This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

The study of nature as an object of scientific interest matured through the investigations of Presocratic philosophers on the observable world. Herodotus is in dialogue with those expanding its domain into the spheres of natural science and the human. Physis embraces the interior and exterior regularities of subjects as diverse as landmasses, rivers, seas, elements, animals, and men. Unique to Herodotus, however, is the use of nature as a category of historical explanation; it is a standard of measurement that permits historical inference.

Chapter 5 argues that preoccupation with travel, topography, and geography merely formed the basis for even more ambitious projects that did, however, show the limits of what practical patriotism might achieve. When combined with a providential belief in the potential of the land, the application of geographical and botanical knowledge to the countryside meant that spaces which had hitherto been considered ‘empty’ or ‘wild’ could be filled with new meaning. Reformers were concerned with the role of people (Indians, but also Europeans, Africans, and Caribbeans of African descent, as well as enslaved people) in managing landscapes. They increasingly discussed questions of what we might call ‘biopower’ after Foucault, conceiving of labour and the management of the population as a resource. In this, reformers paid particular attention to the possibility that humans might influence environments in more profound ways than just by building roads. They hoped that human errors that had made Caribbean environments ‘unhealthy’ in the past could be reversed by building better-ventilated settlements, or regulating military barracks to help soldiers behave like agricultural settlers and make this land productive.