Herodotus set himself the task of determining the cause of the conflicts between the Greeks and the eastern barbarians which had recently manifested itself in two Persian invasions of Hellas. The first had been repelled at Marathon in 490 BC by the Athenians, and by a combined fleet at Salamis in 480 BC and by a united army at Plataea the next year. Thus, his book is known variously as The Persian Wars or The Histories (from the Greek for “inquiries” or “researches”.)
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and barbarians from losing their due portion of glory; and to put on record what were the grounds of the feud.
I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.
Now these Egyptians had done their guard duty for three years, and no one released them from it. So they took counsel together, and by general decision they all deserted and made for Ethiopia. Psammetichus heard of it and pursued them. When he came up with them, he entreated them mightily; he would have them, he said, not desert their household gods and their wives and children. At this, it is said, one of their number showed him his prick and said, “Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.” So they took themselves off to the king of the Ethiopians and surrendered themselves to him, who gave them a gift in return.
In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.
For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them of all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best.
It is better to be envied than pitied.
If the Greeks were given side dishes, say the Persians, they would never stop eating. They are very addicted to wine, and it is forbidden to vomit or make water in the presence of anyone else. They keep very strictly to this practice, too: that they are wont to debate their most serious concerns when they are drunk. But whatsoever they decide on, drunk, this the master of the house where they are when debating proposes to them again on the next day, when they are sober. And if they like it, too, when sober, they act on it; but if they do not like it so, they let it be. And whatever they debate, in preliminary fashion, sober, they give to final decision drunk.
The Spartans fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs.
[The Spartans] made it plain to everyone, however, and above all to the King himself, that although he had plenty of troops, he did not have many men.
This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.
The Scythians take cannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was born in Halicarnassus, an Ionian city occupied by the Persian empire, at the eastern periphery of the Greek world where Greeks and foreigners met regularly, a place where a cosmopolitan attitude would have been natural. [But remember that the Greek word for foreigner was “barbarian”.] Herodotus came from a wealthy family, influential in politics and the arts — an uncle had written an epic poem called Ioniks on the foundation of the Ionian cities. Though the Persians were the city’s overlords, they had permitted a local tyrant to rule directly — this was the remarkable woman Artemisia (who appears played by Eva Green in the execrable movie 300 Rise of an Empire). Herodotus participated in an attempted coup against her and after its failure he was exiled. He returned later and, probably with the help of Athens, overthrew a tyranny led by Artemesia’s grandson but he found that he was unpopular with the citizenry and left his native city again. When the call when out for colonists to settle at Thurii in southern Italy in 443 BC, Herodotus volunteered along with the famous sophist Protagoras. He may well have died here, probably around the year 425 BC.
Exile was a common feature of life for prominent Greeks. Every city at any given time had citizens banished for a fixed time or forever, many of them scheming to return and work the same fate for their enemies. Athens institutionalized exile with its practice of ostracism and several of the heroic figures in Herodotus will be exiled by their city. Most such exiles however did not leave Greece but Herodotus seems to have been different in this regard. During his life in exile he made extensive travels through the Mediterranean world where he did his “researches” for his Persian Wars. We know he went to Egypt and made a trip to Tyre and Babylon, then all in the Persian empire; he voyaged into the Black Sea and into what is now the Ukraine and Russia, going 40 days journey up the Dnieper River. Ionia, Greece and southern Italy were all part of the Hellenic world which he knew personally. He does not seem to have spoken any other language than Greek (which may account for his credulity in some instances) and does not seem to have been an assiduous note-taker during his travels…”I seem to remember, etc.”
