Father of History, Made New

If the past truly is prologue, then "The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories" (Pantheon, 953 pages, $45), edited by Robert B. Strassler, is the starting point for understanding two-and-a-half millennia of Western history. For it is Herodotus whom we must credit not just with inaugurating history as a subject of inquiry, but for using the very word, historiē, to name that activity of research and writing. This massive volume, with a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis and introduction by Rosalind Thomas, reintroduces us to the Greek author and explorer of the fifth century before the common era who was the progenitor not just of history but of what we would today call journalism, ethnography, geography, and political science. With 21 appendices and 127 maps, Mr. Strassler and his trans-Atlantic colleagues make the breadth and depth of this classic work accessible to a new generation of readers — amateurs and scholars alike.

But "The Landmark Herodotus" is more than just a reminder of what the past has contributed to our present. The vanity of our historicism — the belief that "ancient," "medieval," "modern," and now "postmodern" name discrete periods that progressively define knowledge and truth — keeps us from seeing how much classical historiē can be not only a precursor but a living alternative to its desiccated descendant today. It is hard to imagine many currently acclaimed works of history or journalism being read two-and-a-half years, let alone two-and-a-half millennia, from now.

A contemporary policy maker would be hard-pressed to find a better account of imperial ambition than Herodotus's study of the Persian empire and its wars with the Greek city-states in 490 and 480–79 B.C.E. Or of the birth of democracy as an idea, and ideal, in resistance to tyranny. Our contemporary view of historical causation, which mechanically reduces politics to economics and civilization to religion, seems impoverished next to Herodotus's complex and sophisticated exploration and analysis of human nature and society.

Of course, there are those "goldgathering ants in India" and other puzzling digressions, which Mr. Strassler and his colleagues work so hard to illuminate, without quite explaining them to contemporary readers. But no modern author — not to mention the makers of the recent film "300" — can match Herodotus in his skeptical yet moving description of the heroism and sacrifice of warfare:

The Hellenes knew they were about to face death at the hands of the men who had come around the mountain, and so they exerted their utmost strength against the barbarians, with reckless desperation and no regard for their own lives. By this time most of their spears had broken, so they were slaying the Persians with their swords. And it was during this struggle that Leonidas fell, the man who had proved himself the most valiant of all, and with him those other famous Spartans whose names I have learned because I think they also proved themselves to be worthy men; indeed, I have learned the names of all 300 of them.

History has routinely been announced as coming to an end in our modern and post-modern eras. "The Landmark Herodotus" is an invigorating reminder that it had a beginning — one that can be as meaningful to us today as it was to readers two-and-a-half millennia ago.