Herodotean Tall Tales And Truths

Herodotean tall tales and figurative and literal truths

Herodotus: father of history, father of lies

In 2007, Penguin published a collection of Herodotus' accounts of foreign lands as part of its Great Travels series, with the title Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants. Ideas of unsubstantiated tall tales have defined Herodotus' work in the popular imagination from Thucydides to the present day. The impossibility of the literal truth of the phenomena mentioned in the title has been used by Herodotus' critics to undermine his methods and thus his credibility as a source. For Herodotus and his contemporaries, historiai (derived from the Greek historein, to inquire) were inquiries, which could be into many areas which no longer fall within the remit of 'history'. In Herodotus' work, we can see his interest in topics which might now be demarcated as natural history, geography, or ethnography, amongst other disciplines. His immediate successor Thucydides is keen to distance himself from Herodotean broadness of enquiry, and casts aspersions on its integrity, accusing the logographoi ('chroniclers', 'storytellers': by whom he almost certainly intends Herodotus) of 'compos[ing] with a view rather of pleasing the ear than telling the truth'. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, he avoids using the word 'historein' to describe his own activities: the work's title of History is not Thucydidean.

Herodotus then should not be considered solely as a historian, since he wrote before the conventions of the discipline (as we understand them today) were even established. Insofar as his work concerns itself with inquiry into the nature of the world, he ought to be considered also as an early scientific investigator. The geographical breadth of his inquiries (encompassing many different places and peoples, from Arabia to Scythia (reaching to the steppes of central Asia)) necessarily brings him into contact with sources originating in other cultures and languages, which may have gone through several retellings by different peoples before reaching Herodotus himself. As such, I propose to consider the role of language in the imperfect transmission of Herodotus' sources, and the cultural reasons behind whether the tales are believed literally or taken figuratively. It is helpful to regard these tales as figurative expressions of truths, which have been misinterpreted at some point as literal expressions.

Many of the more improbable tales that Herodotus records came to him via people many times removed from the first-hand observers, because of the distances involved or the time elapsed. We can tell what whoever heard the story took to be most important in making sense of it, because these are the details that are preserved in their subsequent retelling. Daniela Bailer-Jones defines a model as 'an interpretative descri ption of a phenomenon that facilitates access to that phenomenon', which usually prioritises certain important aspects of a phenomenon and neglects others. I believe that this is equally applicable to Herodotus' descri ptions of the natural world, except that his sources have come through several iterations in some cases; that is to say, they have been remodelled because different individuals and cultures prioritise different aspects, and as well as having different languages have different knowledge bases. Thus, some stories come to Herodotus unrecognisably altered.

Analogical explanations are employed at numerous points in the Histories, though it is not clear in every instance that Herodotus is aware that they are analogical rather than literal. Analogies drawn from what is culturally familiar to their intended audience can be very helpful: for instance, the suggestion that the brain stores and retrieves information like a computer (which is only meaningful insofar as we know how a computer works). Obviously there are countless ways in which the brain is not like a computer (the negative analogy), all of which would be lost if we were to think the brain literally was a kind of computer. But we are aware that our analogy is just that, and that the two aspects of it may differ in many particulars. So long as we keep track of this nuance, the (positive) analogy is helpful rather than misleading. Translating the analogy for use by someone of a different cultural background may be tricky though: he might not have any knowledge of what a computer is or how it works; or perhaps he does, but fails to grasp the fundamental distinction separating the two parts of the analogy. After all, language abounds in dead metaphors: it would be easy to overlook a live one, or accidentally revive a dead one. If we were to hear about someone who literally had an electronic device inside their skull which recorded and retrieved their memories for them, it would make us as incredulous as the best of Herodotus' tall tales.

It would be an ambitious enterprise to argue that Herodotus is innocent of all charges of sensationalising his material, or that he is never overly credulous. I wish to argue though that much of what seems ridiculous and outlandish to Herodotus' modern reader stems from a confusion between literal and figurative language at some point in the transmission of Herodotus' sources. The idea that Herodotus has a literal belief in the stories of flying serpents and giant gold-collecting ants crops up again and again whenever someone is trying to discredit him as a credible source, or drum up book sales. Perhaps Herodotus' own abstention from explicitly expressing disbelief at them has something in common with the latter aim: after all, they are very entertaining stories. He maintains a detachment throughout, stating that 'my entire account is governed by the rule that I write down precisely what I am told by everyone, just as I heard it.'(2.123).

