South with Herodotus #5 (and a few movies)

Although many passages in Herodotus are tedious, the book on the whole is entertaining. Herodotus loves exaggeration and drama, as in the little story told in Book Four about Macedonian youths who disguised themselves as women and stabbed Persian banqueters to death.
He was endlessly curious about everything and everybody, and enjoyed what we might call multi-culturalism today. Also, though he was clearly on the Greek side against the Persians and proud of Greek success, he made no effort to disguise Greek duplicity, self-interest, cowardice (on occasion), and greed.
At one meal, while I was at the saxophone retreat in Wildacres, I sat next to a fine tenor saxophone player named Kevin Muse, whom I took to be about 19, part of the contingent of ambitious young musicians. Kevin was on my left, and on my right was a Greek-American physician closer to my age named Tom Koinis. Kevin said something in passing about the ancient Greeks' satirizing doctors, so I said, "Have you read Aristophanes?"
This proved to be a ridiculous question.
I assumed that Kevin might have read Aristophanes in a survey course in Western culture or something like as an undergraduate music major, but it turned out that he is an astonishingly young looking man of 43 and a professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. So much for my ability to size people up.
Kevin told me that it's thought that Herodotus recited portions of his book as entertainment at banquets, which gave me a better feeling for what I was reading.
When I got home, my wife lent me a copy of Herodotean Inquiries by the eminent classicist, Seth Benardete, and I have to admit that I haven't done more than open it and skim pages here and there.
I think I have had enough of Herodotus.
I confess that my interest was shallow and satisfied when I got to p. 599.
Meanwhile, we saw 7 movies at the Jerusalem Film Festival, one excellent one, Death in Sarajevo, one awful Turkish movie called The Album, and only one other that I'm sorry I saw: an Icelandic coming-of-age movie called Sparrows.
The Turkish movie portrayed people so vulgar, so shallow, so selfish, that you aren't surprised by the vindictive measures being taken by the government now, against so many hundreds of people that you can only assume they had extensive lists of political enemies to dispose of at the first opportunity. The events in Turkey now, the coup and the repression following its defeat, will inevitably leave an open wound in a society that already had its share of open wounds.
As for the lesson of Death in Sarajevo: like the race issue in the United States, and the specific history of slavery in the South, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here where I live, the tangled grudges and resentments of what was once Yugoslavia will never sort themselves out into a peaceful solution.
Eventually, the conflict may become irrelevant to people, but this will take a very long time. Individuals are trapped in historical events too big to resist or grasp, and they are left with bitter emotions.
Herodotus has little or nothing to say about the thousands of soldiers killed in the wars he describes, the extras in the grand battle scenes, or the women who are part of the spoils of war. For the the warriors, military aggression was mainly an opportunity to get a share of plunder. For the women, it was just a nightmare. Post-traumatic stress was probably the norm back then.
Today we do care about the extras on the set. So that's progress of a sort.

