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"What does Herodotus think of tyranny?

Answer by Roger Brock

Tyrants, sole rulers whose power resulted from usurpation rather than constitutional claims, were a major feature of the archaic period and so are prominent in Herodotus’ work. Herodotus is opposed to tyranny on principle, but he doesn’t demonise individual tyrants, regarding them as real people, not monsters. His principles come out most clearly when he is talking about Athens: he contrasts democratic freedom and tyranny (5.66, 78; see also 1.62, 3.143, 6.5) and the demotivating effect of ‘working for a master’ as opposed to fighting for oneself (there are similar ideas about Asiatic rulers in the roughly contemporary Hippocratic Airs Waters Places 16, 23), just as being ‘held down’ by the tyrant Peisistratus (1.59, 65) writes off Athens as a potential ally for King Croesus of Lydia.

The Persian Otanes expands the same antithesis into a general principle in the Persian ‘constitutional debate’ (3.80), where his portrait of the tyrant’s crimes echoes the Athenian stereotype as it appears for example in Theseus’ speech in Euripides’ tragedy from 423 BCE, Suppliant women (444-55). For Otanes, monarchy in any form is inherently liable to corruption, and kings of Persia in Herodotus do tend to align with a template of despotism that also applies to tyrants: for both, their autocracy makes them unaccountable, and arbiters of law rather than subject to it. Hence, they frequently descend into lawless and outrageous behaviour, transgressing social norms and resorting to violence and mutilation: the Corinthian tyrant Periander, who murders his wife, engages in necrophilia, abuses women, and attempts to use castration as a punishment, is a conspicuous Greek example (3.48, 50, 5.92, and for mutilation, see Pheretime of Barce: 4.202).

However, Herodotus is conscious that monarchy works for some cultures, and indeed the constitutional debate is won by Darius, who argues that sole rule is the reason for Persian power (3.82). It is equally beneficial for the Ethiopians and Massagetae, whose virtuous rulers successfully resist Persian imperialism (1.205-14; 3.17-25).

He is also aware of the allure of tyranny, which causes benefactors of the Great King to ask for it as a reward (always a bad choice!), and he sometimes reflects the popular admiration of the power and wealth of tyrants, as when he contrasts the Samian tyrant Polycrates’ horrible death with his previous magnificence (3.125). Tyrants could be ‘special’, too: the birth of the first Corinthian tyrant Cypselus is foretold by oracles, after which he miraculously avoids death as a baby (5.92), and there’s a portent before Peisistratus’ birth too (1.59). At Athens, Peisistratus also receives an oracle which helps him finally secure power: that’s because he has the skill to interpret it (1.62-3), and tyrants are often clever investigators and problem-solvers, as when Periander catches out the sailors who tried to rob and murder the kitharodic poet Arion (1.24).

Tyrants can be effective political operators, too: Herodotus concedes that Peisistratus ruled moderately (1.59), and Thrasybulus fools the Lydians (1.21-2) and sends Periander memorably cunning political advice (5.92) – the object lesson about cutting off the tall ears of corn recurs in Aristotle’s Politics in the fourth century BCE. To be sure, they areoften morally equivocal at best (Polycrates robs friends too, so that they’ll be more grateful to him for getting their property back: 3.39), but they’re also practically effective: Periander was included among the Seven Sages, alongside the general and autocrat Pittacus of Mytilene.

Finally, whatever their failings, Herodotus’ tyrants are always comprehensibly human, in contrast to, say, the lyric poet Pindar’s citation of Phalaris of Acragas as emblematic of wickedness (Pythian 1.95-6): their actions and motives are comprehensible, they have human weaknesses, and their family lives are often messed up in a way that invites a measure of sympathy, notably in the case of Periander and his alienated younger son (3.52-3), or the desperate attempt of Polycrates’ daughter to forestall his fatal journey, which shows that even tyrants can have someone who loves them (3.124). As so often, Herodotus’ view is nuanced, thoughtful, and sensitive to the diversity of human experience.

For more on tyranny and Herodotus’ view of it, here are a few suggestions:

Dewald, Carolyn. 2003. ‘Form and content: the question of tyranny in Herodotus’, in K. Morgan (ed.) Popular tyranny. Austin, Texas. 25-58.

Gray, Vivienne. 1996. ‘Herodotus and images of tyranny:  the tyrants of Corinth’, American journal of philology 117: 361-89.

Lewis, Sian. 2009. Greek tyranny. Bristol."

From the site of Herodotus Helpline.

Dr. Roger Brook is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds.

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Interiors of Masjid Wazeer Khan, Lahore; photographed by Areesha Khalid.

