John J. Miller (5:34)

We're going to talk about all of that. We're going to talk about the clash between Persia and Greece. We're going to talk about Herodotus, this amazing figure behind this story. How accurate and reliable is he? We're going to tell some stories, look at a few anecdotes from his history. Paul, let's just jump in with the very first line of this book. It starts, herodotus of Halicarnassus. He's writing about himself in the third person. And Halicarnassus was a Greek city in what is today Turkey. He goes on, quote, his researches or inquiries, maybe you'd say his research, his Herodotus researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both our own and of other peoples. And more particularly, to show how they came into conflict, unquote. That sounds like an utterly reasonable and normal thing to do. How new of an idea was this, really?

Paul Ray (6:30)

Well, if you leave aside, Homer, where you get something like this in the form of epic poetry. But, you know, keep in mind, what's the background to Homer? How did they get into conflict? Well, it has to do with. With adultery on the part of Helen, with Paris, who's also called Alexandros, taking her to Troy. And behind this, we Have a story of gods and goddesses of Paris being invited to determine which of the goddesses was the most beautiful. And he picks Aphrodite and she pays him off with Helen. One is a story, largely mythological, about a clash between the Mycenaean Greeks and the people of Troy. Did such a clash take place? We now think it did. Was it of considerable size? Yes. But did it take exactly the form that you get in in Homer? Surely not. Though some of the details are probably correct. In the case of Herodotus, you have a not quite contemporary traveling around interviewing people who were there and trying to get the story right, knowing perfectly well that it's not going to be perfectly right. He tells you that what he tells you is what was reported to him. And he even says at one point, I don't believe everything that is in my narrative, but it's incumbent on me to report what people say.

John J. Miller (8:27)

He did have critics in the ancient world. People criticized his accuracy and reliability. You think he's basically sound and historians can rely upon his accounts?

Paul Ray (8:38)

Pretty much. I'll give you a concrete example. Darius takes over the throne of Persia after the death of Cambyses and he does so we are told by Herodotus with six other co conspirators. In Behistun, between Babylon and Ecbatana, up in the mountains, there is a trilingual inscription and a representation of Darius explaining how he came to power. Now this happened around 522. Herodotus is wrapping up his history around maybe 5, 426, almost 100 years later he tells exactly the same story except he gets the name of one of the seven wrong. Now think about that. Only one of the seven wrong.

John J. Miller (9:39)

So you're saying, you're saying there's archaeological evidence that backs him up that we've now found and it just almost confirms his story.

Paul Ray (9:46)

Now it could be this is the official story told by Darius and it's the story that was told to Herodotus and that he repeats. Could Darius be gilding the lily? Perfectly possible. But the point is what we can see is Herodotus and we can see what his sources were like and he's not making it up.

John J. Miller (10:12)

Herodotus also is a good storyteller, isn't he? Today we might, we might call him in today's lingo, a narrative historian.

Paul Ray (10:20)

Well, not just a narrative historian because he digresses and the digressions are wonderful and strange and a hoot. I'll give you one right at the beginning he's telling the story about How a particular dynasty comes to power in Sardis, in Lydia, which is in Anatolia. And the man who comes to power is Gyges. And he's supposed to be, according to Herodotus, this is the story, I'm sure, that he was told. The bodyguard of Candales, the king. And Candales, Herodotus tells us, was in love with his wife, a very dangerous thing, and thinks she's the most beautiful woman in the world and insists on having Gyges see her naked. She realizes that Gyges has seen her naked and she comes to Gyges and she says to him, you either kill Candales or I will have you killed. And so Gyges becomes king. Now, it's one hell of a juicy story, but it has a motto. Don't look on that which is not your own. And there's irony to it, because the whole rest of the book, Herodotus, is having you look on that which is not your own.

John J. Miller (11:51)

And there are lessons in this, right? There are a point to many of his stories.

Paul Ray (11:56)

Oh, yes. Well, he connects Eros with tyranny, for example. But look, if you look at it as a whole, the first five books or so are the Odyssey.

John J. Miller (12:09)

And there are nine books total in the histories.

Paul Ray (12:12)

And the fifth book is a kind of transition from the fifth book to the ninth book. You're getting the Iliad, the Great Clash.

John J. Miller (12:23)

Now, you don't mean this is recounting the story of the Trojan War. You mean it's an epic story, though, right?

Paul Ray (12:29)

Well, it's a double epic story. Because what you get. Remember at the very beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is said to have seen the towns and learned the minds of many men. Well, Herodotus takes you on a tour of the ancient Near East.

