Moreover, Rendering an Account of What Aristotle Takes to Be This Concept Is Almost a Heroic Undertaking

140 BOOK REVIEWS thinking; moreover, rendering an account of what Aristotle takes to be this concept is almost a heroic undertaking. Philosophers and political theorists alike can find much to ponder in this treatise. Burns’ suggestive critique is enlightening and provocative, in the manner that good history of philosophy should be. Highly recommended. Anthony Lisska18 DENISON UNIVERSITY Debra Hamel, Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), xxiii + 329 pp., $29.95 (pbk). ISBN 9781421406565. Why read Herodotus? While Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and others have longed served as fertile resources for political philosophy, Herodotus has been mostly neglected. Despite a recent efflorescence of scholarship on Herodotus in classical studies, Herodotus has not exerted much influence on how students of political thought, mostly in politics or philosophy depart- ments, reflect upon the present. In general, Herodotus is most often teamed with Thucydides as the less scientific (and thus less useful) of the two histori- ans. Herodotus may offer an instructive account of the origins of Athens or reflections on the perceived value of democracy, oligarchy and kingship in the ‘Constitutional Debate’, but his thought as a whole and the craft of his writing have largely been ignored from within these camps. In her Reading Herodotus,19 Debra Hamel offers an opportunity to recon- sider why we should (or shouldn’t) read Herodotus. Put pithily, Hamel argues that we should read Herodotus because it’s fun. What other text of the ancient world would discuss urination, infestations of worms, necrophilia, lice and flatulence with so much delightful detail and gleeful storytelling? Hamel’s book offers a sampling of ‘the juicy bits’ from Herodotus’ oeuvre, staying close to the surface of his stories and reminding the reader who hasn’t cracked the Histories in a while of precisely what she’s missing. Moreover, although Hamel’s selective retelling does occasion some jarring omissions and reductions of Herodotus’ wide-ranging and digressive text, Reading Herodotus not only offers a substantial answer to the question — why read Herodotus? — but also 18 [email protected] 19 Hamel adopts the title of The History for Herodotus’ work. While there seems to be no clear consensus about the proper title, I prefer Histories since, as Seth Benardete has argued, Herodotus’ work is better considered a collection of inquiries rather than a singu- lar one. For this reason, I will refer to Herodotus’ Histories (rather than The History). See Seth Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries (South Bend, 1999). BOOK REVIEWS 141 prompts reflection on why Herodotus is not read more seriously by students of ancient political philosophy and what such serious reading might elicit. Without much fanfare or pretence, Reading Herodotus offers itself as a kind of equivalent to Lambs’ ‘Tales from Shakespeare’ — but for Herodotus. In other words, Reading Herodotus retells, with some fidelity (and with some interpretation), the tales for which Herodotus has rightly won acclaim and influence. For the most part, the book follows Herodotus’ organization, tracing the origins of the Persian Wars back to Croesus’ conflict with Cyrus, following the rise of the Persians and their first skirmishes with Greeks in Ionia, and then detailing the three great sallies into the Mediterranean which culminated with the battles of Marathon in 490, Salamis and Thermopylae in 480, and Plataea and Mycale in 479. Along the way, Hamel pauses to explore Egypt and Scythia and numerous other customs and stories Herodotus’ narrative traverses. The book moves briskly with only infrequent academic clutter. Although Hamel confesses that her interests may ‘tend to the scatological, sexual, and sophomoric’ (p. 4), her treatment of Herodotus’ Histories none- theless gives plenty of evidence for why Herodotus should interest students of ancient political thought. By focusing Herodotus’ digressive and associative text around the main narrative, Hamel’s reading highlights the development of political forms in the ancient world that the Histories illuminates. From Gyges in Book One to Xerxes in Book Nine Herodotus shows us political leaders taken too far by desire — be it for women or power or glory — and the unhappy consequences of these excesses. In counterpoint to such leaders and their regimes, however, Herodotus introduces the Greeks and the two political heroes of his story, Athens and Sparta, which from the beginning of the narrative counter the dependence of the Lydians, Persians, Egyptians and others upon their rulers’ whimsies with a measured commitment to isonomia,the ancient equivalent to ‘equality under the law’ and the measure of just rule for Herodotus. Yet as we read more deeply in the Histories we also recognize that this contrast is overdrawn: Herodotus also repeatedly appears to warn his Greek audience against their own tendencies towards excess, using his histori- cal investigations to admonish his contemporaries about their own parallels with past tyrants. In other words, as Sara Forsdyke has written, ‘Herodotus not only articulates Greek cultural categories and norms through his portraits of foreign cultures, but [he] also subjects them to critical examination’.20 The corruptive growth of the Persians may well begin to resemble the Athenians’; the relation between political freedom and military strength can trouble osten- sibly free regimes. The narrative arc towards freedom, complicated as it is by resonances between free and unfree, emerges organically from Romel’s focus 20 Sara Forsdyke, ‘Herodotus, Political History, and Political Thought’, in The Cam- bridge Companion to Herodotus, ed. C. Dewald and J. Marincola (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 224–41, pp. 225–6. Cf. Kurt Raaflaub, ‘Herodotus, Political Thought, and The Meaning of History’, Arethusa, 20 (1987), pp. 221–48..

Load more