Herodotus · Civilisations
The great political theme of the <em>Histories</em> - why free Greeks defeated the mightiest empire on earth, and what the clash revealed about freedom, law, and tyranny.
At the heart of Herodotus’s Histories lies a momentous political drama: the clash between the free, fractious, self-governing city-states of Greece and the vast, centralised, autocratic Persian Empire ruled by an all-powerful king. When the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes hurled the greatest armies the world had ever seen against the small Greek states, almost everyone expected the Greeks to be crushed. Instead, the Greeks improbably prevailed - at Marathon, Salamis, Plataea. For Herodotus, this astonishing outcome demanded explanation, and his answer became one of the most influential political ideas in history: that free men fight better than slaves.
In a famous exchange, the Persian king Xerxes asks the exiled Spartan king Demaratus how the Greeks, who have no single master to compel them, could possibly stand against his vast army - surely men who are free and not driven by a ruler will simply flee? Demaratus replies with one of the most important political statements in the Histories: the Greeks are free - but they are not without a master. Their master is the law (nomos), which they fear far more than Xerxes’ subjects fear him. The law commands them never to flee in battle but to stand and conquer or die. So the Greeks are free from any man’s arbitrary will, yet bound by their own law - and it is this voluntary obedience to law, not to a master, that makes them both free and formidable.
Herodotus paints the despot as not only a master of slaves but a figure of dangerous hubris - overweening pride that invites disaster. The supreme image is Xerxes at the Hellespont: when a storm destroys the bridges his engineers have built to carry his army into Europe, the enraged king orders the sea itself to be whipped with three hundred lashes and branded with hot irons, as if the water were a disobedient slave, while his men hurl insults at it. It is an unforgettable emblem of the despot’s madness - the absolute ruler so swollen with power that he imagines he can command nature itself, punish the sea, transcend all limits. And it foreshadows his fall: the man who lashes the sea will be humbled by it at Salamis. Despotism breeds the hubris that destroys it.
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 saw the Greco-Persian Wars as a clash between freedom and despotism. Explain his argument about why free peoples are stronger, and its tensions, in your own words.
Leads to Montesquieu.
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