John J. Miller (12:44)

And it's almost anthropological.

Paul Ray (12:46)

It is anthropological. I mean, what he is interested in is the Nomoi, which is to say the laws, the customs, the ways of the different people. And implicit in the story he tells is a question of which Nomoi are best. And the test about whether your Nomoi are good is whether you get conquered. So what you see is the various peoples that the Persians conquer one by one, in the order in which the Persians conquer them. And then it's followed by the Persian conflict with the Greeks who are the only ones who beat back the Persians.

John J. Miller (13:27)

So this book has part. This first big nine books, but then this first big part, he's giving us some context, setting the scene. And then the second half, we get this epic story of War between the Persians and the Greeks. It's a vast and sprawling work. Is it a coherent story? From. Do we go from point A to point B? I know there are these tangents and so forth, but is there a beginning, middle and end? How does that work?

Paul Ray (13:55)

Yes, thread that runs through the whole thing. And the thread is the interaction between the peoples of Asia and the Greeks and the rise of the Persian Empire and the rise of the Persian Empire until it meets an obstacle that it can't overcome. So even though he digresses all the time and you learned an enormous amount about Egypt that is not necessary to the narrative, nonetheless, he keeps coming back to what he calls his logos, his account. I mean, there are a number of logoi in it. There's an account of the Egyptians, an account of the Scythians and so forth. But the real account is the account of the interaction between the peoples of Asia and. And the Greeks, and above all, the greatest of the peoples of Asia, the Persians.

John J. Miller (14:53)

And there's a kind of theme here as well, a theme of freedom and slavery.

Paul Ray (14:58)

Yes, yes. Like the Greeks everywhere, he treats the peoples conquered by the Persians as slaves. And to give you a sense of how far this extends, we. We have work by Greek scribes at the Persian court who translate from old Persian or Elamite or Aramaic into Greek. And where in the Persian it says manabadaka, my liegemen, they always translate it duloi, slaves. So it is, in some sense a conflict between the greatest regime in human history ever built on despotism. And by the way, the word despotism comes from a Greek word, despotes, which means master over slaves, despotism and free peoples. So he makes freedom a theme, and freedom as an inspiration for virtue. The Greek word for virtue is arete, and it comes from Ares, the God of war. So virtue is courage, first and foremost. That is inspired by freedom. And so you, for example, the Battle of Thermopylae.

John J. Miller (16:26)

And let's talk about the Battle of Thermopylae, because, boy, what a story that is. And this is, in fact, one of our two major sources for what really happened at Thermopylae. Herodotus.

Paul Ray (16:37)

Yes, the other one, Simonides. And his account is much briefer. It's in poetic form.

John J. Miller (16:42)

So this great story that we all celebrate there was that movie 300 a number of years ago. But it's an amazing story. Paul, what happened at Thermopylae and what does Herodotus tell us happened there?

Paul Ray (16:52)

Well, the Persians arrive at Thermopylae In September, probably deliberately, because the Spartans hold a. There's a month in which they don't go out and fight, and they have a festival in favor of Apollo. And as it turns out, that year, the Olympic Games were going on at the same time. Thermopylae is a choke point. Not today. If you go there today, there seems to be a plain there. But in antiquity, the sea came up almost to the mountains, and there was a very narrow path along the shore between the sea and the mountains. And the Persians had to get through it to get into the rest of Greece. And the Persian army has a logistical problem, which is to say you have to feed 100,000 men. You have to provide fresh water for 100,000 men. If you can stop them at a choke point, there's going to be a problem for them logistically. And there's another problem that may arise. Disease. Armies produce a great deal of excrement, and living in the excrement that 100,000 men produce is not a healthy thing. So, you know, if you look at the history of warfare, it is also the history of terrible disease. The flu, the Spanish flu being probably the greatest example. At the end of World War I. In any case, the Greeks see this might be a place where you could stop them. And they sent a small force because they're preoccupied thinking that a small force could hold them because of the narrowness of the passage. With Xerxes is a former king of Sparta named Demaratus. And Xerxes says, do you think they're going to fight? And Demaratus says, oh, yes, they'll fight. And the Spartans in particular will fight, and they'll fight to the very end. And Xerxes thinks, no. And Demaratus essentially says, look, you drive your people into war with whips. Our people go to war because of Nomos. And Spartan Nomos says, stand your ground and die. Never give way. That's what happens. And the Persians find a way around the mountain, and they send a force of about 10,000 to go around the mountain. The Spartans are prepared for this. They have a force of Phocians that are supposed to guard that particular trail through the mountains. But the Phocians cut and run. And so the Spartans get hit from in front and from behind. Now, the crucial thing that plays a role in this is at Marathon, the Greeks discovered that hoplite infantry is superior to Persian infantry, that it can withstand the artillery barrage, meaning the archery of the Persians, and that if not hit by horsemen on the flanks, it can hold the ground against a Much larger Persian force. So a group of a handful of Greeks defeated maybe 11,000 Greeks, defeated a much larger Persian army at Marathon because the cavalry was absent and the archery was ineffective. And that's exactly what will happen at Plataea. But the point is, at Thermopylae, that small force armed the way the Greeks are in a phalanx, can hold them off. And the Spartans are there, and there are other Greeks there, and they relieve one another. You can't stand in the hoplite phalanx all day or day after day, so they move back and forth.

