Upon returning from his trip to Scythia, Herodotus took part in the liberation of his Halikarnassos, and succeeded in removing the tyrant Lygdamis from power. It should be noted, however, that some scholars feel that it was Herodotus' unpopularity due to his Athenian ties, and not his restlessness that caused him to leave.
The first stop on Herodotus' voyage was the city of Myriandrus, a Phoenician colony on the coast of Syria, a few miles south of the modern day city of Iskenderun.
From there he traveled about miles eastward to the shores of the Euphrates river, which he intended to follow downstream to Babylon. Herodotus stopped at several cities along the river, inquiring as to their history and cultures, and again has been proven accurate in his renditions of their tales.
Herodotus continued his voyage down the Euphrates to the city of Babylon. While in the city he inquired as to its capture by the Persian Cyrus, and the brief revolt which Darius put down in By the time Xerxes came to power revolts in Babylon had become almost continuous, and Xerxes demolished much of the fortifications and destroyed large portions of the city.
He describes the city as being fifty-six miles in circumference and surpassing in splendor any known city in the world. At some time before BC, Herodotus left the city and returned home. It was not long after that-- at the latest-- that Herodotus set out on his third great expedition, this time to Egypt. While in the northern, delta region of the country, Herodotus spent his time with the Egyptian priests, who told the Greek of their history, culture, and science.
The Nile itself proved especially interesting for Herodotus, because its regular flooding of the fields was unknown in Greece. During the summer months, rivers in Greece shallowed and dried up, but in Egypt, the opposite would occur.
Herodotus continued to travel upstream, probably in search of the source of the Nile, a subject that he apparently was very interested in and one in which he could find little information. Herodotus dismisses many of the ancient theories on the origins of the Nile, and while he is correct in the refutation of these theories, the solutions he presents for the behavior of the Nile are equally false. It is relatively easy to tell which places in Egypt Herodotus visited, but the order in which he visited them and the routes he took to get there are difficult to determine.
From there, Herodotus journeyed on to Busiris, where he observed and recorded some of the practices of the cults of Osiris and Isis. He traveled cross-country to Bubastis, on the eastern bank of the Pelusian branch of the Nile. From there it is believed that Herodotus traveled to Heliopolis, whose inhabitants, Herodotus believed, were the most learned in Egypt. It is presumed that the priests in Heliopolis related the details of their religion and culture to Herodotus, but for once he Greek historian is tight-lipped about what he had learned.
Leaving Heliopolis, Herodotus wandered south, until he reached the narrows where the Nile is hemmed in by the Arabian mountains. Here, near the quarries which were the source of the stone used for the pyramids was the city of Memphis. Like any tourist of Egypt, Herodotus visited the pyramids, and described the three great pyramids in detail.
It is interesting to note, however, that while he must have seen it, Herodotus makes no mention of the Sphinx. Herodotus continued south from Memphis into Thebes, the chief city of Upper Egypt, and believed to be one of the oldest in the world.
Some have taken this as a sign that this part of the History is a fabrication, but as anyone who has found the Grand Canyon dull or thought the Eiffel Tower was just a building knows, sometimes a visitor just is not impressed by the impressive. It is a sign of Herodotus' honesty that when he has nothing to say, he says nothing about it.
This malaise drove him onward from Thebes toward the destination he had sought from the start of his journey into Egypt, the city of Elephantine. Elephantine was a Persian frontier post and marked the southern boundary of the Persian Empire, and Herodotus has no intention of traveling into the country beyond. Instead he relies on hearsay to gather information about the kingdom of Ethiopia, which lies to the south.
Having reached his ultimate destination at Elephantine, Herodotus returned north to see a few more sites in lower Egypt. He was apparently not in much of a hurry to return to Halikarnassos, either because traveling had become habitual or because he knew that he would not like it when he got there.
Still he probably did feel a longing for home, and if home was not Halikarnassos, it was at least Greece. From some port in eastern Egypt, Herodotus set out by boat for Cyrene, a Greek colony five hundred miles to the west. From there he sailed on to Tyre, where he apparently still had some questions which needed answering, and left Africa behind him. These stories were verified at an ancient temple to Heracles in Tyre, where the Egyptians believed the history of their gods went back seventeen thousand years.