Feathers and doves: Herodotus identifies figurative expressions

Herodotus pauses often in his account of the history of the Persian War to give ethnographic accounts of the peoples involved, which often turn into lengthy digressions. For Herodotus the climate and natural wonders [thomata] of the land were of great importance in explaining the nature and temperament of its inhabitants, as well as being of great interest to him in themselves. In his account of the Scythians, he mentions in passing that 'the region above this land, to the north, is inaccessible to anyone trying to get very far into it, nor is it open to view, because both the land and the air are full of feathers, which obscure one's vision'(4.7.3). It comes at the end of a section on the Scythians' own traditions about their origins as they themselves relate them, but Herodotus passes over such an obviously strange phenomenon as feathers falling from the sky without further comment, save to reiterate that the story as a Scythian one(4.8.1). After a survey of alternative accounts of the origins of the Scythians, Herodotus returns to this curious phenomenon of the feathers:

Now here is my own opinion concerning the feathers that the Scythians say fill up the air and obstruct both visibility and travel through their country. In the upper regions of this land, snow falls continually [...]. Whoever has observed heavy snow falling knows what I mean when I say that the snow resembles [eoike] feathers, and so I think that the Scythians and surrounding people describe the snow as feathers because they note the similarity [eikazontas] between the two.(4.31)

Heavily falling snow is within the limits of Herodotus' personal experience and his explanation is a direct appeal to anyone else who shares in it and can corroborate his account. The image of heavy snow as feathers probably began its life as a metaphor, but became so familiar to the Scythians as to no longer give them pause for thought: as such, we may consider this to be the point at which it becomes a dead metaphor to a Scythian. To a speaker of another language who is not desensitised to the expression, it is striking in its bizarreness (cf. the English 'raining cats and dogs'). Herodotus and his audience and readers are struck first by the negative analogy: the many respects in which falling snow is not like feathers at all. But a Scythian, or someone else attuned to the expression, would note the positive analogy: as Herodotus points out, the image of feathers is a very good descri ption of the motion of this kind of snow; so much so that he can identify the original phenomenon being described from its figurative expression.

In a similar vein, Herodotus gives two accounts of the foundation of the oracle of Dodona as part of his historical investigation. This time, the one which he deems the more probable explanation comes first. In 2.54, he gives the Egyptians' account of two priestesses abducted from Thebes by Phoenicians, and sold into slavery at Dodona and Libya respectively, where they establish oracles. In Dodona though, the story goes that two black doves fly out of Thebes, one to Dodona and one to Libya, whereupon the Dodonaian dove speaks in a human voice and commands the foundation of the oracle. Herodotus regards the story he heard from the Dodonaians as a figurative expression of the truth, and maps it onto the Egyptian story:

I assume [moi dokeusi, 'it seems to me'] that the woman was called a dove by the Dodonaians because she was a barbarian and sounded to them like [omoios] a bird when she spoke [phthengesthai]. Thus they interpreted her speech so long as she spoke in a barbarian language, but after a while they say that the dove spoke with the voice of a human. I believe what really happened was that the woman now spoke to them intelligibly in Greek. How could a dove possibly speak with the voice of a human? And furthermore, the Dodonaians, by claiming that the dove was black, show that she was an Egyptian.(2.57.1-2)

As Herodotus mentions in 2.52.2, the oracle at Dodona is the most ancient of the Greek oracles, and thus, by his time, its foundation is not within living human memory. Though it has not been translated through different languages like the Scythian snow story, it must have passed down to Herodotus' time through several intermediaries, giving plenty of opportunity for distortion.

The Dodonaians are Greeks, and while it would be anachronistic and misleading to suppose that their culture is the same in every particular as that of the Ionian Herodotus, there is a sense by Herodotus' time that Greeks have a separate ethnic and cultural entity from non-Greeks (who are referred to by the non-pejorative term 'barbarian'). Herodotus' exposure to the Greek literature of his day would have primed him to spot and link the points of similarity here. The identification of women with birds, especially when they are in a position of vulnerability as these enslaved Egyptians assuredly are, is common in Greek literature: for instance, in the simile in Odyssey 22.468-73, the condemned maids are compared to doves (peleiai, the same word as Herodotus uses here) or thrushes caught in a snare. The Greek word barbaros (from whence 'barbarian') is an onomatopoeic derivation from the sound of foreign speech as perceived by Greeks: there are many such examples of the association of barbarian speech to the twittering of birds. In Agamemnon 1050-51 Clytaemnestra explicitly equates them in speaking of the captive foreign prophetess Cassandra; and phthongos (the root of the verb phthengesthai used here by Herodotus) in the context of a human crying out like a bird appears in Sophocles' Antigone 424.

Whilst it is not the case that Herodotus would necessarily have been familiar with these particular works (he certainly could not have known the Antigone, since it takes its cue from Herodotus' own story of Intaphernes' wife), they are presumably representative of the literature Herodotus would have been familiar with, and would share in common cultural assumptions. Since Herodotus at least partly shares cultural assumptions with the Dodonaians, he can untangle the literal truth behind the figurative origin myth.

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