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"How did Herodotus know so much about what was happening in Persia?

Answer by Samantha Blankenship

This is a fantastic question. I like to think about this in terms of different networks of information flowing through Persia: some official, others not so official.

The official Achaemenid Persian propaganda machine was truly incredible; in fact, the Great Kings of Persia tell us explicitly that spreading their ideological message to all parts of the empire was a priority. In a long text along with a relief scuplture carved into the cliff face of a sacred mountain (Mount Bisotun in Iran) overlooking an important thoroughfare — a text carved three times in three separate languages — Darius I ‘the Great’ (r. 522-484 BCE) provides a monumental justification for what in reality amounted to his usurpation of the Persian throne. Towards the end of this inscription (at §60), Darius enjoins audiences to ‘declare it [the recorded story] to the people’, and even describes (in §70 of the Old Persian-language version) how he had the text copied on tablets and skins (i.e. parchment) and distributed throughout the empire, ‘everywhere in the lands/peoples’. We know he actually succeeded in disseminating his message widely, because local versions have been found in situ in Babylon and on parchment (in Aramaic translation) at the Jewish garrison in Elephantine, Egypt.

These mechanisms of dissemination were clearly supplemented by oral storytelling as well; this process, and its relationship to the written text at Mt. Bisotun, has been analysed by M. Rahim Shayegan in his book-length study Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumāta to Wahnām (Washington, DC, 2012). Part of the imperial propaganda programme is its translatability into multiple languages (as suggested already by the three different languages in which Darius had the Bisotun Inscription carved); and that explains how the narrative could take on even more linguistic forms and variations as it spread to all parts of the empire, including the Greek- and Carian-speaking margins where Herodotus hailed from.

In my view, though, something equally amazing about Herodotus is that, in addition to knowing what the Persian kings wanted the whole world to know, he also problematizes their official ideological claims. That is, he recognized some discrepancies between the official line and the reality on the ground (see for example Darius’ mercenary attitude to dishonesty at Histories 3.72.4, and his commissioning of a disingenuous trick from his groomsman Oebares at 3.85-87, in contrast to the historical Darius’ insistence on his own truthfulness at DB §§57 and 63). Faced with such disparities, he was able to think about and really critique the limitations on the Persian kings’ ability to control the flow of information throughout their empire and the world beyond. But how exactly would someone like Herodotus know about situations where the official story promulgated by the Great Kings differed from less-flattering realities?

I often think of the passage from the Histories (9.16) in which elite Persians and Greeks recline on couches together at a banquet in Thebes and worry in very personal terms about the human costs of the Greco-Persian War. Herodotus mentions that the story of this banquet was described to him second-hand by a certain Thesander of Orchomenos, who attended the banquet. One pictures Greeks like Herodotus – born a citizen of the Persian Empire when it stretched as far as Halicarnassus – or Thersander, a citizen of a ‘Medizing’ (that is, Persian-allied) city-state, conversing with well-informed Persians at such elite gatherings. Such Persians would have been kept abreast of real conditions very quickly, through official (but not public-facing) channels; the Achaemenids maintained a remarkably swift courier system along the Royal Road system, which Herodotus knew about (Histories 8.98; see also 5.52-53). Even so far away from home, then, Persians assigned to military and political posts in Greek-speaking provinces would be aware of contemporary affairs and could have communicated their own impressions and reactions to interlocutors like Herodotus. By comparing information received through these unofficial channels with the authorized imagery and storylines of Achaemenid kingship, then, Herodotus was able to develop a sophisticated understanding of the relationships between political power and official historical narratives."

Samanth Blankenship, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, University of Tennessee (research interests: Achaemenid Persia, ancient historiography, Greek prose)

From the site of Herodotus Helpline.

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Cats in ancient Greek vase paintings

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Why Did Herodotus not Mention the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

Stepany Dalley "Why Did Herodotus not Mention the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?", in Herodotus and His World: Essays from a Conference in Memory of George Foster (eds Peter Derow, Robert Parker), Oxford University Press 2003

"Abstract

In 1883, early in the days of deciphering cuneiform inscriptions, Archibald Sayce published a commentary on Herodotus' History Books 1-3, entitled The Ancient Empires of the East. He quoted authorities of his own time who questioned the reliability of Herodotus. Ctesias was reckoned a more trustworthy informant who ‘had good reason for accusing Herodotus of errors in his Assyrian history’. After all, Ctesias lived at the Persian court, and so he was supposed to have drunk from more direct sources of knowledge about the ancient Near East than Herodotus could have done. One hundred and twenty years after Sayce published his work, Assyriologists are in a better position to comment on Babylonian and Assyrian matters, thanks to the perseverance and brilliance of several generations of scholars. This chapter does not attempt to verify Herodotus on every point; rather it looks at certain items of information in the light of recent solid progress in ancient Near Eastern studies. It aims to try and find out why certain details appear to be incorrect, and to show how over-eager corrections, made from a poor base of evidence, are occasionally wrong."