John J. Miller (21:07)

Were there in fact, 300 of them?

Paul Ray (21:09)

300 Spartans. And interestingly enough, they are chosen from among men who have sons to leave behind. So they are chosen in the expectation that they will die because of an oracle that said a king must die. And they are the bodyguard of the king, which is traditionally 300 men. So the expectation is they will go there and die and their lineages will survive because they've left sons behind.

John J. Miller (21:39)

But they also do their job right?

Paul Ray (21:41)

Oh, yeah. All the way to the end, surrounded people on all sides.

John J. Miller (21:48)

Without Thermopylae, how is Western history and civilization different? Is it different?

Paul Ray (21:55)

Well, it is possible that the Greeks might have defeated the Persians anyway. After all, they went at sea at Salamis. And the Spartans and the other Greeks. But the Spartans in particular, playing the crucial role, do so at the Battle of Plataea. But the example set at Thermopylae is one that puts steel into the spines of the other Spartans. And of all of the Greeks, we can do this. So sometimes, and very rarely in losing a battle, you win the war.

John J. Miller (22:40)

Their story is inspirational today. You can just imagine what it would have been like for those guys back then.

Paul Ray (22:46)

Oh, oh, look. In 426, a group of Spartans on the island of Sphacteria surrender to the Athenians. And the people in Greece can't believe that they did this. And the other Spartans, when These people, these POWs, return home, they deny them full citizenship for a time, because they can't really be Spartans if they surrendered to the Athenians. So it sets a standard that's very high that future Spartans have to live up to or be held in contempt, and that the other Greeks admire. It gives the Spartans a prestige. It would be hard to measure the importance of that prestige.

John J. Miller (23:40)

We have this story, Thermopylae, largely because of Herodotus. Paul, what do we know today that we wouldn't know if Herodotus never had written down his histories?

Paul Ray (23:51)

You know, not that much. One of the books in my series is called the Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, the Persian Challenge. So I went over this material. We certainly have a better knowledge of the terrain than he provides us with. But that's not all that helpful. We can think about the timing of the Persian invasion. He doesn't tell us that it's deliberate, that they arrive in September, but we can see that. And by the way, they arrived for Marathon in September, too. And the Spartans were late to getting to Marathon because of their festivities. So there are things we can bring to bear on the picture that he doesn't tell us about. But they aren't that important. They just aren't that important. And what he has to tell us is fabulous and pretty accurate. I'll give you an area where we're unhappy. At the Battle of Plataea, we know just about everything we need to know about the Athenians. We know next to nothing about the others there except the Spartans. And he doesn't give us an account of the Spartan strategy. I think you can look at what he tells us and think, no, they are not retreating. They are luring the Persians onto high ground where the Persian cavalry can't be effective. And they're doing it quite deliberately. And they're making it look like they're retreating. But he doesn't know. He hasn't talked to anyone who was in the know about what the Spartans were up to at that time. So we can see holes in his narrative. But. And we can only fill them by speculation.

John J. Miller (25:57)

And the same time, we wish every civilization in every generation had its own Herodotus because we know so much more about the ancient world.

Paul Ray (26:06)

Look, we need someone like Herodotus to tell the story of the Cold War. In my opinion, the history of the Cold War, it's the greatest success for statesmanship in human history. It is an epic. It goes on for something like 50 years. And what you have is a victory of one coalition over another coalition. The dismemberment of the leader of one of the two coalitions. And you have this without having a great war. That's an amazing accomplishment.