South with Herodotus, #4

The incessant wars in Herodotus were motivated not only by the personal ambition of leaders and the grudges they bore, but, perhaps more importantly, by the quest for plunder:
 So Aristagoras went to Sardis and told Artaphernes that Naxos was an island of no great size, but a fair land and fertile, lying near Ionia, and containing much treasure and a vast number of slaves. "Make war then upon this land (he said) and reinstate the exiles; for if thou wilt do this, first of all, I have very rich gifts in store for thee (besides the cost of the armament, which it is fair that we who are the authors of the war should pay); and, secondly, thou wilt bring under the power of the king not only Naxos but the other islands which depend on it, as Paros, Andros, and all the rest of the Cyclades. And when thou hast gained these, thou mayeshe mentionst easily go on against Euboea, which is a large and wealthy island not less in size than Cyprus, and very easy to bring under. A hundred ships were quite enough to subdue the whole."
It's hard to escape the feeling that, whatever monuments you may see as you tour the world, they were all erected with money plundered in one way or another from foreign conquests and exploitation, domestic oppression, and slavery.
I only spent a morning in the old part of Charleston on this trip, and  it was much more splendid that I remembered it. Until the Civil War, Charleston was a major center of commerce, a wealthy, cosmopolitan, and impressive city, and all its prosperity was based on slavery. I gather from the information on the Internet that Charleston is no reemerging. The old, historic area (South of Broad) is one of the most beautiful urban places I've been in. And the historical buildings, so beautifully restored and maintained, probably all owe their glory to wealth based on slavery.
History seemed to be more present in what I saw of the South, probably because so many of the issues remain unresolved: the contrast between gentility and cruelty, the sophistication of the wealthy Charleston elite, who traveled in Europe and brought works of art and furnishings home with them, and the ferocity of those who went to Africa to bring back slaves.
History is what Charleston sells to tourists.
I took a water taxi across the harbor after my morning in Charleston, to meet my cousin Beth, so we could leave for North Carolina. The ride was pleasant and breezy, enjoyable. My destination was Patriot's Point, where a decommissioned aircraft carrier,  submarine, and destroyer are anchored as tourist attractions (Charleston is long on tourist attractions), along with hundreds of pleasure boats. The water taxi sailed right under the shadow of the aircraft carrier, the USS Yorktown, built in 1943 at a cost of 68-78 million 1942 dollars, a billion or more of today's dollars. As we approached the huge ship, I was aghast thinking about the amount of money it must have cost to build it (I estimated about a fifth of its actual cost), and for what: to kill people so they wouldn't kill us. Herodotus would feel right at home, if he could somehow realize that the enormous vessel floating at Patriot's Point was a descendant of the Greek, Persian, and Phoenician war ships that figure in his book.
As aircraft carriers go, the Yorktown is tiny, roughly a third of the displacement and a fourth of the cost. As a monumental waste of money, it doesn't have to be any bigger than it is.

South with Herodotus - #3

I didn't hear from a single Trump supporter during my entire trip to the United States, though Trump will most likely win in South Carolina and has a good chance of winning in North Carolina. That only means that I didn't talk to a lot of strangers beyond asking directions or ordering a meal in a restaurant.
For a reader of Herodotus, Trump is nothing new. The Histories are full of ambitious and cynical men, motivated mainly by self-interest and greed. Indeed, the cruel violence and amorality of the world  he describes are appalling. Here, in a passage chosen essentially at random, is the way the Scythians purportedly put false soothsayers to death:

The mode of their execution is the following: a waggon is loaded with brushwood, and oxen are harnessed to it; the soothsayers, with their feet tied together, their hands bound behind their backs, and their mouths gagged, are thrust into the midst of the brushwood; finally the wood is set alight, and the oxen, being startled, are made to rush off with the waggon. It often happens that the oxen and the soothsayers are both consumed together, but sometimes the pole of the waggon is burnt through, and the oxen escape with a scorching.

Clearly Herodotus delights in describing the ritual cruelty of the Scythians, but cruelty in war is the order of the day:

The Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians, who had got into their hands many more than the Phocaeans from among the crews of the forty vessels that were destroyed, landed their captives upon the coast after the fight, and stoned them all to death.

Warefare is constant in the world Herodotus describes, often for the personal ambition of kings, and equally because of remembered slights, insults, and dirty tricks. Women are seldom more than chattels, taken whenever a man in power pleases. There seems to be very little of what we call morality, though occasionally people give wise speeches:

Amasis to Polycrates thus sayeth: It is a pleasure to hear of a friend and ally prospering, but thy exceeding prosperity does not cause me joy, forasmuch as I know that the gods are envious. My wish for myself and for those whom I love is to be now successful, and now to meet with a check; thus passing through life amid alternate good and ill, rather than with perpetual good fortune. For never yet did I hear tell of any one succeeding in all his undertakings, who did not meet with calamity at last, and come to utter ruin.