His book appears to have been written over a long period of time and amended more than once before its publication, which occurred sometime between 430-424 BC. It is a loosely-knit book with numerous digressions (deliberate and enjoyable). Such conventions were from Homer, on whom his audiences were brought up. It also points to the fact that it was meant to be read aloud; some sections are clearly meant for a stand-alone lecture — one of the ways that Herodotus earned his living during his exile. Silent reading was still relatively rare in any work longer than a letter. The Greeks and Romans reacted more responsively and immediately to the spoken word than we do. There is one source that claims that the Athenians voted Herodotus the sum of ten talents after hearing a part of his work. Now Persian Wars is a very pro-Athenian piece at a time when Athens was not popular but ten talents was an unbelievable fortune — 570 pounds of silver? We do know too that Thebes told him to take a hike and refused to let him speak to their young men but that Spartans were great fans of history — they hated thinking but they loved tales of war, politics and conflict.
The picture above shows a handsome modern historian clad in the Tilley hat that is the unmistakeable sign of a Canadian in foreign climes. He stands beside the bust of Herodotus in his home town, now known as Bodrum in southwestern Turkey. It’s a rather gaudy tourist site these days, most visitors coming for the gorgeous sea and the night clubs, but it contains a few memorials to Herodotus, some fragments of the Mausoleum that was once one of the Seven Wonders, and a splendid crusader castle.
Historians have pondered this question for centuries. I’ve always favoured Herodotus who seems to have been the first to ask an important question about the past, undertake research to establish the truth, and to publish a book of his findings. There were many before him who wrote of past events, usually the deeds of kings or religious figures, but they lacked the inquisitorial method and first-hand observations of the man from Halicarnassus.
Thucydides has his partisans. He was certainly less credulous than Herodotus and omitted any reference to the supernatural in his writings. On the other hand, his reconstruction of what Greek leaders might have said is nothing I would applaud in historians working today.
Nevertheless, both of these guys are of enormous value to our understanding of the past and both are, in their own ways, charming writers. (And I have busts of both of them.) For the next couple of days I’ll feature chunks of their works for those of you who have not had the pleasure of their acquaintance.
The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God. In Burke’s phrases, “He who gave us our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. – He willed therefore the state – He willed its connexion with the source and original archtype of all perfection.” Without the state, man’s condition is poor, nasty, brutish, and short-as Augustine argued, many centuries before Hobbes. The libertarians confound the state with government. But government-as Burke continued-“is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Among the more important of those human wants is “a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.” In short, a primary function of government is restraint; and that is anathema to libertarians, though an article of faith to conservatives.
Depression-era America was a period in which its criminal element were figures of great public interest. The restrictions of Prohibition and the hardships of the Dirty Thirties helped persuade many law-abiding citizens that the nation’s outlaw class were latter-day Robin Hoods or at least celebrities worth reading about. The names of John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker were on the lips of school children, reporters, politicians, and furious police officials.
One of the most famed of the banditti was Charles Arthur Floyd, aka “Pretty Boy”, fabled in literature, film, and song. Listen to his tale as recounted by Woody Guthrie:
Well gather round me children, a story I will tell About pretty boy Floyd the outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well. It was in the town of Shawnee on a Saturday afternoon His wife beside him in the wagon as into town they rode.
Then along came the deputy sheriff in a manner rather rude Using vulgar words of language, his wife she overheard. Then pretty boy grabbed a long chain and the deputy grabbed a gun And in the fight that followed he laid that deputy down.
Then he ran to the trees and bushes to live a life of shame Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name. He ran to the trees and bushes on the Canadian river shore And many a starving farmer opened up his door.
It was in Oklahoma City, it was on a Christmas day A whole carload of groceries with a letter that did say: You say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief Well here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.
As through this life you travel you meet some funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen. As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam You’ll never see an outlaw take a family from their home.
There is a lot of poetic anti-capitalist license in Guthrie’s version of events. Rather than being forced into a life of crime, Floyd was already a thief and convict by the time he was 21. After his release from prison in 1929 he turned his hand to bank robbing. Despite the killings that often marked his passage, he acquired a reputation as a friend of the common man. Tales spread of his destroying mortgage documentation in banks and giving money to poor farmers, but there is little hard proof of this. What can be proven is a series of murders and thefts in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Ohio.
