Herodotus and His Modern Readers: The Rewards of Not Being a Thucydidean

Cicero famously dubbed Herodotus “the father of history”—but 19th-century “scientific” historians preferred to trace their ancestry to Thucydides, the great ancient master of “manly” political and military history. Today, “realist” scholars of international relations still idealize Thucydides’s unflinching commitment to truth-telling and his focus on the amoral unfolding of the Peloponnesian Wars, seeing his narrative as a quantum leap beyond Herodotus’s wide-ranging, digressive storytelling. Herodotus, however, has always had a few aces up his sleeve: While Thucydides stuck to the Greeks, Herodotus took to the road to investigate the history (and customs) of the other peoples of the Persian Empire. He wrote about battles, but also about Persian kings and barbarian queens, about North African marital customs, and about the behavior of camels, delivering to posterity a vast, heterogenous, archive of facts and fables we continue to check, and regularly confirm. His kaleidoscopic content—as well as those good stories—won for him his own, alternative, modern fan club, one that included Egyptologists, radical geographers, Aryan racists, and Afrocentric thinkers. From him these less prominent, but always more numerous, readers gleaned innovative methods for writing about peoples for whom historical documents were late or scarce. Many also developed irreverent attitudes toward Greek greatness, imperial conquest, and the causes of human actions. As this address will describe, throughout the eras of 19th-century “scientific” and 20th-century “realist” infatuation with Thucydides, scholars who kept reading Herodotus reaped the rewards of cultivating this alternative historical vision, one from which we still have much to learn.