A Guide to Reading Herodotus' Histories by Sheehan Sean

Author:Sheehan, Sean
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474292689
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

Athenian history (5.55–96)

Aristagoras’ visit to Sparta afforded the occasion for a digression concerning that city’s political history and his trip afterwards to Athens also affords an excursus, though a far lengthier one, that looks back to earlier political difficulties in the Athenian polis. It carries on from events covered in a parenthesis in Book One (1.59–65) about how Peisistratus became tyrant of Athens, and concludes in Book Five with the fall of the Peisistratids and the gain for Athens of isēgoriē (equality, freedom of speech), analogous to Sparta having emerged from its past period of trouble with eunomiē (good political order).

Some chapters within the digression into Athens’ past are minor detours of their own and while the first two of these – the family origins of the tyrannicides and how the alphabet came to be used in Greece (5.57–61) – are not obviously relevant to the Ionian revolt, their subject matter and treatment are hallmarks of Herodotus. There is an abiding interest in Histories with questions of kinship and lineage, and looking into the foundations of the Greek alphabet is consonant with the principled intention, announced in the proem, of ‘showing-forth’ the ‘inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus’. The investigator’s eyewitness evidence – ‘I myself have seen’ the Cadmean inscriptions (5.59) – is very much characteristic of how the author goes about fulfilling his announced objective and an interesting example of how he uses inscriptions to throw light on a very distant period, supposedly predating the Trojan War, when little of any oral tradition has survived or carries much value (Thomas 1989: 90). Another instance of Herodotus’ liking for embedding portions of his text is the loop within the digression that begins at 5.55 with the information that the tyrant Hipparchus was assassinated: the loop delves into origins of the Greek alphabet at 5.58 before returning at 5.62 to the point reached at 5.56. Having reached this point, the reader learns what happened after the assassination of Hipparchus at a Panathenaic procession. The loop completed, the main digression about Athens’ past continues with background information that will lead to the context for understanding why, some thirty-five chapters later, Athens responds to the visit of Aristagoras in the way it does.

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