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Volume 33:

Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern (full text)

I told my friend Jake, who's a historian, that I was reading Herodotus -- specifically the sections of his Histories that describe his travels in Egypt -- as part of this volume of Voyages and Travels in the Classics. He suggested that to include the father of history (also knowns as the father of lies) as a kind of proto-travel writer was to miss the point of what makes Herodotus a classic in the first place. The same goes, Jake said, for the Roman historian Tacitus. Tacitus' major works of history aren't included here. Instead, we're given the relatively minor Germania, a work of contemporary anthropology.

I have a half-formed theory about these decisions. A reading course like the Classics depends, in part, on the idea that readers should be given unmediated access to the great works of literary history. Instead of synthesis and interpretation, we're given primary documents. Instead of historical studies of an era, we're given the era in its own words. There is no volume of Histories in the Classics; the closest thing is a collection of American Historical Documents. Of course, everything in the Classics is a kind of historical document.

But eventually, works of history themselves become historical objects -- primary documents of historiography. Herodotus and Tacitus still have something to tell us about the historical events they studied (the Greco-Persian Wars and the early Roman Empire, respectively). Each of them lived within a generation of the periods on which they focused, and such proximity is invaluable. But they have even more to tell us about their own time, about how ideas like history and culture were then conceived. Including their studies of contemporary foreign cultures is a means for the editors to split this difference.

I'm glad they did, because Herodotus is an awful lot of fun. He has a great instinct for narrative, which is a big part of what made him a model for later historians. Some of his stories sound a bit too good to be true, but that doesn't make them any less fascinating. This one appear early in the excerpt.

Now the Egyptians, before the time when Psammetichos became king over them, were wont to suppose that they had come into being first of all men; but since the time when Psammetichos having become king desired to know what men had come into being first, they suppose that the Phrygians came into being before themselves, but they themselves before all other men. Now Psammetichos, when he was not able by inquiry to find out any means of knowing who had come into being first of all men, contrived a device of the following kind: -- Taking two new-born children belonging to persons of the common sort he gave them to a shepherd to bring up at the place where his flocks were, with a manner of bringing up such as I shall say, charging him namely that no man should utter any word in their presence, and that they should be placed by themselves in a room where none might come, and at the proper time he should bring to them she-goats, and when he had satisfied them with milk he should do for them whatever else was needed. These things Psammetichos did and gave him this charge wishing to hear what word the children would let break forth first, after they had ceased from wailings without sense. And accordingly so it came to pass; for after a space of two years had gone by, during which the shepherd went on acting so, at length, when he opened the door and entered, both the children fell before him in entreaty and uttered the word bekos, stretching forth their hands. At first when he heard this the shepherd kept silence; but since this word was often repeated, as he visited them constantly and attended to them, at last he declared the matter to his master, and at his command he brought the children before his face. Then Psammetichos having himself also heard it, began to inquire what nation of men named anything bekos, and inquiring he found that the Phrygians had this name for bread. In this manner and guided by an indication such as this, the Egyptians were brought to allow that the Phrygians were a more ancient people than themselves.

The rest of the volume is given to Englishman in boats. The voyages of Sir Francis Drake offer rather harrowing descriptions of piracy on the open seas. But the most interesting of these later works is Walter Raleigh's description of his discovery of Guiana. The work was written largely to convince King James to release Raleigh from the Tower of London and send him back to Guiana, where he promised to capture the golden city of El Dorado for the crown. In the light of these pages, it seems more than appropriate that Raleigh should share this space with the father of lies.


--CRB, September 28, 2007

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