Herodotus · Civilisations
Herodotus’s remarkable insight, 2,500 years ago, that every people thinks its own customs best - and his even-handed curiosity about the ways of others.
Herodotus travelled widely across the ancient world - to Egypt, the Black Sea, the Near East - and everywhere he went, he observed, with insatiable curiosity, how differently peoples lived. The Egyptians did the opposite of the Greeks in countless customs; the Scythians had their own startling ways; the Persians, the Babylonians, the Indians, each had distinct practices of marriage, burial, worship, diet, dress. From this vast comparative observation, Herodotus drew a profound conclusion about human custom - one that would not be fully developed again for over two thousand years.
Herodotus illustrates the point with an unforgettable story. King Darius of Persia asked some Greeks what would induce them to eat the bodies of their dead fathers; they were horrified - no price could make them do such a thing. Then he asked some Indians (the Callatiae, who customarily ate their dead parents) what would induce them to burn their fathers’ bodies (as the Greeks did); they cried out in horror at the very idea. Each people was revolted by the other’s funeral custom and certain its own was right. The lesson: what seems natural, decent, and obviously right is relative to one’s culture; reverse the upbringing, and you reverse the intuitions. Custom is king.
What makes Herodotus extraordinary is not just the insight but the attitude: he describes other peoples with genuine curiosity, often admiration, and a notable absence of the contempt his contemporaries felt for ‘barbarians.’ He devotes a whole book to Egypt, marvelling at its antiquity, wisdom, and achievements, often ranking Egyptian ways above Greek. He records the customs of the Scythians, Persians, and others in detail, trying to understand them on their own terms. This ethnographic gaze - the systematic, curious, relatively non-judgmental description of other cultures, seeking to understand how and why they live as they do - makes Herodotus the father of ethnography and anthropology as well as history. He looked at the human variety of the world and found it endlessly fascinating rather than merely contemptible.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Herodotus observed ‘custom is king’ and described other peoples with curiosity rather than contempt. Explain his insight and the tension it creates, in your own words.
Leads to Claude Lévi-Strauss.
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