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.
Mathais Gasteiger created Hercules and the Hydra, this larger-than-life neoclassical bronze, which has occupied several spots in and around the museum, in 1920s Germany. Whatever name you choose to call him, Heracles/Hercules will be a recurring figure henceforth in both The Histories and this blog, so this was a fitting start to our reading. Speaking of artworks, for anyone interested, the cover of David Grene's translation of Herodotus, also pictured in this post, with the idiosyncratic title The History, is Jacques-Louis David's 1814 painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, which I have seen years ago at the Louvre.
Herodotus begins Book 1 with his iconic declaration of intention to tell explore the conflict, and the roots behind the conflict, between the Greeks and the Persians. The opening paragraph is pretty iconic, but I won't reproduce it here. You can actually order it as a piece of canvas wall art from Amazon. One of my cousins in Texas quoted it to me verbatim at a dinner party. Herodotus then goes on to tell the several abduction narratives which prefigure the conflict to come. In this post, we will concentrate on the first, the story of Io.
In The Histories, a group of Phoenician traders land in Argos and set up shop on the beach to sell their wares. After a few days, some women come down, including Io, the king's daughter. Poor Io and her friends are kidnapped by the traders, who proceed to carry them off to Egypt. No one mounts a war for Io's honor, she is not the face that launched a thousand ships, probably just the one ship that took her to Egypt.
Herodotus begins Book 1 with his iconic declaration of intention to tell explore the conflict, and the roots behind the conflict, between the Greeks and the Persians. The opening paragraph is pretty iconic, but I won't reproduce it here. You can actually order it as a piece of canvas wall art from Amazon. One of my cousins in Texas quoted it to me verbatim at a dinner party. Herodotus then goes on to tell the several abduction narratives which prefigure the conflict to come. In this post, we will concentrate on the first, the story of Io.
In The Histories, a group of Phoenician traders land in Argos and set up shop on the beach to sell their wares. After a few days, some women come down, including Io, the king's daughter. Poor Io and her friends are kidnapped by the traders, who proceed to carry them off to Egypt. No one mounts a war for Io's honor, she is not the face that launched a thousand ships, probably just the one ship that took her to Egypt.
Io is also a mythological figure. Her father is named as Inachus, a river god, so whether she is a princess or a water nymph is up for debate. If you are the type to complain about history and mythology converging, give up now, because Herodotus is not for you. Nymph Io is not abducted from Argos by Phoenician traders, but instead becomes the object of adulterous desire for Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Fearful of his jealous wife Hera, Zeus transforms Io into a heifer. Undaunted, Hera curses Io with an annoying gadfly, that torments her endlessly as she wanders around the world.
Io appears on stage, presumably in heifer form, in Athenian tragedian Aeschylus's play 5th century BCE play Prometheus Bound. Pictured here is an excerpt performed by Koilon Productions at Webster University, Athens, which I attended last summer when Greece reopened to the world. I will also be referring to this trip often over the course of the blog. The titan Prometheus was bound and tortured for eternity for daring to steal fire from the gods as a gift for mankind. On her wanderings, Io comes upon him and they commiserate together about their sufferings. I personally think that Prometheus having his immortal liver eaten daily by an eagle is more horrific than Io's gadfly problem, but it's not a competition. Like Aeschylus's Persians, another play I hope to blog about later, there is little dramatic action in Prometheus Bound and a great deal of poetic lament. To bring this story full circle, the titan comforts the heifer with the prophetic knowledge that her future descendants will include great hero who will free Prometheus himself from his imprisonment. Aeschylus assumes the audience knows that the identity of this hero is the legendary Heracles.
Herodotus's "historical" Princess Io kicks of the cycle of abductions that eventually leads to the Persian Wars, while Aeschylus's "mythological" nymph Io is an ancestress of Heracles. While she may be a relatively obscure figure in both incarnations, he has been a household name in the Western world from antiquity to the present day. This sarcophagus fragment from second century Imperial Rome depicting four out of the twelve labors of Hercules can also be found at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I remember being fascinated by this piece as a young boy obsessed with mythology. I'm still obsessed, but thanks to Herodotus, I have a lot more to be obsessed with.
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