Stephany Mary Dalley is British Assyriologist and scholar of the Ancient Near East, prior to her retirement a teaching Fellow at the Oriental Institute, Oxford.

Stepahany Dalley's theory on the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" is that in fact the Hanging Gardens were located in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh (destroyed more than a century before the birth of Herodotus), not in Babylon, that's why Herodotus did not mention them in his description of the city of Babylon. This is a topic debated among Assyriologists and the truth is that Stephanie Dalley's theory has been criticized by some of her colleagues. But anyway I find fruitful the nuanced approach of Dalley on Herodotus as source on the Babylonia of his time and her reaction to the overcritical attitude of some towards him.

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Gold signet ring inscribed with Linear A writing, Minoan, 1700-1600 BC

from The Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete

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Xerxes' Homer

Johannes Haubold "Xerxes' Homer" in Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millenium, Oxford University Press 2007.

"Abstract

This chapter argues that the reception of epic in wartime and post-war Greece was affected by an extended dialogue between both cultures. The Persian leadership used Homeric epic, especially the Iliad, in order to justify imperial expansion to the Greeks in their own cultural terms, just as they appropriated Babylonian and Judaic visions of history in order to validate their expansion elsewhere. Drawing on the Herodotean evidence for the Persians' use of Greek oracle-mongers, and especially his account of Xerxes' visit to Troy, which presented the king as the champion of Troy, seeking revenge for its downfall, the chapter suggests that Xerxes' Iliad consisted of a set of wholly new glosses on familiar topics, pro-Persian interpretations, and selective enactments."

According to the review of this chapter of the volume by Johanna Akujärvi (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007.12.36/ ):

"Herodotus’ Histories famously begins with an account of how learned Persians attributed the origins of the conflict between Greeks and Persians to a series of abductions of women starting with the Phoenicians taking Io and culminating with the Trojans seizing Helen which the Greeks avenged by capturing and destroying Troy (1.1-1.5). Are this and similar passages merely a “projection of Greek thinking on to non-Greeks” (p. 50) as is commonly assumed, or are such passages in the Histories a reflection of the actual existence of a Persian take on the Trojan War, and perhaps even a particular Persian interpretation of the Homeric epics? In the chapter “Xerxes’ Homer” Johannes Haubold argues — quite plausibly, with parallels to Persian rewriting of Babylonian and Judaic traditions — for the latter alternative, though one should keep in mind that the more he ventures into particulars the more uncertain the argument gets (as Haubold himself indicates). Haubold demonstrates that the Persians and their Greek expert advisors had every reason to attempt to control the shape and meaning of important local texts, so that the conflict could be explained and justified in terms familiar to the Greeks. Haubold reconstructs the Persian narrative of the conflict along these lines: “a Greek from the mainland (Peleus) rapes the goddess Thetis, setting in motion the fateful events that eventually lead to the clash between Achaeans and Trojans. In a second step, a Greek army sets out from the mainland, sacks an imperial city (Troy), and offends the local deity, Athena, in the process.” (p. 56)1 Both the deity and the unjustly sacked city of Troy finally find their champion in Xerxes. Further, Haubold argues that the Iliad — since no Ionians are mentioned among the Achaean contingents in Iliad 2 and what is more, Miletus is mentioned as fighting with the Trojans — may have been used to strengthen Ionian loyalty and as an argument for the idea of a Panasian army in a campaign against the Greeks in Europe. The Greek reaction, a creation of “Homer the Greek patriot” (p. 61) can most notably be observed in the re-enactment of the heroic epic tradition in Attic tragedy, and other traditions, such as the Athenian epitaphioi logoi in which the Trojan War is linked with the Persian Wars in a struggle of ‘us against them’.

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Babylon under the Achaemenids: the Greek sources re-considered

Johannes Haubold

“Babylon under the Achaemenids: the Greek sources re-considered”

This was the subject of a seminary by Pr. Johannes Haubold in September 2023 at Columbia CAM (Center for the Ancient Mediterranean), New York.

According to the abstract given by Pr. Haubold for this seminary:

"Recent scholarship has made a habit of pointing out the inaccuracy of Greek sources about Babylon: pace Herodotus, the Babylonians did not auction their daughters on the marriage market; pace Ctesias, Queen Semiramis is largely a figment of the imagination; and unbeknownst, it would seem, to both Herodotus and Ctesias, the Neo-Babylonian empire really did exist, controlling large swathes of the fertile crescent and the Arab peninsula in the 6th century BCE. All this we know because cuneiform sources are now well understood: by studying them, we can hope to cut through the fog of Greek mythmaking and get to the facts of the matter – or so goes the dominant account.

