If we are very fortunate in our search, we can benefit from the articulate reflections of our ancient forebears . . . . [With their help, we can] look at ourselves with better and clearer vision. This, after all, is one of the best reasons for studying antiquity.
Michael B. Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture
Flight Boarding now to the Distant Past
In a time when many of us have not been near an airport in months, time travel has a lot to recommend it. There is no need for masks or face shields, and no need to place one’s hope for safety in an open middle seat. We do not have to worry about ending up on one of those now-legendary flights where the nation’s polarized opinions erupt in shouting matches, with the obligation to impose order on a chaotic society delegated to flight attendants.
And, best of all, in these very troubled times, time travel permits us to visit places that are very distant from here and now.
A Gift from the Past:
An Unusual Approach to Decision-Making,
Paraphrased as “I’ll Drink to That!”
Because I am by profession a time traveler (the more conventional term is “historian”), I have access to possible solutions to current dilemmas that few others have considered.
So here’s one.
The current dilemma: The Members of Congress are not doing great at arriving at decisions that the majority support.
The possible solution: They should drink more, but also sometimes stay sober.
WHAT?
How did I come up with that utterly wacky and batty idea?
I got it from a historian I admire tremendously.
Here’s what this historian tells us about a procedure for decision-making practiced by a group very distant from us in time and location:
If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day, the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterward when they are drunk.
This story, like many others told by the same historian, suggests that there are many alternatives to the style of deliberations and discussions that preceded the recent vote on the impeachment of former President Donald J. Trump. This fresh perspective could be useful for understanding the immediate past, but it could be even more useful for experimenting with methods to improve the practices of national decision-making that seem to have spiraled down into the subsurface. Still, I would be very cautious about recommending that the U.S. Senate give this method a trial run, since I cannot support any procedure or process that would prohibit Senator and L.D.S. Church Member Mitt Romney from full participation.
But who is the historian who brought this remarkable historical parable of innovative decision-making to my mind?
I read this story in a book by my colleague and kinsman Herodotus, who lived two-and-a-half millennia ago, but who is speaking to us from the distant past as if he were Zooming with us in 2021.
A Professional Question of Paternity,
Way Beyond the Reach Of 23andme and Ancestry.Com
Over the last couple of centuries, people who call themselves historians cannot be sure who their father is: Herodotus or Thucydides?
Herodotus wrote the history of the Persian Wars, fought between the Greeks and the Persians, and Thucydides wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, fought between the Spartans and the Athenians. In the war Herodotus wrote about, the Greeks united against an outside enemy; in the war Thucydides wrote about, the Greeks divided and fought an internecine war.
That contrast seems worth thinking about in the United States in 2021.
The question of the intellectual parentage of the profession of history arises from the great difference in the minds of Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus was the father of the style of historical writing where curiosity is the navigator, and the historian arranges stories, quotations, and his own reflections in a pattern that readers would be hard put to outline. Thucydides was the father of the kind of history where narrative cohesion and rational appraisal of evidence call the shots.
No DNA tests can help us with establishing paternity. But, in truth, it does not require sophisticated technology to distinguish the descendants of Herodotus from the descendants of Thucydides.
It will not surprise anyone to learn that I have always seen Herodotus as the true father of history, and also as my intellectual ancestor, kinsman, and colleague. If anyone is tempted to doubt my status as Herodotus’s direct descendant, that doubt can be lifted by contemplating a passage that makes our kinship clear.
In this passage, Herodotus suddenly declares, “A remarkable fact occurs to me.” This “remarkable fact” (which has to do with the climates that favor or discourage the reproduction of mules!) does not seem to hold a very direct connection to the subject previously under discussion. So Herodotus offers a moment of guidance and orientation to his readers: “I need not apologize for this digression—it has been my habit throughout this book.”
Has it ever!
Anyone who wants to see evidence of Herodotus’s lasting influence on the writing of history need only spend a few minutes with my own book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. In the writing of that book, “remarkable facts” kept occurring to the author, who kept a firm grip on Herodotus’s coattails and did not bother “apologizing for the digression.”
By contrast, I have seen Thucydides (or “Lucid Thucid,” as one of my college classmates nicknamed him) as the precedent-setter for a more plodding and pedestrian approach to the writing of history. But my long-held appraisal of Thucydides is shifting even as I write. I will always love Herodotus, but I am finally realizing that Thucydides deserves a second chance. Like so many of the changes in the last year, this one has caught me by surprise.
What brought this on?
Chapter 5 in Book Two of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War is entitled, “Second Year of the War: The Plague and its Effects.” This is a very brief, very concentrated, very eloquent description of a society thrown into disorder and chaos by an epidemic.
