it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on Herodotus’s Histories:
Homer, the epic poet who wrote the story of the Trojan War, lived some four hundred years before Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian War. Thucydides, who lived just a generation after Herodotus, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, a war, he insisted, that was the greatest war that had ever happened, a war that lasted twenty-seven years and ended with Athens defeated and its empire destroyed. The defeat of Athens, and the long decline that, some believe, still continues, gives some reason to think Thucydides was right, that the war between Athens and Sparta was the most important war that had taken place, but there never would not have been a war had Athens not become an empire which seemed to threaten the freedom, if not the very existence, of Sparta and its allies. And Athens would not have become an empire if the Athenians had not had the courage, and the foresight, to stand against the attempt of Xerxes and the Persians to make, as Xerxes promised, “a Persian empire that has the same limit as Zeus’s sky. For the sun will look upon no country that has a border with ours, but I shall make them all one country, once I have passed in my progress through all Europe.” Why this did not happen, how Xerxes and the Persians were defeated, is what Herodotus wants to understand.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
Herodotus will tell the story of the war, and will tell it better than the story Homer told of Troy. He will investigate, and uncover, the real causes, and not, like Homer, invent a more entertaining story. In Homer’s story Helen - Helen who launched, as they still say, a thousand ships - was the reason Troy was attacked, the reason why Hector and Achilles and all the others fought their battles and died their deaths. Homer’s story had been told a thousand times. Every man and woman, every child, in Athens, and not just Athens, had listened as a rhapsode, one of those dull-minded men who can only memorize someone else’s words, recited every line with all the exaggerated enthusiasm of a poorly paid actor in a play on stage. Everyone knew the story, and everyone was wrong. Helen never got to Troy. She was not there. The ship that had taken her had sailed to Egypt. While the Greeks and the Trojans were shedding blood at Troy, Helen was safe in a city somewhere near the Nile. Herodotus distinguishes Homer’s story from what “my eyes, my judgment and my searching” have revealed and what he has heard from, among others, the Egyptians. Helen was brought to Egypt. The Trojans did not have her. It was not that Homer had been deceived; it was that Homer was deceptive. “And I think Homer knew the tale; but inasmuch as it was not so suitable for epic poetry as the other, he used the latter and consciously abandoned the one here told.”
We hear about other places and other times, the stories, the histories we are told, but this is not the same; it is not as trustworthy, as what we are able to see for ourselves. Herodotus shows us this by telling us, that is to say, by letting us hear from him, the story of how a king lost his kingdom by insisting that the truth be seen and not heard. Candaules, the ruler of Lydia, tells Gyges, his trusted bodyguard and confidante, that his wife, the queen, is the most beautiful of women. Gyges believes what he is told, but that is not enough for Candaules: Gyges will not really believe what he tells him unless he sees for himself how beautiful she is. Gyges is made to hide in the bedroom when the queen comes in and removes her clothes, but he does not go undetected. When the queen discovers that Candaules has let her be seen by someone who has no right to see, she tells Gyges that he must either kill the king and take his place, or be killed himself.
What exactly does this mean? Why does Herodotus tell this story at the very beginning of what is supposed to be his history of the Persian War, the war in which, to everyone’s astonishment, the Greeks, led by Themistocles and the Athenians, defeat a Persian army so large that when Xerxes crossed into Europe it took seven days and seven nights to make the crossings, a war that made it possible for Athens to create an empire of its own? Is it only to establish a rivalry to Homer that Herodotus begins his history with a story of a woman who, like Helen, was so beautiful, and so desirable, that kings were killed and kingdoms shaken to their foundations? Or is Herodotus teaching a deeper lesson?
The story of Gyges is told again, a generation later, when Plato tells it with reference to a ring, the ring of Gyges, that allowed whoever wore it to become invisible and in that way, free from observation, do whatever he wants to do without fear of getting caught. He can take what belongs to others, including not just their lives, but even the kingdom of a king. Everything depends on what is seen. What cannot be seen, what remains invisible, can only be explained by words, which are themselves invisible until someone writes them down. The most important words, the authoritative writings, are the laws, the rules, the customs and beliefs by which the citizens of the city, whether Athens or Sparta; the citizens of any country, any nation, whether Egypt or Persia, live together. The laws, to be obeyed, must not to be questioned. Socrates, we all remember, was put on trial and condemned to death on the accusation that he did not believe in the gods of Athens, that he did not believe what the city believed.