John J. Miller (26:44)

Do you have a preferred edition or translation of Herodotus? There are many, of course. Do you have a favorite?

Paul Ray (26:51)

Well, I use the landmark Herodotus. The translation is not perfect. The maps, however. And there are over 100 maps.

John J. Miller (27:01)

This is a great addition. Who's the editor of it, and why is this a great addition?

Paul Ray (27:06)

The editor is a businessman named Robert Strassler. He's a friend of mine. He did a tutorial on Thucydides when he was a student at Harvard, he was a turnaround artist and he buy companies, fix them up and sell them. And he retired at the age of 58. And Bob Strassler, he managed his money, which was considerable, for a few years. And then he got bored and he thought, well, gosh, maybe I can do something with Thucydides. So he began having maps made, and then he hired people to do appendices. Then he took a 19th century translation and he created this remarkable book. I reviewed it long ago that it makes it so easy to teach.

John J. Miller (28:01)

Well, I remember it was a revelation when I first saw it, because when I read Thucydides in college, I enjoyed it a lot, but I needed maps and they just weren't there. And then suddenly there are maps on every page. And he's done the same thing. Now for Herodotus with the landmark and.

Paul Ray (28:16)

For Xenophon's Hellenica, Xenophon's Anabasis, Arion's Anabasis, Caesar, Gallic wars and the Polybius will be coming out, I think, in two volumes fairly soon.

John J. Miller (28:32)

So an excellent resource, a great way to read Herodotus. Paul, how did you discover Herodotus as a reader?

Paul Ray (28:42)

I don't remember. I must have read it in college. I never as an undergraduate. I mean, I took a course on the Peloponnesian War with Donald Kagan, but we didn't read Herodotus through for that course. Maybe I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Maybe that's when I first read it through. But I probably read it for just general information sometime when I was in college. And it's hard to read it and not fall in love with it because it merits repeated reading and it's just full of juicy stories. It's also full of fascinating information, not all of it accurate, but a remarkable amount is accurate and can be confirmed archeologically or from other sources. And I'm thinking of the Near Eastern picture because we have lots and lots of sources for the ancient Near East.

John J. Miller (29:46)

Before we wrap up, I want to go on one tangent, maybe a Herodotus like tangent on Thucydides, who we've mentioned a few times here. And when you think of who are the great historians of the ancient Greek world, it's these two guys, and Herodotus comes first, Thucydides comes second. They're contemporaries, they're alive at the same time. Although Herodotus, I think, is about a generation old, older, they're also quite different. So how do you compare and contrast these these two guys? We've been talking about Herodotus. How does Thucydides compare?

Paul Ray (30:18)

Herodotus wants to take what happened and make sure it's remembered. He also provides a kind of setting for it so you can see how it makes sense. And he's also interested in Nomos. He's interested in customs and ways and religion and political regime. Thucydides uses a word that Herodotus only uses sparingly, nature. And he talks about human nature. There's only one passage in Herodotus in which human nature is touched on, and that has to do with Thermopylae and the discussion between Demaratus and Xerxes concerning the courage of the Spartans. In particular, Thucydides is interested in laying out the history of the Peloponnesian War because he thinks that the future will resemble the past. So there's a sense in which Herodotus is sort of in between being an historian and a novelist, and Thucydides is in between being an historian and a political scientist. So, for example, defense intellectuals, they read Thucydides. Some of them look at Herodotus, too, but they all read Thucydides. And he is the model for geopolitical analysis, I would say. He's also the model for an analysis of regimes and culture and how that factors into warfare. So, you know, he tells you the story of the plague, and he tells it because if it ever comes again, you're going to know how it will proceed. The plague and the war are very similar. If a great war comes again, you will know the logic by which it unfolds. If you read my book, Herodotus says nothing of the kind.

John J. Miller (32:27)

So to wrap up, then, final question. What's the case for reading Herodotus today? Why should we do it now?

Paul Ray (32:35)

Well, it's a reminder of the ongoing struggle between despotism and freedom. It's a reminder of the conditions for freedom. It's an argument that we need always to be prepared to defend freedom, which is say we should concern ourselves with national security. And it does provide you with the basis for analyzing great power relations. That's not his theme, but it's there. And also for trying to figure out how David can defeat Goliath.

John J. Miller (33:22)

Paul Ray, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the histories by Herodotus.

Paul Ray (33:27)

My pleasure.

John J. Miller (33:28)

You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is at heymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with an episode of the Great Books Podcast.