Herodotus seldom expresses approval or disapproval of  the people he describes and their actions. He is clearly a Greek patriot, proud of the Greek victory over the Persians, but he doesn't make the Persians out to be such awful people.

He is not a writer with illusions about human nature.

South with Herodotus #2

The Bible is quite interested in genealogy:
Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's handmaid, bare unto Abraham: And these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, according to their generations: the firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth; and Kedar, and Adbeel, and Mibsam, And Mishma, and Dumah, and Massa, Hadar, and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah: These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names, by their towns, and by their castles; twelve princes according to their nations. (Gen. 25:12-16)
Herodotus shares that interest:

There was a certain king of Sardis, Candaules by name, whom the Greeks called Myrsilus. He was a descendant of Alcaeus, son of Hercules. The first king of this dynasty was Agron, son of Ninus, grandson of Belus, and great-grandson of Alcaeus; Candaules, son of Myrsus, was the last. The kings who reigned before Agron sprang from Lydus, son of Atys, from whom the people of the land, called
previously Meonians, received the name of Lydians. The Heraclides, descended from Hercules and the slave-girl of Jardanus, having been entrusted by these princes with the management of affairs, obtained the kingdom by an oracle. Their rule endured for two and twenty generations of men, a space of five hundred and five years; during the whole of which period, from Agron to Candaules, the crown descended in the direct line from father to son. (Herodotus, Book 1)

The modern reader wonders why the Bible bothers telling us the names and lineage of people who are at best tangential to the story, just as she wonders why Herodotus keeps telling us who was descended from whom and what contest they won at the games. These details seem pointless to us - which is just the point. Ancient literature came into being in a society radically different from ours. Read correctly, it takes us there.

But what is the correct way of reading ancient literature? Does it really take us into antiquity?

I suggest reading these books like a time traveler. 

If you could land a time capsule in fifth century BCE Greece, you wouldn't be quite sure of what you were seeing when you stepped out. You would have to observe cautiously and avoid jumping to conclusions. You would need a reliable informant to explain things. But how could you find one? And how could you know if he was reliable? It would be a little like a reporter asking his taxi driver to explain things to him while on the way to a new foreign assignment.

Reading Herodotus I had to be doubly cautious, because I was reading him in translation, and I depended on the translator's ability to decipher the text and render his understanding. Is de Selincourt a reliable informant? 

What exactly did the passage I just quoted, about Candaules, Hercules, and the rest mean to Herodotus' audience? Why were they interested? 

What it was for them cannot be what it is for us. Our interest in Herodotus as a key to understanding ancient Greek culture is obviously foreign to the interest of Herodotus' contemporaries - since they probably assumed they understood their own culture perfectly well.

I was set down in South Carolina, not a place as foreign to me as ancient Greece, but I couldn't always understand what I was seeing. I spent a summer in Charleston in the summer of 1968, teaching African-American high school students in an Upward Bound program, but I remembered very little of the city, and things have changed significantly since then.

Fortunately, I did have a reliable informant, my second cousin Beth Keyserling, who put me up at her house, introduced me to her daughters, and briefed me extensively.

