Book 1.34-45: The Boar Hunt

“Who mourns for Adonis?” asks Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1821 poem Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. The obvious answer to the question, looking at this DVD cover for François-René Martin's 2013 French production of English baroque composer John Blow’s 1683 opera Venus and Adonis, would be the goddess of love herself. Stung by the arrows of her own son Cupid, Venus falls in love with the mortal hunter Adonis, only to lose him in a fatal boar hunt. By the final act, mighty Venus, whose powers could enslave the gods themselves, is pitiable in her sorrow. Yet for Shelley, we the readers mourn not for Adonis or his divine lover, but for every young man, like Keats, cut down in the prime of life. We mourn for them and also for ourselves, all human beings destined to follow Adonis down the road to death sooner or later. Love herself mourns for lost youth. Like Adonis, Atys, son of Croesus, will lose his life in a boar hunt recounted by Herodotus in The Histories. However, unlike Adonis, Atys will fall victim not to the tusks of a boar, but to the spear of a hunter.

Book 1.29-33: The Art of Happiness

This larger than life Buddhist statue stands among the monastic ruins of the Kanheri Caves found in Mumbai's Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Modern scholarship provides a wide range of dates for the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, the prince left his palace to seek enlightenment. He may have lived at the same time as Herodotus, but also may have lived as early as a century before or even a century after. The sculptures and engravings in the caves date to long after Herodotus, even centuries after Buddhism became the dominant religion in India under Ashoka the Great, the Mauryan emperor who managed to conquer much of the subcontinent. Since we cannot provide exact dates for any of these events, for the purposes of this post, we can imagine that possibly Siddhārtha Gautama was meditating on his quest to find liberation from suffering around the same time, or at least the same century, as Croesus was debating the nature of happiness with a guest at his court. 

Book 1.26-28: Rich as Croesus

In 1931, Mexican archeologist Alfonso Caso excavated one of the richest Mesoamerican burial caches ever discovered from Tomb Seven at Monte Alban, center of the ancient Zapotec civilization in Oaxaca, Mexico. I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of these treasures at the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca in 2019. Notable artifacts include a human skull encrusted in brilliant blue lapis lazuli and an intricately carved golden pectoral depicting a figure wearing a buccal mask and an elaborate headdress. Some scholars interpret such burial customs as an ancient obsession with death, while others infer that for people to want to continue their lavish lifestyles in the next world, they must have been pretty keen on the lives they were living! Others see expensive funerals as the ultimate form of conspicuous consumption. Croesus, our next subject from The Histories, who ruled the Lydia around the same time as the early formation of Monte Alban on the other side of the earth in the sixth century BCE, has become a byword for wealth over the centuries. The fifth in a dynasty of conquest minded kings, Croesus was in a position to enjoy the affluence accrued by his predecessors.

Book 1.15-25: Five Generations

 

Since the most memorable story from this section of The Histories deals with a sea voyage, I will share my most recent experience at sea, my birthday dinner on the Aegean last summer with the wonderful Sailing Athens. The two Greek guys who run this catamaran know how to plan the perfect day trip, so please book them if you ever travel to Athens. So far, this blog has covered Herodotus-related plays, novels, films, paintings, statues, vases and archeological sites, but now I can finally make good on my promise in the introduction and talk about food! 

Book 1.12-14: The End of the Heraclids

Pictured above is another marble image of Hercules from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, not one modeled on any of the emperors this time, to commemorate the end of the Heraclids. Herodotus writes that the Candaules's queen lets Gyges into the royal bedchamber just as her husband did before her. She hands him a sword. Candaules enters. Gyges strikes. And so, after five centuries and twenty-two generations, the Heraclids die out. Gyges marries the queen and declares himself king. The people of Lydia are justifiably angry about the regicide, but the Oracle at Delphi approves Gyges's reign, while also warning that five generations down the line, this new royal dynasty will suffer a fall in recompense for the murder of Candaules. Herodotus points out that no one pays attention to the prophecy...until it comes true. 

Book 1.10-11: The King Must Die

I first read Mary Renault's 1958 novel The King Must Die on a cruise in the Aegean sea seven years ago. I had chosen the book specifically because one of the stops on the itinerary was the the partially reconstructed bronze age ruins of Knossos on Crete, center of the Minoan civilization. There's no separating this archeological site from the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. Even the tour guides tell it as a matter of course. Renault reimagines the half-man half-bull creature as a metaphor for the ancient Cretan sport of bull jumping, but her story starts long before Theseus ever sets foot on the island of Crete. The title of the novel comes from an extended episode early on when the young hero stumbles upon a matriarchal society in Eleusis and inadvertently gets chosen as the next year-king because he arrived on the "day when the king must die." In Renault's telling, Theseus is forced to kill the current king and become the new king by marrying the queen. Such violent transitions of power happen frequently in The Histories of Herodotus, starting with Candaules, last of the Heraclids. 

Book 1.8-9: Hopelessly Devoted to You

 

This copy of Flemish painter Jan Massijs's 16th century painting of David and Bathsheba was hanging in the stairwell of the Hotel Quirinale, where I stayed a few weeks ago in Rome. I would highly recommend this historical hotel for beautiful rooms and excellent service. Anyway, thinking about the painting, I can't help but compare and contrast the subject with that of Lydian King Candaules and his wife. There are many echoes of biblical stories in The Histories, or echoes of Herodotus in The Bible depending on how you look at it. King David of Israel and Judah falls in obsessive love with Bathsheba when he sees her bathing from the roof of his palace. He places her husband Uriah Uriah in the front lines of battle, hoping he would die and leave Bathsheba free to marry again. Despite the new couple losing their first child as punishment for David's sin, Bathsheba eventually gives him an heir, the famously wise King Solomon. The love story of Candaules, descendent of Heracles, proceeds rather differently, but it still hinges around nudity and voyeurism.