In other words, if I had read Thucydides with the same level of appreciation with which I have read Herodotus, I would have been better prepared for the world in which we have landed. The slogan of the Center of the American West is “Turning Hindsight into Foresight.” Hindsight now reveals to me that reading Thucydides thoroughly when I was young would have added up to a high-powered version of foresight. Given how closely Thucydides complies with the Center’s practices, I will give Thucydides his due soon. But for now, Herodotus is still the main event.
How Herodotus and I Got Acquainted and Built a Lasting Relationship
When I was a freshman, I had to take a required year-long course in Western Civilization in Cowell College at the University of California Santa Cruz. In my first-ever college assignment, I was to pick a character in Homer’s Odyssey and compose a Shakespearean sonnet in the character’s honor.
Since I was only seventeen years old and I had never been to college, this assignment, more or less, made sense to me.
Thus, my reading of Homer’s Odyssey was guided by an unusual quest: to find the recipient of my maiden run at the Shakespearean sonnet (three quatrains and a final couplet). Odysseus’s wife Penelope prevailed in this competition (as if she didn’t have enough trouble already with all those suitors camped out in her home and bugging her).
Sparing you a full tour through the syllabus, I will jump ahead to the outcome: whether or not Penelope stayed faithful to Odysseus and kept her suitors under control, I myself had fallen in love with the classical literature of Greece and Rome before I turned eighteen.
A key to this cerebral romance was my professor, Jasper Rose. If I have gone through life with the assumption that the job of “professor” came with a license for major-league eccentricity, Jasper Rose is unquestionably the source of that assumption. Among his many distinctive habits, Jasper called us “duckies.”
On one memorable occasion, when our course had moved past the classical era and arrived at the Protestant Reformation, I had been puzzled by Jasper’s remarks when we discussed original sin. “Mr. Rose,” I said to him in a one-on-one conversation, “when you talked about original sin and the fall from grace, I thought that maybe you actually believed in a core of darkness in the human soul!”
His response to my urgently expressed hope for reassurance that he couldn’t have meant such a thing?
“Just wait, ducky. Just wait.”
This turned out to be very sound advice, maybe especially for 2021.
Having a Crush on the Classics
Here is why I was enchanted by the writers I encountered in my freshman Western Civilization course: People who lived and died two and a half millennia before I was born were speaking directly to me.
The classical era was not in the least a golden age. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome were not peaceful places. But many of the people who lived in those times and places were tranquil and reflective when they wrote. Living through eras of violence and disorder, these folks kept observing, thinking, studying, reflecting, and writing.
In other words, they set quite an inspiring example for a young person trying to figure out the turbulent era of the 1960s. Plus, the very fact that these writers had lived so long ago was its own font of tranquility.
The historian Herodotus had lived on the planet two-and-a-half millennia before I arrived, and he still had plenty to say to me. (And to you, too, in a moment.) To restate this point in an even more heavy-handed manner: I am living today in a bitterly divided and agitated nation, and yet I can stay calm (most of the time!) in part because I took a course in 1968-1969 that grounded my consciousness in a longer sweep of time.
And this brings me to another feature of the classical era that now preoccupies me even more than it did in the late 1960s. In the world Herodotus wrote of, there was such a swirl of identities—affiliations tied to city-states, empires, colonies, islands, and archipelagos, not to mention the camps of armies on the move—that there seemed to be nothing in the picture that resembled the configuration of racial and ethnic identities of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century or the early twenty-first century. No doubt the people who figured in his histories displayed a variety of skin tones and colors, but Herodotus—whose mind and attention flitted around in every imaginable direction—didn’t seem to have the time or interest to keep track of who was black, who was brown, who was light pink, and who was that rarest of colors—stark white. In other words, one great feature of paying attention to the classical era is that the ideas of race that have held such power in the United States do not have much bearing.
And now for another round of heavy-handed commentary.
In my formative years, I took a required Western Civilization course, and I did not get indoctrinated into a mindset that celebrated the superiority of white people. A full year’s immersion in the study of Western Civilization did not neutralize me as a critical appraiser of American history, especially of racial injustice and exclusion. As a college student in those days, I was quite active in protesting to support civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. But it never would have occurred to me to protest against Professor Jasper Rose for requiring me to study the history of folks who would now be called “elite white men.”
Was Herodotus’s skin brown? Tan? Pink? Or pasty white?
I didn’t know the answer and I wouldn’t have thought to ask the question.
As Jasper Rose said, “Just wait, ducky. Just wait.”
Herodotus Plays to Posterity:
Human Interest and Relevance up the Wazoo
(Or Immersed in the Hellespont)
It serves no purpose to make antiquity inaccessible to the non-specialist, least of all here, where the subject is one which raises so many issues of general interest.
Michael B. Poliakoff,Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture
No doubt, I knew too little—and still know too little–about matters of identity and hierarchies of privilege in the classical era. But this is what I knew as a certainty: Herodotus had given me an over-abundance of stories—really, parables—to ponder.
