the Thebans at
Thermopylai is one of the weakest spots in the historian's armour?148
Yet there is little or nothing in all this, and in the lesser cases
which might be cited, to convict Herodotus in his own person
of ill-will to any man or state in Hellas.149 That he does no
injustice to the Barbarian has often enough been pointed out150 :
that not even Plutarch's captious tract alleged against him.
(viii.) Herodotus' own reflexions are seldom profound, and
never ill-natured.151 His very empiricism refutes the charge of
[p. lxxxix]
ill-will.152 His method of letting people tell their own story,
instead of rationalizing or reducing all his conflicting materials to
a self-consistent prcis, enables his readers to compare one account
with another for themselves, and to correct at times the version
preferred by the historian in the light of one reported on principle.
Not indeed that Herodotus quite fulfils his own formula. He
has not been at sufficient pains always to collect information from
every source legitimately concerned. It is certainly strange, and
a little unfortunate, that the campaign of Plataia should be so
largely drawn from Athenian tradition, and throughout Herodotus
is too much at the mercy of his Athenian authorities. Yet even
here the very transparency of the medium supplies its own corrective,
and the absence of conscious or deliberate special pleading
on the historian's part enables his readers to improve on his
position. This observation holds good even of the stories of the
nautical and military operations: we may venture to rationalize
them just because the historian has done little or nothing himself
in that direction. If, on the whole or in parts, we claim to
understand the course of events better than our best authority, it
is not so much that we correct and supplement his record largely
from other sources, but rather that his record so largely supplies
its own corrective, in the conflict of evidences reported, and the
manifest animus of much reproduced bona fide by the reporter.
Such reconstruction can be but hypothetical, and of course depends
for its acceptance upon appeal to still verifiable facts in
the physical conditions, and in the nature of man; but it is
not thereby discredited as illegitimate, and its verisimilitude is
due, in the last resort, to the simple good faith of the first report.
(ix.) The navet of Herodotus must not, however, be exaggerated;
the presence of a critical and a rationalistic tendency
in his work cannot be denied. He has himself exercised to
some extent a judgement, if not in the selection, at least in the
evaluation of his sources, rejecting stories as untrue, or improbable,
which he still thinks it his duty to report, entering his own
opinion and verdict in some disputed cases formally for what it
is worth, and incidentally or implicitly forcing on his audience
[p. xc]
a certain reading of the facts, a certain rationale of the merely
empirical order of phenomena, or the merely empirical roll of
witnesses. In some cases this element of reflexion, when
segregated and envisaged on its own merits, leaves very little to
be desired. No one will claim for Herodotus the rank of a
philosophic thinker; yet the rationale which he gives, in one way
or another, sometimes speaking in his own person, sometimes by
the lips of his dramatis personae, sometimes it may be in the mere
way of narrative, of the Greek victory over the Persians, is all but
complete. On the Persian side the unmanageable size and
numbers of the hosts153 ; disregard of sound policy and errors in
the actual plans of campaign154 ; division of interests, rivalry
and quarrels among the leaders, and in the command155 ; division
of interests and lack of coherence in the fighting forces156 ; positive
inferiority in equipment, armour, skill, discipline, training157 : what
more could be required to explain the issue? On the Greek
side the contrary and the complement of all these: the advantage
in actual material and military equipment158 ; the advantage in
skill, in discipline, in leadership, in intelligence; union159 ; the
advantage in manhood and in moral160 ; the vast superiority of the
cause.161 Yet Herodotus does not escape a certain inconsequence
between his clear perception of the secondary causes accountable
for the Greek victory, and his strong, desire to make the most of
the danger, and to magnify the result, as a great and wonderful
work, not to be explained by any merely human actions or
considerations. In the end he is not content, short of the
invocation of his highest categories for human experience. In
his mind the victory is due, immediately and ultimately, to the
direct interposition of the gods and heroes, the higher individual
wills which rule the world, and to the supreme laws of all human
life and fortune.162 Religiously speaking the discomfiture of Xerxes,
the salvation of Greece, are ascribed to the jealousy excited in
the god, Zeus, by the pride and power of the man, Xerxes163 ; or
[p. xci]
ethically expressed, to the sure nemesis which lies in wait for the
high and mighty things of this world, to the certain if slow
corruption which is the lot of mortality, to the law that happiness
is not for man, and human life at best a sorrowful thing.164
Doubtless this moral has led Herodotus to portray in Xerxes
the character which deserves the judgement, to emphasize in the
traditions those traits and anecdotes which accord with the
foregone conclusion; but even here his method, careless of
inconsistencies, has redeemed his work; showing that the
historic Xerxes was not the mere despot, proud and capricious,
cruel and cowardly, vicious and well-nigh insane, as too much of
the record implies, but that his actions were guided at least in
some degree by the intelligible motives of a politician, and the
reasonable feelings of a man.
Nor can it be said that Herodotus' empirical method of narrating
stories, or his meternpirical doctrines of Divine vengeance
and of mortal doom, have much diminished his political sagacity
and fairness, where there is a call for their application. His view
of the service of Athens, and of the importance of that service to
the cause of Greece, though insufficiently qualified by any clear
statement of the great interests Athens had at stake, is nevertheless
on its positive side a judgement in which the modern world must
acquiesce. His perception of the separatist feelings underlying
the action and policy of the Peloponnesian states is clear enough.