Gyges, according to Herodotus, was more than willing to believe what he had been told but, compelled to see the truth, could only live if he became himself the onewho decided what everyone else would be told to believe. By telling us this, Herodotus forces us to at least begin to doubt what we have been told before, including, most importantly, what we thought about our own laws, our own way of life. Every nation, Herodotus tells us, thinks its customs best. Darius, at the time he ruled Persia, called together some Greeks to ask what they would take to eat their dead fathers. No price in the world, they replied. Then he asked some people who did eat their fathers what price to burn their dead fathers with fire. They were horror stricken. Herodotus does not make comparisons simply to demonstrate the difference in customs between nations; he makes them to compel us to take up the question of better and worse, a question that leads of necessity to the question of what is best, what is the standard by which to judge what is better and what is worse. Though it is not generally noted, Herodotus was a very careful writer, not just in what he wrote, but how he makes the reader forget while he is reading his own beliefs. He makes what is foreign seem familiar, and yet, at the same time, safe from view. He describes what he calls the “very wisest” custom of the Babylonians as if he were doing nothing more than what any playwright, any storyteller, might do, and in that way hide a profound critique of any city, any nation, that permits itself to become divided against itself, two cities instead of one, a city of the rich and a city of the poor.
Once a year in Babylon the girls who were ready for marriage were brought for auction, an auction that begins with the best-looking girl, the girl who will bring a “great price.” And then, following her, the next good-looking girl. “All the rich men of Babylon who were disposed to marriage outbid one another in buying beauties.” But what of those of “the lower classes who wanted to marry,” but could not afford to bid? The money collected from the auction of the desirable women was used to provide dowries for the girls no one wanted to take on her own. The poor took the “uglier girls, with money to boot.” With the cry of the auctioneer, “Who will take the least money to live with this one?” every man who wanted to marry found himself a bride. The rich got the women they wanted, and the poor got their money. Instead of two cities, Babylon stayed one. Until, that is, Babylon was conquered and in the “general ruin” the poor had no choice but to prostitute their daughters.
If it is always better that the city, the nation, remain one instead of two, the question is who should rule: what form of government has the best chance to keep the city, the nation, united. Herodotus reports a debate among the Persians in which Darius insisted that monarchy, the rule of the one best man, is always better. Oligarchy, or even aristocracy, the better kind of government by a few, always leads to faction, and faction always leads to murder, because everyone always wants to rule by himself alone. Athens, in its experience, gave a different answer. Under the rule of princes, that is to say, of tyrants, it was not better in war than any of her neighbors, but “rid of those princes, was far the first of all.” Herodotus explains: “When held in subjection they would not do their best, for they were working for a taskmaster, but, when freed, they sought to win, because each was trying to achieve for his very self.”
More than the question of monarchy or democracy, tyranny or freedom, it is the question of what we look up to, what give our lives meaning, how we understand the best way to live. There is for Herodotus a reason in things, a logos, that explains the movement in human history. “The Persian War will prove to be a surface phenomenon that has its basis in the principles and elements he discovered in the first few books,” explains Seth Benardete in his remarkable and too little read study, Herodotean Inquiries. The Egyptians and the Persians believed in different gods, and those beliefs determined who they were. “Hesiod and Homer, in giving the Greek gods their human shape, did more than just duplicate human beings. They radically separated human beings from all other living things and stamped them with a specific excellence. The gods thus imposed a standard which the Greeks could look up to, so that they could judge whether to respect or despise themselves. … The Egyptians…gave their gods, in so far as they had one, an animal shape. They made men look down rather than up, to reverence the subhuman rather than the human, only to despise and never to respect themselves.” The “gods of the Persians represent a more natural theology. The very supra-humanity of the Persian gods might have been that which proved fatal to the Persians.”
Xerxes crossed into Europe and “watched his army crossing under the lash. Seven days and seven nights did his army cross, and never a moment’s break.” He brought with him 1207 ships with 200 men per ship, or 241,400 men. The navy and the army together numbered 2,317610. Add to this the forces of some allies and the service train that went with them and the number totals 5,283,200. To feed them took no less than 1,100,340 bushels of wheat every day. And yet, despite all this, the war was lost at the sea battle of Salamis in which Athens “supplied by far the most ships and those that had the greatest speed.” Xerxes, as he promised, got to Athens, but he found nothing there. Themistocles and the Athenians had abandoned the land and the buldings and, in effect, taken the city to the sea. Afraid the Greeks would sail to the Hellespont and break down the bridge over which his army had crossed into Europe and which supplies the only return to Persia, Xerxes had no choice but to run away. The Athenians announced to the Spartans, when they were still afraid of what the Persians might do, that, “So you know now, if not before, that while a single Athenians survives we will not make terms with Xerxes.”
The Athenians were the saviors of Greece. “They chose that Greece should remain free…they stood their ground and withstood the invader when he came against their own country.” Themistocles, more than anyone, was responsible. While others thought only of their own, private, wealth, he had persuaded his fellow citizens that instead of distributing among themselves the money that came from the silver mines the city owned, they should spend the money to build 200 ships for war. Like that “very wisest” custom of the Babylonians, the Athenians understood that the city, the nation, has to act as one.
How much of what Herodotus has told us is true is for each of us to discover by a careful reading of a careful writer who after all that he has written leaves us with the reminder that, “I must tell what is said, but I am not at all bound to believe it, and this comment of mine holds about my whole History.” It is worth the effort to see for ourselves whether what we hear from Herodotus over the centuries is true.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge.
--Marshal Zeringue
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