9 - Stories and storytelling in the Histories

Summary

Any reader who approaches Herodotus' great book with the conventional assumptions of what a modern, Western, post-Thucydidean narrative history is or ought to be - that is, expecting a generally austere concentration on political and military affairs, perhaps citing the texts of treaties, adducing inscriptional evidence, and so on - is likely to be disconcerted, if also delighted, by the way the text unfolds itself. One does not immediately see what is coming. The prospectus-paragraph sets out the project clearly enough. Two parallel clauses, the second of which reinforces, varies and amplifies the first, declare the author's aim as being 'to prevent the memory of human actions being obliterated by the passage of time, and to ensure that great and wonderful achievements, whether carried out by Greeks or by foreigners, are not denied their proper celebration'. It goes on immediately to define a more precise focus: 'to investigate why they (the Greeks and foreigners) went to war with each other' (praef.).

And indeed by the beginning of chapter 6 (say, in our terms, a couple of pages), Herodotus fingers the man who he is 'personally convinced' set the long series of hostilities in motion: Croesus the king of Lydia. Croesus was the first ruler to levy tribute from the Greek settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor; he was also, we go on to discover in the course of the first book, the man who made the fateful mistake of attempting an eastward expansion of his kingdom and suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Persians, thus bringing Greeks and Persians face to face for the first time and setting the scene for the wars that would follow.