Herodotus knew that Halikarnassos was not the place for him, however, and within two years he had left once again, this time for Athens. The city had been sacked and burned by Xerxes in , but that had been more than thirty years ago.
The atmosphere in Athens, however, was little more comforting to Herodotus than the one he left in Halikarnassos. A law passed by Pericles in ended all hopes Herodotus might have had of becoming an Athenian citizen, and instead of remaining as a resident foreigner, Herodotus began to reconsider his options. Herodotus did not remain in Thuria, however. He probably returned to Athens sometime around On at least three occasions Herodotus refers to incidents in the opening phases of the Peloponnesian War that tie up loose ends from earlier in the History.
It is believed that he stayed in the city from , but the city was probably starting to loose its luster to the aging historian. Herodotus had already written about one war, he had little desire to write about another. It is unclear just how long Herodotus stayed in Athens, but a few facts can be inferred from his influence on others. Some scholars take this to indicate that Herodotus was no longer in Athens by , as Aristophanes tends to reserve satire for what is prominent and present--"obscurity earned no laughs.
It is most probable that Herodotus returned to Thuria after his stay in Athens, possibly to flee the plague which had broken out there, possibly because there was nothing else for him there. In any event, his days of traveling were behind him and, assuming he left Athens alive, Herodotus settled down to a life of relaxation and editing of his work.
His voyages to the four corners of the world brought Herodotus into contact with more peoples than any other Greek of his day, and he used what he learned in his research to tell the story of the war that shaped his youth.
It is ironic that with all of Herodotus efforts to preserve the memories of the events of others, the circumstances, even the location and date, of his own death have been forgotten. While anyone could have related the tales of the Persian war, it is the details and tidbits garnered while traveling that separate Herodotus' tale and have made it stand out for over two thousand years. Clearly, Herodotus was a well read and well traveled man, but no one could create such a work out of nothing.
What was the well from which this wealth of knowledge was drawn? What sources did Herodotus use to create such a diverse and colorful History? What Herodotus learned from the people with whom he spoke to while on his travels he undoubtedly called upon while constructing his work, but he also drew on the collective learning of all those who had gone before him.
About years after Herodotus, another historian from Halikarnassos, Dionysius, briefly described the beginnings of Greek historical research by saying: "Before the Peloponnesian War there were many early historians in many places.
A second group was born a little before the Peloponnesian War and were Thucydides' early contemporaries. If this passage is taken at face value, it is possible that Herodotus did not have to rely solely on the data provided by his own travels to construct his History. Unfortunately, not enough of Hecataeus' work has survived for us to judge just how dependent upon it Herodotus was. While we can show that Herodotus had a familiarity with Hecataeus, there are several other sources which Herodotus was probably familiar with but which we cannot identify.
Next time he'd bring everything he had against them to ensure their defeat, destruction and eternal humiliation. At that moment, only the gods knew he never would, that in his stead would come upon the Greeks a foe who was even more determined and bitterer than the old king, Darius' son and heir Xerxes.
Though inevitable and clearly a direct consequence of the First Persian War, the next collision between Greek and Persian forces was forestalled for almost a decade by events which unfolded in both Greece and Persia. In Athens, an important new leader arose named Themistocles. Nursed on Athens' burgeoning democracy, Themistocles was part of a new generation of Athenians skilled at using its new types of law to his personal benefit.
For instance, among the reforms introduced with the institution of democracy two decades earlier was a provision known as " ostracism ," a procedure for removing individuals unfriendly to the new Athenian government without having to execute them or instigate family feuds or internecine bloodshed.
In an ostracism an assembly of citizens was called and, if more than six thousand votes were cast against one man in a secret ballot taken on ostraca — ostraca means in Greek "broken pieces of clay pottery"; these functioned as the ancient equivalent of waste paper—that man was exiled from Athens for ten years, but peaceably and without retribution to his relatives, friends or estate.
Themistocles used this procedure to remove several of his political foes from power and, thus, rose to prominence in the city. Meanwhile, back in Persia Darius was determined to get revenge on those wretched Greeks who had stood in the way of his divine imperative to rule the world.