Going South with Herodotus - #1

I was looking for a book to bring with me on my rather long trip to America and settled on the first Greek historian, Herodotus, whom I had never read. We had an old Penguin Classics paperback edition in our library, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. The book itself was more than fifty years old. My wife bought it in Athens when she was there on a Fulbright in 1968-69, and the translation probably dates to the 1930s.
I'm not quite sure why I chose to read Herodotus after all these years of ignorance, but it was the right choice: a long, slow, irrelevant, and fascinating read. In a rambling way, he tells the story of the Greeks' repulsion of the Persian invasion, led by Xerxes, in 480 BCE, with fascinating and lurid descriptions of the customs and beliefs of many of the peoples of the Ancient Near East.
I went to America primarily to receive a prize for translating Aharon Appelfeld's book for younger readers, published by 7 Stories Press under the title, "Adam and Thomas." As I have told people innumerable times by now, the main reason I decided to attend the American Jewish Libraries conference was its location: Charleston, where I have cousins. Indeed, as I have frequently boasted, my second cousin Billy Keyserling, is the mayor of Beaufort, a town on the coast south of Charleston.
Since the prize money covered half of my air-fare, and the publisher promised to cover the other half, I decided to go. I planned to start my trip with a visit to my son and his family in Washington, DC and then I would go down to Charleston, visit Billy and his brother and sister, and then return home. Then, serendipitously, when looking for more information about thmme New Century Saxophone Quartet, a fine ensemble, I discovered that, just a few days after the convention in Charleston, there would be a week-long "saxophone retreat" at Wildacres, in the improbably (to my ears, at any rate) named town of Little Switzerland, North Carolina, which didn't sound impossibly distant from Charleston. The retreat, an annual event, was to be led by a stellar tenor saxophone player, Jim Houlik. So I decided to extend my stay in the US by a week, which certainly ought to have given me time to finish Herodotus. But in fact I only finished yesterday evening, a week after my return to Israel.
If I had read Herodotus as a student, like most people who have read him, I would not have read him with the historical books of the Bible in the back of my mind.  I also would not have read him with fifty years of intervening life experience. The stories of Saul, David, Solomon, and the various kings of Judah and Israel mainly concern sinning against God, being punished, obeying God, and being rewarded. The stories Herodotus tells have a lot to do with following the cryptic instructions of oracles, but almost nothing to do with right action in obedience to divine law. 
Herotodus is curious about everybody in the world who comes to his attention (interestingly, we descendants of the ancient Israelites, who think we were so important, do not even rate a mention in his narrative). The Bible is narrowly focused on the Twelve Tribes descended from Jacob, and troubles to mention only their enemies. Herotodus displays a great deal of geographical knowledge (some of it quite fanciful). The Bible is barely interested in any place other than the Land of Israel. The Biblical narrator is anonymous and impersonal. Herotodus' personality comes out in his writing. In Book One, for example, he writes: "The customs which I know the Persians to observe are the following: they have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly. This comes, I think, from their not believing the gods to have the same nature with men, as the Greeks imagine." The Biblical narrator would never speak for himself that way, and he would never think to compare his religion with another, except to condemn idol worship.

Heredotus is mainly famous, or notorious, for his sensational accounts of the customs of various foreign peoples. Here is a typical example: "The Magi are a very peculiar race, different entirely from the Egyptian priests, and indeed from all other men whatsoever. The Egyptian priests make it a point of religion not to kill any live animals except those which they offer in sacrifice. The Magi, on the contrary, kill animals of all kinds with their own hands, excepting dogs and men. They even seem to take a delight in the employment, and kill, as readily as they do other animals, ants and snakes, and such like flying or creeping things. However, since this has always been their custom, let them keep to it. I return to my former narrative."

Perhaps, in imitation of Herodotus, I should describe the ways of the American South, the drawl, the friendliness, the slow pace, and the deeply contested history. In a way, the South begins in Washington, but it wasn't until I reached Charleston that I was truly immersed in the region. The immersion was slow, since I spent my first two days there in a Marriott hotel, which might have been almost anywhere, the way an airport is a neutral space.

I did, however, venture out of the Marriott for a couple of meals, since the American Jewish Libraries, an impecunious organization, were only treating me to one dinner: I had some flounder in a the Marina Variety Store, a fish restaurant, which proved to be farther from the hotel than I had been led to believe, and grits for lunch at the Hominy Grill the following day (the waitresses sported tee-shirts proclaiming, "Grits are Good for You"). Usually I feel odd eating alone in restaurants, but I rather enjoyed the experience this time.

This trip was taking me pretty far away from Israel and Judaism, but I decided to avoid meat and seafood, to keep an approximation of kashrut.