Book 1.7: The Sons of Hercules

When I first photographed this marble bust a few weeks ago at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, I thought I recognized the face of Marcus Aurelius, known to many as the philosopher emperor due to the continued worldwide popularity of his Meditations. On closer inspection, the man trussed up with a club and lion skin as Hercules is actually Marcus's son and successor, the Emperor Commodus, the narcissistic villain everyone loves to hate in such films as The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator. This makes much more sense, as Commodus was known a showman who fostered a cult of personality that included fighting in the arena as a gladiator. Commodus may have used the iconography of Hercules as a symbol of his own imperial power, but he was far from the first ruler to do so! 

Book 1.6: The Island of Lydia

For our monthly Herodotus discussions, my friend and I often paired the reading selection with some related cinematic viewing. Since the first half of Book 1 leans heavily into the Lydian saga, the ancestors of Croesus and his own doomed reign over Lydia, we started with Pietro Francisci's 1959 Italian film Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules and the Queen of Lydia), better known as Hercules Unchained in the 1960 English language dub. This film was the second go around for American bodybuilder Steve Reeves in the role of Hercules, as he starred in the 1958 Le fatiche di Ercole (The Labors of Hercules), a film not included in the DVD box set of pelpum movies pictured above. The pepla were sword-and-sandal themed films produced in Italy during the 50s and 60s. The term comes from the Ancient Greek garment known as a peplos, a long draped robe, although both male and female characters in these films tend to wear much shorter tunics overall. If you are one of the many 21st century viewers who only do streaming, these films are typically public domain and can be found for free on YouTube.

Book 1.5: No one in Sparta heard you!

For a coda to his abduction narratives, Herodotus returns to Io, relating an alternative Phoenician account in which she was not abducted at all. Instead, Io willingly engaged in premarital sex with the captain of the vessel and got pregnant. Rather than face the anger of her parents, she chose to flee with her lover to Egypt. Now, in the original story, the Phoenicians were only in Argos for five or six days, so Io would have needed a longer timeline for all that. Herodotus will make a habit throughout The Histories of giving us multiple accounts of events and letting us decide for ourselves what is most believable. That said, he does not present the account of Io's transformation into a heifer. Nor, when discussing the origins of the Trojan War, does he bother to present the beauty contest for the golden apple among the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite judged by Paris and pictured in the above vase at the National Archeological Museum in Athens, Greece. 

Book 1.4: The Topless Towers of Ilium

I photographed this religious icon at the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest some years ago. Here, there is a clear delineation between the victorious angels in heaven and the monstrous devils that they cast down into hell. Or is there? It seems to me that not just devils are on a downward spiral into the abyss, some the haloed figures appear to be fallen angels. Or falling angels, at any rate. Herodotus's narrative of the Persian War, like the Trojan War before it, is not framed as battle between good and evil. In fact, I'm not sure these earlier polytheistic societies even considered good and evil in such simplistic terms. So what does a pre-Christian figure like Helen have to do with concepts such as sin, hell, and damnation? The answer is Faust. 

Book 1.3: The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

This detail comes from Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto's 16th century painting The Abduction of Helen, which I saw a few years ago at an exhibit of his work on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from the Prado Museum in Madrid. Here, we see Tintoretto's vision of what Christopher Marlowe described as "the face that launched a thousand ships" in his play Doctor Faustus. I will get to Marlowe in my next blog post, but for now let us talk about Herodotus's Helen. Like her half-brother Heracles, that other famous mortal offspring of Zeus, Helen will provide another recurring mythological motif in The Histories, including a significant discussion in Book 2, which I will preview at the end of this post.

Book 1.2: The Witch of Colchis

Decades before Madeline Miller rehabilitated the witch Circe in her current bestseller, Miranda Seymour took on an origin story for the murderous Medea in her 1981 novel. Something I really admired about this retelling is that Seymour did not attempt to engender sympathy for Medea by justifying her actions, but tried to put her antiheroine into context by fleshing out the deadly intrigue at the royal court of Colchis and the death-devoted cult of the goddess Hecate. Seymour's Medea is no tragically misunderstood victim. She is a woman who survived by becoming the most dangerous person in a dangerous world. There are no heroes or villains in this story, just winners and losers.

Book 1.1: The Heifer

About a year ago, my friend and I decided to take on The Histories of Herodotus as a reading and discussion project. We were several months into the global pandemic that had upended everyone's lives and needed a shared activity more intellectually stimulating than the various serials that fuel the so-called streaming wars. We met at SLAM, the Saint Louis Art Museum, to begin the journey by reading aloud together in the statue garden, as pictured above, underneath the statue of Hercules. I am aware that Herodotus refers to this character by his Ancient Greek name Heracles, but this particular statue is neither ancient nor Greek. 

Herodotus: Introduction

"Who was Herodotus, anyway?" was my mother's question when I broached the topic of my Herodotus project to her. As I began to explain his significance as the so-called Father of History in the Ancient Greek world, she almost immediately stopped listening. She did, however, ask me if there was a statue of him. The answer was actually, yes! There are statues of Herodotus at the Louvre, in front of the Parliament building in Vienna, and this bust pictured above that I personally photographed two weeks ago at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, Italy. Certainly, it's been wonderful to travel again after the shutdowns of the global pandemic last year, but there will be plenty of time to talk about travel and other topics coming up. All the time, in fact.