10 October, 13.00–14.10 (Aula, LUX)

Suzanne Marchand (Louisiana), “Learning from the Father of Lies: Herodotus’ Lessons for Modern Truth-Seekers”

Nineteenth-century historians loved to contrast the ancient writers Herodotus and Thucydides, usually to the great detriment of the former.  Herodotus, the first half of whose Histories dealt with Near Eastern kings, customs, religions, geographies, fauna, and wonders before the Persian Wars, was characterized as a gullible child, who had gathered and reported little but the gossip of self-aggrandizing ‘oriental’ informants; he only became something like a ‘real’ historian when he wrote about the Greek victories on the battlefield.  Thucydides, by contrast, was a manly historian devoted to factual Realpolitik. His History of the Peloponnesian Wars was what history should be: a national history, written by a person with full linguistic mastery of his material, chronologically precise, stripped of uncertainties, amusing stories, wildlife, and women.  From about 1820 to 1890, these historians succeeded in making Thucydides the true father of ‘scientific’ history, and consigning Herodotus, and especially his ‘oriental prelude,’ to the status of a naïve, though lovable, fabulist.

This part of the story is predictable.  What is less understood is that these historians were far from being alone in the knowledge-making world of the nineteenth century.  Looking more broadly across this world we find at least as many readers and writers of ancient history who retained their faith in Herodotus’ Near Eastern reports, hoping to turn them into ‘real’ knowledge.  Indeed, the very wide spectrum of the Herodotean faithful  ranged from Russo-Germans seeking the origins of the Scythians to African Americans pursuing the history of black persons in Egypt and Ethiopia.  Arthur Gobineau was a fan, as was David Livingstone. Herodotus also appealed to a small number of social historians of ancient Greece, and their anthropologically-minded friends. Many of the attempts of this motley crew to make knowledge from what the hypercritics had deemed ‘myth’ required inventing new methods of knowledge-making, some of them successful, some of them wildly speculative. Their collective contribution, however, was to push ‘history’ far beyond the bounds set by the critical historians, and to seek answers to questions the public wished answered, whether or not it was safely ‘scientific’ to do so.  I hope in taking on this subject to discuss the pros and cons of attempting to ‘know’ things that had been deemed unknowable, and to show how Herodotus, precisely as ‘father of lies,’ was the jumping off point for forms of methodological innovation that the Stoic and ‘scientific’ Thucydides could never have engendered.