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.
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.
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