Herodotus
Article
Herodotus is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 14, 2023 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus”; “People like Herodotus realize writing has the potential to immortalize the greatest, strangest things in the world”; “Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian”. It most often appears alongside Plato, Socrates, Adam Smith.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: July 14, 2023
- Last seen: April 04, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
- Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
- Book Review: Cyropaedia
- Links For April 2024
Related Pages
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- Plato (3 shared issues)
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- Socrates (3 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (2 shared issues)
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- Arabia (2 shared issues)
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- Aristotle (2 shared issues)
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- Babylon (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Confucius (2 shared issues)
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- Egypt (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- Greece (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
There’s something missing… and Egan thinks we find it in the emotion-laden, unsystematic, wonder-struck kind of writing that he says spread through Greece in the early years of the Greek Miracle. This looks for all the world like a mash-up of Mythic and Philosophic understanding. It’s best exemplified, Egan writes, in The Histories, by Herodotus — a sort of “Guinness Book of Ancient World Records. But you don’t need to take Egan’s word for it — here’s the historian (and vampire novelist) Tom Holland, being interviewed by Tyler Cowen:
Inline links: being interviewed by Tyler Cowen
Writing predated the Greeks, but before the Greeks got their hands on it, Egan says, it was mostly used for simple matters — listing out the names of rulers, or itemized debts. People like Herodotus realize writing has the potential to immortalize the greatest, strangest things in the world. The word that comes to mind when reading it is “adolescent”. (The first time I opened my copy, my eyes landed on the sentence “There is a place in Arabia… which I visited because I wished to know more about the flying snakes”. The fourteen-year-old in me was eager to read more.)
When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following sense: my elders told me the story of how our people came to be. It started with the Greeks: Pericles the statesman, Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian, the first playwrights, and before them all Homer, the blind first poet. Before Greece, something called prehistory stretched back. There were Iron and Bronze Ages, and before that the Stone Age. These were shadowy, mysterious realms. Then history went on to Europe. I learnt as little outside Europe as I did before Greece. There was one class on 20th century China, but that too was about China becoming modern, which meant European.
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
There’s a big historical dispute about exactly what happened with the Medes, of which the Cyropaedia presents one side. In 575 BC, the Median Empire was the local great power, with the Persians as one of their many vassals. By 525 BC, the Median Empire had been absorbed by Persia. Nobody knows how. Herodotus says Cyrus conquered Media. Xenophon says that Cyrus conquered his empire while still sort of a vassal of Media, and the Median king was so impressed that he gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage and made him the heir. Historians lean toward Herodotus’ story, but the details remain obscure.
29: Did you know: “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests. Pliny the Elder wrote that . . . the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.”
Inline links: cinnamon birds