I am siiting on my table and looking out the window to a day that is as soggy as my mood. For the past week or so, I have not read much and I don't have anything to write about nor have I blogged here. What is affecting me? I do not know. I am familiar with these bouts of lassitude but this utter carelessness of both reading and writing is new to me. And nothing I could do or nothing I could have done, moves me even a litle bit. I am apathetic, I am enervated, I am dead.
In his superb opening passages, Herodotus explains why he writing this history and also lays down his method when he introduces his themes by phrases like, "the Persians say that", "the Phoenicians say that" etc etc. He is letting them do the talking. Also, the beginnings of the quarrel reach firmly back into the realm of myths and the injustice done by the abduction of Europa or the rape of Helen are all current matters of debate.
After starting with the "Who threw the stone first debate?", Herodotus says that he will not take part in the debate himself but will go further with his story. And the story is "an account of the cities of men, small as well as great: for those which in old times were great
have for the most part become small, while those that were in my own time great used in former times to be small: so then, since I know that human prosperity never continues steadfast, I shall make mention of both indifferently."
There is an immense sense of sadness in that indifference for it comes with the painful realization that prosperity is never steadfast.
Then, Herodotus begins his story, not in Hellas, not in Persia, the chief protagonists but in Asia Minor, where Croesus of Lydia is "the first barbarian of whom we have knowledge." This barbarian is important for eventually he will be subdued by Persians as they begin their imperial march.
Lydian history contains the very famous Candaules episode. Candaules, proud of his wife's beauty, wants his friend Gyges to see her naked and judge for himself. When the wife notices what transpired she conspires with Gyges to kill her husband and install Gyges as the king. This is the myth behind the rise of the new dynasty and Croesus is the last king of this new Lydian dynasty.
A large section of the first book delas with history of this new Lydian dynasty and as usual in Herodotus, myth and fact are closely intertwined. The Pythian oracle pronounces that the vengeance for the murder of Candaules is to come in the fifth generation but the Gyges dynasty ignores it. Meanwhile, it has prdouced a line of kings of whom Alyattes turns Lydia into a sizeable empire. His son, Croesus, was a very famous king whose wealth had become proverbial.
The Croesus account contains such notable legends as Solon's visit and the boar of Atys. The reign of Croesus is also coincidenal with the rise of that other very famous emperor of antiquity, Cyrus of Persia. Croesus decides to invade the Persians and cut their incipient power and sends for the Pythian Oracle who replies that a grat kingdom will be destroyed in the battle. Taking this as an affirmative sign, Croesus marches against the Persians only to be defeated by them. In bitterness, when he consults the oracle again, the Oracle replies that by destruction of a grat kingdom it had meant Croesus's own. The defeated Croesus becomes the confidante of Cyrus and now the story of Herodotus turns to its chief protoganists, the Persians.
The once mighty Assyrian empire was thrown away by a ragtag tribe of Medes. Medes then form a monarchy whose chequered state of power is notable for the Scythian invasion. The Median king Astyages marries his sister Mandane to a lowly Persian called Cambyses, whose union produces Cyrus. Persians were first subordinates of Median kings and it is Cyrus who overthrows the median yoke and establishes the Persian dynasty and empire. Cyrus like every other hero has a mythical history where he is brought up by different parents than his own. (See my entry on The Myth of the Birth of a Hero by Otto Rank.)
Cyrus then overthrows the Median yoke and his victory over Croesus makes him the emperor of all Asia. This concludes the first book except that Herodotus, as much an ethnographer as a historian, includes the ethnographies of both the Lydians and the Persians.
Herodotus is frequently referred to as father of history but he is a very contentious figure both in ancient and modern times. People have always complained about his willingness to believe in fairy tales and his credulity and hold that other historians like Thucydides and Xenophon are better in comparison. Others though have regarded him as a model to emulate and his work, if it does not contain a great deal of truth in it, has at least a great deal of charm.
