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.