In the years following the First Persian War, he began gathering a stronger force than before but, before he could march on Greece a second time, the satrapy of Egypt revolted BCE. Forced to turn his attention to the Egyptians, he was about to march his great force against them when he unexpectedly died. His son Xerxes r.
It proved a serious and fatal mistake on their part, for Xerxes put an end to both uprisings with typical Persian dispatch and carnage. By early BCE, with his kingdom and kingship secure, the young Persian king could at last turn his attention to the Greeks and the requittal of his father's sullied honor.
Assembling his forces, he marched to Asia Minor in the spring of that year and began making preparations to invade the Greek mainland. In the meantime back in Greece, the 's produced yet another surprise. In BCE workers in the Laurian mines of Attica the area around Athens opened up one of the richest veins of silver ever found there.
Money poured into the city, at least one hundred talents, several fortunes by the standard of the day. Conservative, aristocratic elements in the Athenian government proposed distributing the money equally among the people, but Themistocles, now the head of the more liberal and forward-thinking faction, suggested building a new navy of ships called triremes , fast battle-cruisers of innovative design.
Ultimately, Themistocles won the day—in large part by ostracizing his main political foe—and a new Athenian fleet was constructed, just in time for Xerxes' arrival.
There, the Persian navy joined the King and, in order to facilitate the crossing, Xerxes' engineers had huge ropes constructed which they used to tie old ships together in a straight line across the narrow waters.
Then they built a road over the top of these ships, in Herodotus' words, "paving the sea. The king was furious and, like the despot he was—and the god he believed he was! That is, after all, what any self-respecting king does when confronted with a rebellious slave: get out the whips, fire the brands and start reciting curses. Relishing the absurdity of the king's inflated ego, Herodotus dramatizes the scene, purporting to quote the very words which Xerxes ordered his whipsmen to pronounce as they punished the dire strait:.
Sour water, the lord inflicts this justice here, for you have done him wrong without his ever having hurt you once. Indeed King Xerxes will go over you. Your feelings do not matter. It's right for no one on the earth to sacrifice to you.
You are a muddy, salty stream. Xerxes rebuilt his boat-bridge, and to this second effort the forces of nature were indeed more compliant—perhaps the punishment actually worked! Xerxes' army was so large it took a full seven days and nights to move all of his forces to the other side.
In fact, according to Herodotus, there were over five million people—this accounting shows his merchant mind at work—but he adds drily that this figure includes "prostitutes and bakers. Hugging the coast so the navy could stay close by for protection, the Persian army passed easily through northern Greece. Indeed, the majority of cities in the area capitulated to the Great King—the ancient Greeks had a verb for "capitulating to the Persians," "to medize " that is, "go Persian" which recalls their confusion of Medes and Persians—especially when the northern Greeks saw the size and scope of his forces.
But like his father, Xerxes' passage was made complicated and perilous, not by the Greeks, but Greece itself. Northern Greece consists mostly of rough terrain, rocky and mountainous, and there were many Persian lives lost and ships sunk as Xerxes' forces wound their way south.
Given the dual nature of this expedition moving both by sea and land, the Persian army at one point along their journey south had no choice but to follow an inlet which led them to a narrow pass called Thermopylae —literally "the Hot Gates" because there were hot springs in the surrounding cliffs—it was an area the Greeks knew well.
Seeing that the Persians would have to march through this cramped passage which allowed no more than a few men to walk abreast, the Greek commanders decided to try to make a stand there. If they stood any chance against the mighty army of the king, it would be in a place like this where he would not be able to marshal all his forces at once against them. They decided at the same time to confront the Persian navy near there along the coast, where hazardous waters might lessen the advantage the king's great number of ships provided him.
And so it did. A great storm blew up and destroyed a third of Xerxes' navy as it was stationed in the straits that lead to Athens. Because the Persians' land forces were prevented from advancing by their Greek counterpart which had stationed itself in the narrows, it meant their navy—even after all the disasters it had encountered, it still outnumbered the Greek naval forces by two to one—could not proceed to Athens either.