In June 1933 “the Kansas City Massacre” made the headlines; four policemen and a prisoner were killed in a botched rescue attempt – Floyd was named as a suspect but he publicly denied his involvement. By now local and federal authorities were turning up the pressure on the brigands. Machine Gun Kelly was caught, Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger had been gunned down, vaulting Floyd to the top of the Most Wanted List. In October 1934, after a car crash Floyd was cornered in a farmer’s field and shot to death. Baby Face Nelson was killed within weeks and Ma Barker was shot a few months later. The age of the rural outlaws had ended.
Like Nell Gwynn, Marie-Jeanne Bécu, aka Madame du Barry, rose from the depths of the sex trade to the heights of royal favour.
She was born in 1743, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a monk. After a convent education, she worked as a street pedlar, a lady’s companion, a shop assistant, and a prostitute. She caught the eye of Jean du Barry, a Gascon nobleman who had made a fortune as a war contractor and who operated as a high-class pimp. He took her as his mistress and with his help she became one of Paris’s most successful courtesans. Her blonde hair, blue eyes, and pretty face (which seems rather insipid in contemporary portraits) eventually attracted Louis XV’s attention in 1768. Since the death of the king’s previous favourite Madame de Pompadour four years earlier, Louis had acknowledged no one as his maîtresse en titre. (Only the French could have invented an official role for a royal doxy, complete with state-funded apartments and privileges.) Du Barry needed a noble title to aspire to that role so a convenient marriage was arranged and she could openly appear at court.
Du Barry kept her royal lover happy until his death in 1774 by which time she had made powerful enemies for her dabbling in politics and her unbridled extravagance. The new queen, Marie Antoinette, had her banished to a convent for a time and du Barry was never able to return to the court of Louis XVI. She lived quietly on her rural estates until the French Revolution. She managed to survive the first few years of turmoil but her support of counter-revolutionary émigrés led to a sentence of death in December 1793. Her last words on the scaffold were “You are going to hurt me, please don’t hurt me, just one more moment, I beg you!”
We have spoken about ladies-in-waiting and the ease of their transition to the role of royal mistress. Sometimes, however, a woman is just so gosh-darn attractive that the king plucks her from the lower orders and keeps her as a pet. For a while.
Say hello then to Nell Gwynn, prostitute and actress (then, as now, the two professions were often considered one and the same), born in London in 1650 in the midst of the revolutionary Puritan rule of England. She seems to have grown up in a brothel but was attracted to the life of the stage where, since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for the first time in English history women were allowed to take women’s parts. By her mid-teens she had moved from being an orange-seller in the theatre to increasingly large roles in plays, especially comedies. Her reputation as “pretty, witty, Nell” attracted a series of noble lovers and by 1668 she had captured the attention of dissolute King Charles II.
Charles II kept a string of mistresses, often juggling more than one at a time, so there was no reason to think that Nell’s tenure would be a long one. In 1670 she gave birth to a royal bastard, whom she named Charles. The king had so many illegitimate children that he was known as “The Father of his Country” but he was uncommonly good to them, handing out royal titles and pensions with an open hand; in fact many of today’s English upper crust owe their noble status to these episodes. Nell’s son became the Duke of St. Albans.
Charles was a secret Catholic who was receiving bribes from French king Louis XIV to openly proclaim himself a member of the Church of Rome and to bring the country into obedience to the pope but by this time anti-Catholicism had become the English popular religion. Thinking Nell’s coach to be that of the king’s Catholic mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, an Oxford mob created a disturbance — to quell it, she stepped out and cried “Good people you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore.”
Nell was a gambler and big spender, leaving her frequently in debt. On Charles’s deathbed he asked of his brother and heir James II, “Let not poor Nelly starve.” She died in 1687, probably of syphillis. She requested that her funeral sermon be preached on the text from Luke 15: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”
As we learned in yesterday’s thrilling episode, the post of lady-in-waiting to a queen may be a launching pad to the role of mistress to the king. Such women are chosen for their beauty and amiability, are generally well-born, and are constantly at court, where they are visible – and accessible– to the monarch. Because royal wives are usually chosen for their dowries or political connections, pretty young ladies-in-waiting often outshine their queen, hanging upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
Let me then introduce Înes de Castro, lady-in-waiting to Constanza Manuel, wife of the Portuguese Prince Peter. However great the attractions of Constanza were , they paled in Peter’s eyes to those of Înes with whom he soon began an illicit relationship. The prince, nonetheless, did his marital duty and poor Constanza died giving birth in 1345 to a son, Fernando. As far as Peter was concerned, this left him free to marry his true love, but he was forbidden to do so by his father King Afonso who, for dynastic reasons, needed his son to wed higher up the royal ladder than Înes.
Peter stubbornly refused to remarry and rejected the princesses his father suggested for a future bride. He lived apart from the court with Înes who produced three children. King Afonso feared that his son was favouring Spanish relatives of Înes and that civil war might erupt if the relationship continued, so in 1355 he sent three assassins to where she was living. They murdered her in front of one of her children.
At this affront Peter rebelled against his father. He was defeated but soon after succeeded to the throne of Portugal upon the king’s death. He captured two of the assassins and ripped their hearts out with his own hands. A splendid legend says that he had Înes disinterred, her corpse clad in royal robes and enthroned. All the nobility that had slighted her when she was alive were forced to kneel before the cadaver and kiss the skeletal hands.
Peter had a magnificent dual tomb erected in the Alcobaça monastery. He and Înes were buried facing each other so that on Resurrection Day the first thing they would see would be each other.
Writing the little bio of Peter the Great a few days ago introduced me to the story of Mary Hamilton, aka Maria Danilovna Gamentova, and from that to musing on the often unlucky fate of young women who catch the eyes of sovereigns. For the next few days this blog will recount their sad tales.
Mary Hamilton was the descendant of a Scots family which had emigrated to Russia in the sixteenth century and entered into the service of the tsars.By the early 1700s they were prominent enough to have a girl, Mary, chosen as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Catherine, wife of Tsar Peter. It is quite common for women such a position to come to the attention of the royal spouse and for that wayward husband to take one as a mistress. So it was with Peter and Mary.
Empress Catherine was of a tolerant nature and for a while all was well with the illicit couple but then, as so often happens, the concubine’s charms fade and the emperor looked elsewhere for his pleasure. Mary remained at court and fell in love with Peter’s military aide-de-camp Ivan Orlov. He was an abusive drunk who beat her; to please her paramour she began to steal from the Empress to buy him gifts. She also aborted two pregnancies and strangled to death a child she was unable to kill in the womb.
In early 1725 she was betrayed by Orlov; Mary was tortured in the Tsar’s presence and confessed to her crimes. The penalty for murdering a child of the royal blood (the dead baby may have been Peter’s) was to be buried alive but the emperor spared her that, condemning her to be beheaded. He told her, “Without breaking the laws of God and the state, I can’t save you from death, so take your execution and believe that God will forgive you.” The painting above shows her awaiting her end.
1845 “The Raven” is first published under author’s name
One of the English language’s most famous poems appeared on this date, its author Edgar Allen Poe having sold it for $9.00 to a New York magazine. The poem’s clever use of internal rhyme, its supernatural vibes, and mournful tone have made it a favourite for reciters of verse ever since. As a child I learned it from listening to a 16 ⅔ rpm disk with a reading by Lorne Greene, Canada’s famous “Voice of Doom”.
The poem has been recorded by voices great and negligible, from James Earl Jones, to Basil Rathbone, to William Shatner. The most striking version is that produced by The Simpsons, available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY&t=113s
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—
’Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