His problematical interpretation of the conduct of Sparta at a
critical moment is ambiguous only in form165 ; and his explanation
of the final determination to co-operate loyally with Athens is
none the less his own for being put into dramatic form.166
Throughout, Herodotus must have credit for reporting with
understanding the political wisdom and sagacity of his heroes
or dramatis personae, even where he is not actually fathering on
them his own reflexions; and the application of this principle
proves that, although his express judgements on political affairs
appear at times strangely superficial, yet this current superficiality
is consistent with a high degree of political shrewdness upon
occasion. Even his anecdotes, though doubtless often apocryphal,
may be regarded as the deliberately chosen vehicles for a good
deal of sound sense, and political or ethical philosophy. Such
[p. xcii]
parables as the Crown of Virtue,167 the Dinner la Perse,168 the
Answer of Kyros,169 have each as clear a moral as the fable of
Persuasion and Necessity170 put into the mouth of Themistokles
to adorn a solemn historic occasion. The reflective element in
Herodotus' work is far larger than appears at first sight, owing
to the skilful means which he has adopted to render it more
easily digestible. It is the very dotage of criticism to suppose
that Herodotus is unconscious of his own devices, or incapable of
the wit and wisdom which he has made his own; he himself
must be credited with most of the reflexion which we find in his
pages, whether it take the form of express judgements delivered
ex cathedra by the historian himself, or be conveyed dramatically
by speakers in the course of his narrative, or wear the still more
lively and insidious guise of an anecdote en passant, or a bon mot,
recorded for what it is worth. It is perhaps not too much to say
of these elements in the last three Books that they bear more
directly on the general theme, and cohere more closely with the
proper texture of the story, than do similar elements in other
sections of the work; and this observation also tends to the
general credit of this volume of Logoi, whether regarded as a
permanent contribution to history, in the strictest sense of the
term, or merely as a literary achievement calculated to give
pleasure to readers, or listeners, in moments of leisure.
(x.) The geographical deposit is another element in which
the last three Books of Herodotus approach more nearly to the
standards of sound historiography than any other considerable
section of the work. The comparative fulness and accuracy of the
geography is partly incidental to the subject, like the advantage
which the narrative of Thucydides gains from being concerned
with relatively well-known landscapes, and scenes amenable
to methods of simple inspection. Not that Herodotus even in
these Books is a scientific geographer, or free from empirical
errors; but, defects and errors notwithstanding, the contribution
which he makes incidentally to the cartography of the Aigaian
area, of ancient Greece, of parts of Asia, especially minor Asia, is
not inconsiderablea positive contribution, as matters stand for
us, quite independent of the question, how far the geographical
data in his work are the result of his own researches, and how
[p. xciii]
far the geography has come to him ready-made by his predecessors,
or involved in the narrative, as found in his Sources.171
(xi.) The chronology of the war deserves appreciation on
similar lines: scientific, or even approximately systematic, it is
not; yet nowhere in the work of Herodotus is the chronology so
good as in the last three Books. Here too the advantage is
inherent in the subject, the story of a short and recent war of
invasion: but what of that? The admission but emphasizes the
historical quality of the record. The exact period of the war, the
succession of the seasons, the temporal sequence of events, some
well-remembered intervals, some approximate synchronisms, even
the Ephemerides or diaries of important sections of the story, are
presented for all time in the pages of Herodotus. Many weighty
and interesting problems of chronology are indeed left doubtful;
some apparently precise indications prove, on closer scrutiny,
ambiguous; but still the narrative as a whole emerges, relatively
speaking, a chronological triumph for the Father of History. His
great disciple, and rival, Thucydides, seems to have done little
new in this matter except to systematize and apply to a more
extensive and amenable subject the method evolved by Herodotus
in the stories of the Persian war.172
(xii.) Finally, the last three Books of Herodotus are not
lacking in materials for students of Comparative Jurisprudence,
of Ancient Law and Early Institutions, of Folk-lore, even if the
deposit under this head be less rich than in the Books of foreign
travel and research, notably the second and the fourth. A
careful analysis of the Logoi here in question will soon discover
a very considerable contribution to the institutional history
not merely of the Greeks,173 in particular of Sparta174 and of
[p. xciv]
Athens,175 but in a lesser degree of the Persians,176 and even of the
outer Barbarians.177 Primitive Culture parades in many guises
through the Army and Navy Lists of the Empire; systems of
military tactics and command are seen on both sides in operation;
forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, are put
to the test; principles and practices of international custom
are formulated, or illustrated; religious cults and ideas start
from every page; ethical standards and sentiments abound in
evidence; the condition of the arts and sciences is exhibited;
the story of the war becomes a survey of mankind. All these
items of anthropology are, indeed, no more immune to criticism
than the express contributions of military and political history;
but they gain in credit and in use by the very fact that their
publication was not the main purpose of the argument. The
incidental fact, which occurs so to speak in an alien stratum,
is historically all the more acceptable for being unnecessary to
the object immediately in view.