Having no other option, the Persians tried for three days in succession to push their way through, but the stubborn Greeks resisted and repulsed them over and over. The tactic of using Mother Nature as an ally had worked brilliantly for the Greeks ten years before at Marathon and so it did again, and would, no doubt, have continued to do so indefinitely, if it had not been for Human Nature.
When the Persians saw that force was not going to prevail, they resorted to deceit. From a traitorous native who knew the terrain, they learned about a trail that wound around the pass. Xerxes' elite guard—they were called "The Immortals" because, whenever one died, another immediately replaced him—followed this turncoat to the other end of the pass and led a surprise attack on the Greeks' rear guard. After Leonidas , the Spartan king in charge of the Greek forces at Thermopylae, saw that he and his men had been caught in a trap, he dismissed everyone except for three hundred of his best fighters, all Spartan volunteers who chose to stay with their king and forestall the Persian advance as long as they could, while the rest of the Greek army withdrew to Athens.
With nothing to lose at this point, knowing full well they were going to die, Leonidas and his three-hundred Spartans advanced out of the protection of the narrow pass and, because they were superb warriors—Spartans like Leonidas spent most of their lives training for combat—they inflicted heavy losses on the Persians.
When at last they retreated, exhausted from continuous fighting, the Persian army closed in on them, and the Spartans died fighting to a man.
The Greek poet Simonides composed an epitaph of unparalleled simplicity and beauty to honor these valiant warriors:. S tranger, tell the Spartans: here we stayed. When they gave the order, we obeyed. Thermopylae was, in the end, hardly a victory for the Greeks, but it showed Xerxes—just as Marathon had shown Darius—that conquering Greece was not going to be easy.
Besides bolstering patriotism, the courageous self-sacrifice of Leonidas and his men won the Greeks two significant advantages. First, it bought them the time necessary to reorganize and assemble their forces for the great and decisive and inevitable sea-battle to come, what had to happen when such great navies were brought into such close proximity.
Second and more important, it gave them a chance to prepare for Xerxes' invasion of Attica which by now was inevitable, too. With Thermopylae behind him, nothing much stood between the king and the city he so hated, in fact, nothing at all after Thebes "medized," the only remaining Greek city-state of any significance blocking his passage south. Xerxes could now fulfill his father's mission to capture Athens and, with that, avenge the Ionians' destruction of Sardis, Darius' humiliation at Marathon and the many insults his dignity and divinity had suffered at the hands of these insufferable Greeks who resisted reason and the fate everyone knew was theirs.
And so he did, with vicious anger—he seized Athens, which the Greeks had evacuated, and torched most of the city, including the old wooden Temple of Athena on the Acropolis an upcropping of rock at the center of the city. Watching Athens burn must have given him a great sense of satisfaction.
But sequestered and crowded on an island nearby, the Athenians saw it, too, and now had their own reason for revenge. In many ways, what happens next, what might be called "Xerxes' folly," plays out like a Greek tragedy, in which the central character rises to his greatest glory only to fall precipitously to doom and despair. While this perception of the situation is surely due, at least in part, to the sensibilities of the ancient Greeks who constitute our primary sources for the Persian Wars and who were weaned on tragic drama—no doubt, they couldn't help but see this moment in history as a piece of theatre—there's no doubt, either, that the king's momentary triumph in Greece was short-lived and his peripeteia a term for a sudden "change of fortune" in a play comes as abruptly as that of any character in tragedy.
And like the great figures of the Greek stage who often move from joy to utter despair within the space of a single scene, Herodotus' narrative gives the impression Xerxes should have seen the imminent disaster lurking in the wings, awaiting its cue to enter, his fate.
Sitting in a smoldering Athens, the king faced several major problems. First, Attica offered him little more than personal satisfaction. Greece, in general, is not a rich land agriculturally, and Xerxes had five million or so mouths to feed. Furthermore, the delay at Thermopylae had given the Athenians the time to take what stores of food they had with them in flight. So, in ensuring he didn't repeat his father's mistake and underestimate the resistance which the Greeks might put up, he had brought with him an immense expedition, unprecedented in its size, according to Herodotus at least.