And you are about to share in that wealth.
As a seventeen-year-old, I loved my Western Civilization course, but I was easily distracted (a character trait that has not exactly faded away over the last half-century). So I am forced to admit that I did not finish reading the large sections of Herodotus’s Histories that Mr. Rose had assigned. Still, in what seems to have been my longest-running “I am really going to do this eventually!” resolution, I lived for decades with the intention to return to where I left off and read the whole book.
This was not only my longest-running resolution, this was one of the few that delivered results.
One of the less recognized qualities of a great university is that it can transform a drifting, languishing intention into an action plan. And so, when I met Professor Peter Hunt, a member of the University of Colorado’s spectacular Classics Department, my identity as a “wannabee classicist” was unveiled, and Herodotus and I got back together, with Peter Hunt as the insightful and knowledgeable convenor of this millennia-scrambling reunion.
Sustaining this time travel, it is now my privilege to introduce Herodotus, my colleague and kinsman from another world and time, to readers who may not have had the pleasure of his company.
Everyone should know this: I am about to go overboard with block quotations. Readers, I know that all of you—well, really, I mean all of us—perform the literary equivalent of the broad jump when we see a block quotation.
Don’t do that.
I am using block quotations because I cannot bear to get in the way of Herodotus as a storyteller. As odd as this might seem, I would no sooner interrupt a passage quoted from his Histories than I would interrupt a living person who I was interviewing, cutting him off so that I could paraphrase or abbreviate the remarkable stories that this person was telling us.
So if you are short on time, skip anything I wrote, but don’t even imagine skipping the block quotations that Herodotus wrote. And just to point out what is no doubt obvious: in these passages, the word “I” refers to Herodotus, and not to the Faculty Director of the Center of the American West.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you a remarkable historian who refuses to let the passage of 2500 years stand in the way of speaking to us. Herodotus was possessed by unending curiosity, and even though he often found human conduct to be mysterious and confounding, he never gave up on trying to figure it out. And now . . . a sampling of my favorite passages from Herodotus’ writings, all of them worth pondering in 2021.
Passage #1:
Before There Was Unresolved Agonizing about the Disputed Meaning of Truth,
There Was a Trustworthy Assertion of Grounded Skepticism
My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means required to believe it—and this may be taken to apply to this book as a whole.
Passage #2:
Before there Was PowerPoint,
There Were Rigorous Spartan Standards for Effective Public Speaking
When [the Samians] who had been forced to leave [their] island reached Sparta, they procured an audience with the magistrates and made a long speech to emphasize the urgency of their request. The Spartans, however, at this first setting, answered the speech by saying that they had forgotten the beginning of it, and could not understand the end, so the Samians had to try again. At the second sitting they brought a bag, and merely remarked that the bag needed flour—to which the Spartans replied that the word “bag” was superfluous.
Passage #3:
Before There Was Unending Litigation over Water Rights in the Courtrooms
of the American West,
There Was Howling at the Palace
Herodotus tells us of an unusual approach to raising concerns about water supply, as practiced by residents of “a plain in Asia surrounded by a ring of hills.”
In the ring of hills, a considerable river rises—the Aces—which is used to supply water to the five tribes I have mentioned, being split into five channels and flowing out to each of them through a different gorge; now, however, that the Persians are masters of the country, all these people find themselves in a serious difficulty, for the king has blocked up the gorges and constructed sluicegates to contain the flow of water, . . .the result of this for the people who have depended upon the use of the water, for they are now deprived of it, has been disastrous. In winter, to be sure, they get rain like anyone else, but they need the river water when they are sowing their millet and sesame in the summer. When therefore they find themselves waterless, they go in a body with their wives to the Persians, and stand howling in front of the gates of the king’s palace, until the king gives orders to open the sluices and allow the water to flow . . .
Passage #4:
Before there Was What We Have Taken to Be Rational Calculation to Control Nature,
There Were Uncivil Expressions of Anger to Teach Nature a Thing or Two
The Persian leader Xerxes was, shall we say, used to getting his way, and he did not like to be resisted.
A bridge had already been constructed across the Hellespont from Asia to Europe. . . The headland was the point to which Xerxes’ engineers carried their two bridges . . .
The work was successfully completed, but a subsequent storm of great violence smashed it up and carried everything away. Xerxes was very angry when he learned of the disaster and gave orders that the Hellespont should receive three hundred lashes and have a pair of fetters thrown into it. I [a.k.a. Herodotus] have heard . . . that he also sent people to brand it with hot irons. He certainly instructed the men with the whips to utter, as they wielded them, the barbarous and presumptuous words: ‘You salt and bitter stream, your master lays this punishment upon you for injuring him, who never injured you. But Xerxes the King will cross you, with or without your permission. . . ..”
