The Histories

The Histories

Introduction

Herodotus Greek historian, called the Father of History, b. Halicarnassus, Asia Minor. Only scant knowledge of his life can be gleaned from his writings and from references to him by later writings. The value of his work lies not only in its accuracy, but in its scope and the rich diversity of information as well as the charm and simplicity of his writing. This paper aims to discuss his famous book the Histories.

Cicero called Herodotus the father of history, but he is not a historian's historian in the sense that Thucydides is. Thucydides, the younger man by about 15 years, produced a forthright account of the war that broke out between Athens and Sparta in 431BC, dished up without fear or favour and generously seasoned with cynicism and hard-nosed political insight. It's a narrative based on eye-witness accounts, often his own - with evidence, he tells us, carefully sifted so that he presents only the most authoritative version of events. He bequeathed us a highly influential world view in which the weak topple in the face of the mighty with plangent inevitability.

Discussion

Herodotus' tale of Gyges in the first book of his Histories initiates a pattern comprised of four stories in which the display of a woman affects male power relationships. A feature of autocratic rule, these stories associate calculated political theater with the overthrow, assumption, or undermining of political power. The forms and outcomes of these tales are diverse and unpredictable and demonstrate an uncertain relationship between power and the deliberate theatrical display of a woman. Emphasizing the difficulty of interpreting visual evidence correctly, these stories identify the vulnerability of political power to visual deception and add precision to the Histories' assessment of the genres of tragedy and historiography. Collectively, the stories affirm the precarious nature of political power, since the theatrical display of a woman has the potential to weaken and even to disempower men, even in the absence of greed, lust or passion. By demonstrating that visual evidence can mislead when misinterpreted, these stories call into question the ability of theatrical display to convey knowledge and, consequently, they validate implicitly the interpretive role of the historian.

The story of Gyges, prominent and primary in the Histories, introduces a motif that is recapitulated in three noteworthy later stories. Setting in motion the subsequent hostilities between Greeks and Persians, the Gyges tale is the first story that Herodotus relates on his own authority.



The Lydian king, Candaules, convinced that his wife is the most beautiful of all women, arranges for his bodyguard and chief adviser, Gyges, to view the queen naked. Candaules' purposes are not explicit, but if he intends this ploy to strengthen his position or authority in some way, he is seriously disappointed. At the queen's instigation, Gyges murders the king and takes the tyranny and the queen herself for his own (1.8-14). Later in Book 1, Peisistratus reinstates himself as tyrant of Athens by displaying to the Athenians a very tall, good-looking woman, Phye, arrayed in hoplite armor ...