The Greek Histories

Informationen zum Autor Edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm Klappentext From the leading scholars behind The Greek Plays, a collection of the best translations of the foremost Greek historians, presenting a sweeping history of ancient Greece as recorded by its first chroniclers. Leseprobe Herodotus (c. 485c. 425 BC) As Homer was to poetry, so Herodotus was to history: a writer of enormous scope and vision who, working from small, discrete stories largely circulated by word of mouth, created a monumental work unlike anything before it. And just as with Homer, Herodotus seemed, to later readers, to be a darling of the Muses: After his death the nine books into which his work was divided were given the names of the nine Muses, as though they had taken shape from divine inspiration. For lack of any title or genre label to describe his creation, Herodotus introduced it to his audience with his declarative opening words: This is the display of the historie of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The Greek word historie meant inquiry at the time Herodotus deployed it, but because of its prominence in his opening sentence, it took on new layers of meaning. Within a century, Aristotle would use it to mean a written account of the past. Thus was the word history, in the sense we give it today, created, at the same moment as the genre itself. Though he is today called a historian, Herodotus was much more than that. His work focuses on the wars between the Greek world and a vast Persian empire that stretched from the Aegean to what is now Pakistan and included Egypt as well. Those conflicts began in earnest in 499 bc, but Herodotus casts his eye further back in time, only reaching the start of hostilities at about the midpoint of his work. He has much else to discuss: the origins of great Asian monarchies and Greek tyrannies; the customs of various non-Greek peoples, especially the Egyptians, builders of an immensely old and complex civilization; the geography of the oikoumene or inhabited world, the span of the earth known from human report; and above all the influence of the divine on human life, whether through dreams, oracles, natural phenomena, or the strange freaks of chance that we might chalk up to blind luck but which the Greeks always linked to the gods. The main story line of Herodotus' work, the Persian Wars as we call them, serves as a connecting thread on which many tales are hung, the units Herodotus calls logoi (stories, accounts, discussions). Some of these larger logoi contain smaller ones within them, as for example the logos of Croesus, king of Lydia, spanning the first half of book 1. To put this monarch in his proper historical context, Herodotus first describes how his great-great-grandfather Gyges established his dynasty by seizing the Lydian throne, and how each successive king expanded Lydian power. Then comes a dialogue between Croesus and Solon, an Athenian wise man, and, as a result of the arrogance Croesus there displayed, a family drama involving the king's ill-fated son. Only at this point, halfway into the Croesus logos, do we reach Lydia's attack on Persia, and the connection to our major themethe rise and fall of the Persian Empirebegins to emerge. This loose, digressive structure defies our expectations for linear narrative. We seem to be in a web of stories, hitting hyperlinks everywhere that take us in new directions. In book 2 we veer off the main path to explore Egypt, a land thick with marvels, in enormous depth. Yet the main thrust of the work is always discernible: Egypt matters because the Persians conquered it in the 520s bc, another stage in their relentless growth. The same imperial drive will take us later to India, Arabia, Scythia, Thrace, indeed nearly every part of the world known to the Greeks. For each new region that falls to the Persian advance, Herodotus tells us all he knows about the p...

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Edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm