Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Herodot (Herodotus); Entmythologisierung der Mythen; Herodot - Aischylos

Kurzinhalt: Herodotus distrusted Homer; he was inclined to believe the Egyptians;

Textausschnitt: 2. Herodotus
17/1 The historiai were the inquiries undertaken by Herodotus with the purpose of generally preserving ta genomena, the recollections or traditions, and of specifically preserving the traditions that had a bearing on the prehistory of the great conflict between Hellenes and barbarians in the Persian Wars (1.5). At the moment we are concerned, not with the rich detail of the Histories, but with the method used by Herodotus for extracting what he considered the truth of events from his sources. Two examples will illustrate the problem. (103; Fs)

18/1 The most comprehensive source for the prehistory of the European-Asiatic conflict was Homer. But Herodotus distrusted Homer, and on several occasions doubted the correctness of his account, because he was familiar with the Asiatic versions of the same events. And he preferred to lean on the Asiatic versions when he became critical, because they had already transformed the mythical and poetic traditions of the Greeks into the new type of pragmatic account that he wanted to develop himself. The spirit of this transformation can be gathered best from the account of the Trojan War given to Herodotus by Egyptian priests. (103f; Fs)

19/1 The historian questioned the Egyptians concerning their opinion about the reliability of Homer's story in the Iliad; and he found them quite willing to set him right and to tell him how it all really happened. This is their story condensed: (104; Fs)

Helen was indeed abducted by Paris; and the Greeks really went with a great host to Troy. They demanded by a mission the return of Helen and the stolen treasure. But the Trojans swore that they had neither the woman nor her possessions but that both were in Egypt in the hands of King Proteus. The Greeks, not believing the Trojans, embarked on the long siege; and when they had conquered the city, they found that the Trojans had spoken the truth. Menelaus, then, was dispatched to Egypt and there he received back Helen and the treasure.

20/1 Herodotus was inclined to believe the Egyptians, because the Homeric story violated common sense. If Helen had really been at Troy, she would have been returned to the Achaeans. Neither Priam nor his entourage must be assumed to have been mad and to have risked their own persons, their children, and their city for the purpose that Paris might keep Helen. Even if at the beginning they had been so minded, they would soon have changed their minds when they saw the losses mounting. Moreover, Paris was not an important personage in Troy,- it is inconceivable that Hector, the older and more valiant man, should have consented to the mad policy. The only explanation is that Helen really was not there. If the Greeks did not believe them, it was the will of the gods to punish Troy for her wrongdoing (2.118-20). On this occasion Herodotus carefully distinguished between the story, which he attributed to the Egyptians, and the argument for his preference, which he claimed as his own. (104; Fs) (notabene)

21/1 The Asiatic background of the method becomes even more apparent in the opening chapters of the Histories when Herodotus reports his Persian and Phoenician sources concerning the conflict between Europe and Asia. From Persian sages he received the following story about the origin of the conflict (condensed):

The Phoenicians started the trouble. They came from the Indic Ocean and settled on the Aegean shore. There they engaged in sea trade and, on one occasion, abducted Io, the daughter of the King of Argos, and brought her to Egypt. The Asiatic misdeed was countered by the Greeks, probably Cretans, who abducted Europa, the daughter of the King of Tyre in Phoenicia. The accounts were balanced. Then the Greeks started new trouble by abducting Medea from Colchis. And two generations later it was the turn of the Asiatics, when Paris abducted Helen. Again it was a draw. But now the Greeks did something for which they were greatly to be blamed, when they countered with an armed invasion of Asia.

22/1 This time, the rationalistic reasons for the blame are given by the Persians themselves (condensed): (105; Fs)

The Persians admit that it is wrong to abduct women, but to chase after them with serious intention of revenge is foolish. A prudent man will not pursue the matter further,- for obviously such women are not abducted against their wishes. The Asiatics did not pay much attention to the abduction of their women; but the Greeks gathered a great host and destroyed the kingdom of Priam. Ever since, the Asiatics have regarded the Hellenes as their enemies.

23/1 There can hardly be a doubt that Herodotus is on the side of the Asiatic psychologists, for he points up the argument of his Persian sages by the Phoenician version of the abduction of Io. According to these worldly-wise seafarers the lady had an affair with the captain of the ship and departed with him of her own accord when she perceived herself to be with child (1.1-5). (105; Fs)

24/1 The two examples will be sufficient for our purpose. It appears that Herodotus, in order to transform his sources into history, employed and developed a method that was already widely applied in the border area of Greek and Asiatic civilizations. In the report of the Persian sages, a chronology of events was derived from a number of Greek myths,- the facts were slanted somewhat in order to serve what today we would call the "national interest"; and a reasonable history emerged through the application of common sense and elementary prudence. In the case of the Helen story that he received from the Egyptians, we see Herodotus proudly taking a hand himself at developing an argument of the Asiatic type in order to justify his preference for the Egyptian story against Homer. (105; Fs)

25/1 The method is of interest in several respects. When Herodotus took the mythoi at their face value as historical sources, a large vista of early Greek history opened, with its relations to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Crete - a vista which, on the whole, was historically true. And while the methods developed by modern historians and archaeologists for the purposes of using the myths and epics as guides to historical reality have become infinitely more cautious, subtle, and complicated, and usually will lead to widely differing results in the detail, the principle of the procedure is still the one followed by Herodotus. We still assume that a concentration of myths on a geographical site indicates historical happenings at this site-and we expect that an excavation will render important results. When Homer chooses the name Phoenix for the educator of Achilles, or the name Aegyptius for the lord who opened the assembly on Ithaca, we assume that Mycenaean civilization had connections with Phoenicia and Egypt that made the choice of such names intelligible to the hearer. And inversely when, according to the report of Herodotus, Egyptian priests had developed a long story about Helen in Egypt and built it into some place in their history, we assume that they had a rather intimate knowledge of various cycles of the Greek epic and must have been duly impressed by them. (105f; Fs)

26/1 The method, second, reveals a far-reaching destruction of the myth through a rationalist psychology. From the Herodotean texts it appears that the new psychology had its origin on the Asiatic frontier; and that would cast an interesting light on at least one of the sources of the rationalism that prevailed in Athens, in the wake of the Persian Wars, at the time when Herodotus temporarily settled in the city. By rationalist destruction is meant the development of the dispassionate coordination of means and ends as a standard of right action, inevitably in opposition to the Homeric participation in the order of Zeus and Themis as the standard. The destructiveness appears, therefore, most glaringly in Herodotus' argument against the historical reliability of Homer. The story that the Trojans did not want to surrender Helen could not be true, because nobody would have been so foolish as to ruin a city for such a cause. The profound concern of Homer with the aetiology of disorder, his subtle analysis that tried to explain precisely why such foolishness happened, were apparently lost on Herodotus. (106; Fs)

27/1 In the light of the preceding reflection, the method is, third, of interest as a symptom of the decay of Hellenic civilization. Herodotus not only knew his Homer well, but was in general one of the most widely informed and cultivated men of his age. If Herodotus could no longer understand Homer, the question imposes itself: Who could? Only one generation earlier, Aeschylus was still moving on the spiritual level of Homer; considering the fact that Herodotus was a greatly admired and popular author in Athens only a few decades later, the spiritual and intellectual decline must have been as rapid as it was terrific. The question is of further interest because of the later Platonic attacks on Homer. If the Herodotean interpretation was representative of a general trend, if more or less everybody read Homer in this manner, one part at least of the Platonic attack would have been directed not so much against Homer as against the manner in which he was misunderstood. The notion of Homer as "the educator of Hellas" will bear some closer study for the fifth and fourth centuries. (106f; Fs) (notabene)