Passage #5:
Before There Were Self-Help Books,
There Was a Valuable Reminder to Think about the Troubles Other People Face
One thing, however, I [a.k.a. Herodotus] am very sure of . . . and that is if all mankind agreed to meet, and everyone brought his own sufferings along with him for the purpose of exchanging them for somebody else’s, there is not a man who, after taking a good look at his neighbor’s sufferings, would not be only too happy to return home with his own.
Passage #6:
Before There Were Embittered Fights over whether to Preserve or Tear Down Statues,
There Were Persians Warning Us, “Don’t Even Go There”
The following are certain Persian customs which I can describe from personal knowledge. The erection of statues . . . is not an accepted practice amongst them, and anyone who does such a thing is considered a fool.
Passage #7:
Before There Was a Sense of Complacency that got Knocked for a Loop In 2020,
There Was a Foresighted Observation From Croesus The Lydian
The first thing I would tell you is that human life is like a revolving wheel and never allows the same people to continue long in prosperity.
“It’s All Greek to Me”:
Classicists at Odds
In fact, the most interesting thing about fighting as a sport is the form in which various peoples institutionalize it and what they reveal about themselves in so doing.
Michael B. Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture
When I was still a newcomer to the academic world, I started auditioning for the role of message-carrier between the domain of universities and the habitats of the general public. (I hesitate to compare myself to Hermes or Iris, the Greek messenger-god and messenger-goddess, but I do try to learn from them.)
My early auditions for this role did not get off to a great start.
On one occasion, on the train from New Haven to New York City, I sat next to a nice man who had not attended college but who knew a lot about construction and carpentry. We talked about his work for a while, but then my conversational companion asked me about my work.
I then rattled on about what we were studying in my American history and literature courses at Yale. A few minutes into my report, the carpenter gave up, phrasing his surrender with a well-aimed appraisal of my attempt to invite him to travel with me into the academic world.
“I’m listening,” he said. “But it’s all Greek to me.”
In a process that I had barely noticed, I was evolving into a denizen of the academic world, with scholarly customs of expression supplanting whatever I had once had as a native language.
To this moment, I am in debt to my train companion, who let me know that I was on a slippery slope, at a point in my life when I was still able to arrest the skid.
And yet I should not, must not, and cannot conceal how much I have benefited from the work of academic experts, even if I sometimes mock the inaccessible language that echoes in the world of scholarship.
Here’s the point.
Herodotus would have been “all Greek to me” if it weren’t for the work of classicists who translated his words, thereby put him into my reach, and made it possible for me to know him as my kin. Without the academic classicists, I would never have had the opportunity for time travel over two-and-a-half millennia. I would never have become a believer in the proposition that anchors and steadies me every day:
Our capacity to think about humanity over long reaches of time is the life raft that keeps us from sinking into the disordered tides and currents of our times.
All this would explain why I felt sad when I settled down with The New York Times Sunday Magazine on February 7, 2021 and came upon an article by Rachel Posner about the “War for the Future of the Classics.”
I encourage everyone to read this thought-provoking portrait of Dan-El Padilla Peralta, a historian of ancient Rome and a professor at Princeton University. In forceful statements in The New York Times article, Padilla asserts that studies of ancient Greece and ancient Rome have been saturated with a celebration of white people and a denigration of Black people. Professor Padilla’s statements have set off an angry conflict among classicists.
I hope for a chance to meet Professor Padilla. Providence has been improbably kind to me making such encounters happen, so a chance to get to know this accomplished scholar might be in my future.
But for now, I am restricting my commentary to a personal plea.
Here we go.
Classicists, you are taking the ground out from under my faith that thinking about humanity over the long span of millennia clears our minds and provides us with illuminating perspectives that we cannot get any other way.
So, classicists, please don’t fight.
Or, on second thought, go ahead and fight, but do so in a manner that sets a model for intense, forthright, illuminating, productive, and, yes, educational disagreement.
I conclude with a reenactment of the final scene in the movie Shane, when Joey Starrett calls to Shane as he rides away from town. (And, as always, thank you, Professor Howie Movshovitz, for the major improvement you have wrought in my cinematic literacy.)
In this concluding scene, I will play the role of little Joey, and the classicists will play the part of the cowboy Shane, riding away from me.
Here is my plea, just before the credits run.
Come back, Classicists. Come back.
A Final Word From 4005, BCE
There’s serious trouble among the dead at the moment.
You might almost call it a civil war.
Aristophanes, The Frogs
Note: In these passages, I am relying on the translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt, published by Penguin Books, with a first edition published in 1954; I used a revised edition published in 2003.
If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.
Photo Credit: banner images courtesy of:Wikipedia
