A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Except, of course, the expectations of those who have read the Histories.

Daniel Mendelsohn revisits Herodotus.

Comments

[David Wharton]

Thanks for the link. I don't think I ever got more pleasure from an undergrad course than I did poring over Herodotus in second-semester Greek with a few students and our brilliant professor, the late John Crosset.

Mendelsohn's review of the Landmark Herodotus was quite good, though I thought that last two paragraphs were pretty tendentious. Herodotus the ur-Postmodernist? That belies Herodotus's Ionian commitment to true discovery that Mendelsohn acknowledges earlier in the review.

The George H.W. Bush:Darius::George W. Bush:Xerxes comparison really doesn't comport well with what Herodotus tells us in the Histories about the ancient father/son duo. But with M's larger point -- that great and powerful nations can come to grief at the hands of smaller ones because of hubris or foolhardiness -- no argument with that. Good thing they still teach Herodotus at the service academies.

Oddly, Mendelsohn leaves out almost all mention of Herodotus's sincere and frank belief in the activity of the gods in human affairs. Herodotus attributes the ruin of Croesus to the phthonos (envy, jealousy, or begrudging) of the gods, and he shows them constantly active though dreams, omens, oracles, and events in the Histories. Maybe this element of Herodotus's worldview didn't jibe with Mendelsohn's desire to resuscitate H's reputation among academic PoMo ironists.

[Ed Cone]

Perhaps Mendelsohn views the stories of activist, anthropomorphic gods as similar to the mythologies he does mention in the article (e.g. the wild tales about peoples and places that Herodotus also advanced with such earnestness) -- artifacts of another time that seem risible to a reader with modern knowledge and expectations, but that do not compromise the larger value of the work.

I look forward to getting a copy of the Landmark Herodotus.