But that created a different problem for Xerxes from his father's woes, how to feed and house so many soldiers—and prostitutes and bakers. Worse yet, it was getting late in the year—those costly delays, again! If that happened, the Persian navy, possibly even the king's own person, would be forced to winter in Greece, far too primitive and dangerous a land to harbor his royal presence.
If he wanted a warm bath, no doubt, he'd have to go all the way back to Thermopylae. All this meant that the Greeks, though exiled from their homes, held one high card: since Xerxes was eager to resolve this conflict quickly, they could pick the time and place of the final confrontation. They decided to assemble the full complement of their sea forces near the island of Salamis close to Athens and face the Persian navy in the straits between the island and the mainland. Either entrance to the Bay of Salamis is narrow, which would force the Persian ships to break formation as they entered.
That would give the Greeks' nimble but outnumbered triremes a better chance of defeating the Persian fleet since they didn't have to meet it all at once.
Believing that, after the Greeks saw for themselves his superior forces which were greater in both size and strength, they would buckle under and retreat, Xerxes had a throne set up on the cliffs overlooking the bay where he could sit and watch the conflict to come.
From that commanding view, he ordered his navy to advance into the narrows and the Battle of Salamis began. As ship after ship from the king's armada passed through the straits into the bay, entering only a few at a time because that's all that could fit, the Greeks picked them off. Still worse for the Persians, those ships which saw the trap and tried to turned around and escape ran headlong into their fellow galleys entering the bay. More than one Persian cruiser was rammed and sunk by one of its own comrades that day.
So many of Xerxes' men drowned in the waters around Salamis that for weeks, even months after the battle, Persian bodies were washing up on the shores near Athens. And the king watched it all unfold sitting in his front-row seat above the bay and, no doubt, cursed these "sour" waters, too.
But even after suffering such a massacre, the Persians' forces still outnumbered those of the Greeks, by as much as three to one. Xerxes, however, had had enough of these western upstarts and, afraid that they might take the offensive and try to prevent his return to Persia, he ordered the Persian navy to retreat to Asia Minor.
The lesson of Cambyses' over-appetite for conquest, the grim prelude to his assassination, surely preyed on Xerxes' mind. After all, for a conqueror whose reach exceeds his grasp, more danger lies at home than abroad. So, leaving behind a good part of his land force, not a negligible army by any means but nothing like that with which he had launched himself into Greece, Xerxes retreated quickly eastward, returning to Sardis and eventually the safety of Persepolis.
In the king's stead, one of his generals Mardonius stayed behind in Greece to command the remaining Persian army. Godley, through perseus. In addition, he wrote that he wanted to explain why the Greeks and the Persians went to war between B. However, "Histories" details many other topics alongside this narrative. Related: Ancient Greeks may have built 'disability ramps' on some temples. The word Herodotus used to describe his work was "historia," which, in time, came to mean history as we understand it today.
He gives lengthy descriptions of the social and religious customs of other peoples "ethnography" , of man-made wonders for instance, the walls of Babylon and the pyramids in Egypt and of the natural world the causes of the annual flooding of the Nile.
Herodotus does not claim to be a firsthand witness to any great event he describes. He traveled across the known world, speaking with the local people he encountered and asking many questions wherever he went. This is how he obtained the various accounts that he would include in "Histories.
When Herodotus was not traveling, he returned to Athens; there, he became something of a celebrity. He gave readings in public places and collected fees from officials for his appearances. In B. Herodotus spent his entire life working on just one project: an account of the origins and execution of the Greco-Persian Wars — B. Most of what we know about the Battle of Marathon is from Herodotus.
After Herodotus died, editors divided his Histories into nine books. Each was named after one of the Muses. The first five books look into the past to try to explain the rise and fall of the Persian Empire. They describe the geography of each state the Persians conquered and tell about their people and customs.
The next four books tell the story of the war itself, from the invasions of Greece by Persian emperors Darius and Xerxes to the Greek triumphs at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale in and B. He treats every piece of his narrative, from the main themes to the digressions and from the facts to the fictions, with equal importance. He shows how Persian hubris led to the downfall of a great empire, but he also places a great deal of stock in gossipy tales of personal shortcomings and moral lessons.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
0コメント