I am not a scholar in Greek literature or in history and am just a plain average reader with great deal of interest in reading. When I started reading Herodotus, I read him not as a historian or a polemcist but as a regular reader of books with a critical sense of his own. So, what is my verdict? I think his history is fabulous and thoroughly charming. I am something of a fan of fantasy genre( I don't like science fiction), and reading him gave me the same sense of wandering in unknown and mysterious lands that best of fantasy works produce in a reader.
I am not an academic historian concerned with nitty-gritty and hairsplitting to establish a recondite point of "truth" but what do I think is its worth as a history? I think a great deal. He has produced a new genre of writing, which in itself, is too valuable, for he has invented a new means of preserving memory of things past or passing. As for all the fantasy tales Herodotus included in his book, I think at the time he was writing, these fictions were current and an accepted means of perceiving and preserving facts, though a critical sense was developing, evident in Herodotus himself. He does not invent these fictions but reports them and they are all told to him by the people he met in his journey.
Since, the Greeks were famous for their free-thinking, his tales have aroused a great deal of scepticism among later scholars who then went on to produce a new criterion for good history, that is, it should describe facts as accurately as possible.(See my entry on Lucian's Instructions for writing History). But, I think such a spirit developed in the first because they had read him and developed a critical sense of differentiating what is real and what was merely fabulous. Plato might have ranted against Homer but his free-thinking would have been impossible without Homer. Similarly, I think the later historians, no matter how much they disbelieved him, are nevertheless indebted to him.
The History of Herodotus is divided into nine books, each bearing a name of one of the Nine muses. The concern of Herodotus is to tell the story of Greeco-Persian wars, at least the truth as percieved by the parties then extant. In his inimitable opening words, he says that he is writing this history because, "neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous,which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, maylose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another."
Two things are noticeable in these noble opening lines. Firstly, he wanted to preserve the memory of what happened. He didn't write and epic or a novel or a drama based on some dramatic events, and there were many, of the Persian wars. He wanted to preserve the memory of it, to which end he not only travelled widely but also delved into histories of all the participants and established the method for writing histories. Also, as far as I know, he has not done this monumental work in service of some king but in commitment to his ideals.
Second, the equal weight he gives to both the Greeks and the Barbarians, including the latter in his testimony. This is remarkable. Consider the earlier histories of Assyrian tablets or the proto-history of Jews contained in the Bible. Both omit the Other. An Assyrian king would definitely not have involved the deeds of the people he conquered in his victory proclamations and neither would the Jewish priests include testimony of other people in their books.
I will blog about the entire nine books in the next few days, as an interested amateur, interested in its story and also in its myths, if at all, more interested in the latter.
I was suffering from a huge writer's block last week and also a huge reader's block. Couldn't make myself read anything, much less write anything. Since, it's been almost a week since I wrote anything, I made myself get up and searched the local library for something interesting. I stumbled on Joseph Nigg's Fablous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings From Ancients to the Present.
Nigg's book is not just any bestiary which catelogues mythical beasts and their fantastic features. Such bestiaries are a legion and are to be found even on internet. This book is a compendium of the ancient sources themselves. As it quotes the most relevant authors whose works have had a hand in the the life of the fantastic creatures, from Homer to Carl Jung, you can track the vicissitudes in the fortunes of these beasts and the men who believed or refuse to believe in them.
Mr.Nigg's book is divided into four sections: Ancient Creatures, Beasts of God, Strange and Dubious Creatures and Recurring Images.
In Ancient Creatures, Nigg provides the excerpts from classical authors from Greece and Rome who discussed these fantastic beasts. The Arabian Phoenix and the cinnamon bird, the Indian manticore, griffin and unicorn and other beasts from Ethiopia, Scythia and Egypt are the ones which seem to have fascinated the ancients the most. The ancients were also concerned about Armaspes, a race of one-eyed humans who were supposed to live in Scythia just below the Hyperboreans and somehow I feel that Rowling's nifflers are based on giant gold-digging ants described here.
These fabulous creatures lost their vitality once the classical world ended but were soon revived under the Church, where they now served the added purpose of edification of the doctrine. The second section probes the extensive use made by fabulous beasts by the Church. The phoenix, the unicorn and the griffin still hold the pride of the place.