This paper takes a different approach. Rather than play off cuneiform reality against Greek fantasy, I ask how the two sets of sources can be used to complement and mutually illuminate each other. I make two suggestions in particular. First, Greek historians of the Achaemenid period attest to a remodeling of collective memory which occurred in the wake of major uprisings in Babylonia in the early 5th century BCE. The reprisals that ensued, including what has become known as the ‘end of archives’ (Waerzeggers), challenged established patterns of historical memory, and it is this challenge, I argue, that informs Greek mythmaking about Babylon. My second point follows from the first: as part of their attempt to disrupt home-grown imperial tradition, thinkers friendly to the Achaemenid project promoted a view of the Babylonian elites as either ineffective or effective only at enabling their Iranian overlords. The former tendency is prominent in Herodotus. The latter comes to the fore in Ctesias’ account of the fall of Nineveh. Ctesias there transforms the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar, who in his inscriptions boasts that he single-handedly threw off the Assyrian yoke, into the arch-collaborator Belesys, who with his Chaldean expertise enables a Median king to conquer Assyria, while holding no imperial aspirations of his own.

I conclude by reflecting on the manipulation of political and cultural memory in the Achaemenid empire; and on the insight that the Greek sources, with their story-telling approach, show some of the ways in which the Achaemenids and their allies exerted imperial control."

If I understand well what Pr. Haubold writes in this abstract, we should consider that the main sources of Herodotus on Babylon (besides a possible personal visit, not claimed unambiguously by Herodotus himself, doubted by many scholars and, even if it happened, short and without possibility of serious interactions with the Babylonian intellectual elites) must have been Persian and more generally Iranian (to include the Medes) or anyway pro-Persian, usually, I think, as intermediated by interpreters. I find that this is a plausible approach to a much debated topic, although of course one should not exclude totally the influence of other types of sources on the Herodotean account of Babylon. I think that with Ctesias things are simpler, as he lived for several years in the Persian court as personal physician of Artaxerxes II, and we must consider as evident that most of his information on Babylon had as source Persians and more generally people of the Persian court.

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Greece and Mesopotamia. Dialogues in Literature

Joannes Haubold Greece and Mesopotamia. Dialogues in Literature, Cambridge University Press 2020

"This book proposes a new approach to the study of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian literature. Ranging from Homer and Gilgamesh to Herodotus and the Babylonian-Greek author Berossos, it paints a picture of two literary cultures that, over the course of time, became profoundly entwined. Along the way, the book addresses many questions that are of interest to the student of the ancient world: how did the literature of Greece relate to that of its eastern neighbours? What did ancient readers from different cultures think it meant to be human? Who invented the writing of universal history as we know it? How did the Greeks come to divide the world into Greeks and 'barbarians', and what happened when they came to live alongside those 'barbarians' after the conquests of Alexander the Great? In addressing these questions, the book draws on cutting-edge research in comparative literature, postcolonial studies and archive theory.

Proposes a new, theoretically informed approach to the study of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian literature

Discusses a wide range of Greek and Mesopotamian texts, citing them both in the original language and in translation

Addresses some of the most central issues in the study of the ancient world, such as contact between the Greeks and their neighbours, the 'invention of the barbarian' in classical Greece and the making of hybrid identities in the Hellenistic period"

Pr. Johannes Haubold, Princeton University (Classics, Greek Literature and Language, Akkadian Literature and Language, Cultural Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World)

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Elton Barker on the Spartan Aristodemos and Homeric intertexts in Herodotus

" In this first presentation from the third edition of the Herodotus Helpline, Professor Elton Barker (The Open University) examines Herodotus' version of the Battle of Thermopylae - and in particular, his account of the Spartan Aristodemos, who did not fight alongside the so-called 300 - against the Homeric background."

From the youtube channel of Herodotus Helpline (September 2021).

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'Nocturne'. Granville Redmond.

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Santa Maria della Salute, Venecia

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Theatrical masks - comedy and tragedy. 

Herculaneum.

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Corinthian columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens. The building of the temple started during the reign of Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens in the 6th century BCE, but has been completed only under Roman emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century CE.

Beautiful Greece!!!!

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Speech and Authority in Herodotus

Mathieu de Bakker Speech and Authority in Herodotus' Histories.

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“There is peace even in the storm” ― Vincent van Gogh See more