The third section continues the voyage through the Renaissance times. Their use was disrupted in seventeenth century when people declared they were fictitious but they were back in vogue in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the least in speculative fiction.
Nigg introduces these excerpts with competent prefacing. By the end of the book, you are actually taken through thousands of years, man spent in search of the elusive animals which plagued his consciousness by straying onto the periphery but never to the front.
I knew most of these animals and stories told here but the book was still a great discovery for me. I had read Herodotus and Ctesias before but it was great reading obscure authors like Aelian and Solinus.
All in all a great anthology. A book that will rouse you out of any slumbe by invokinng your sense of wonder and merriment.
Hamlet has been called the "Mona Lisa of English literature", meaning it will never be solved why hamlet prevaricates taking revenge on his uncle, time after time even though he had many chances. This problem has also been called the greatest unsolved literary puzzle in English.
I always wondered what the problem was because I had no problem with it. And if I'm right, neither did Shakespeare's audiences, who were not preplexed by Hamlet's behaviour. The problem started somewhere in eighteenth century and quickly became the Mona Lisa of literary criticism.
I have not even finished all of Shakespeare's plays, let alone be aware of the tonnes of secondary literature on the bard. Still, let me take a stab at what has confounded so many bright minds over the centuries.
Why did Hamlet put off killing his uncle time after time? Simple.Hamlet is a prince. He just cannot go and kill a reigning king without risking serious political consequences. Already Denmark is ravelling from the death of the old king and the subsequent hasty marriage of Gertrude to Claudius. A prince purely bent on power could have murdered Claudius and got the power himself but Hamlet is concerned about the moral impact on Denmark. "There's something rotten in Denmark" passage indicates that.
Yes, he is commissioned by his father's ghost to affect the revenge. But, he cannot kill a king based purely on a ghost's words. First, he tries to verify the veracity of the ghost's charge. This happens during the mock play. Once, sure of the guilt of Claudius, he has to establish it to his friends and some impartial witnesses like Horatio. He cannot kill Claudius without that proof, no matter how many tempting opportunities come his way. In fact, the shifts in his moods can all be referred to the conflict between his own passion for revenge and the need for patience.
While Hamlet is weaving his plans, Claudius is weaving his own. So that by the time Hamlet can take his revenge, he is sent to death by Claudius. That's the tragedy. Something like this happened in Nepal where the current Nepal kins killed the entire royal household and then became a king. He lost all his power in a subsequent rebellion by his peoples.
So there. I am the greatest literary detective, ain't I?
Bernard Lewis is one of the most respected scholars on Islam and The Crisis in Islam began as a long essay on Islam in 2001, that critical year which changed all our lives, and ended up being a short book in 2003. I have read Lewis' other histories which are written in somewhat cagey style. This books by contrast is an exercise in simplicty. Lewis writes simply but by the end is able to pack up so much punch, he is able to render the tragedy of modern Islam without apologising for it nor showing any virulence. It is thoughtful and shattering at the same time.
Lewis spends only little time with the early history of Islam and the Crusades and such like but picks up on the moribund state of Islam during the start of last century, a state which still plagues it. He shows how Islamic world was fundamentally oblivious to America till a few decades ago and then suddenly discovered it and quickly made it into the Islamic version of Babylon, an immoral place which has to be destroyed.
According to Lewis, " the most powerful accusation of all is the degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life, and the threat that it offers to Islam.........That is what is meant by the term the Great satan, applied to the united States by the late Ayotollah Khomeeini. Satan as depicted in the Quran is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, ' an insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men.' "
The focus of the book is squarely on the the threat posed by Islam to the west and does not go beyond. It does not probably occur to Lewis that Islam might provide a threat to wider world than simply the West and his summation is generosity itself.
He clings to all the sunny possibilities that will prevent Islam from becoming a world wide threat but ends on this sombre note: " If the fundamentalists are corect in their calculations and succeed in their war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam."
One can only wish desperately that the fundamentalists are wrong in their calculations.
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