To Objectively Make Sense

Enjoyed spending a good part of the day with Herodotus.  My older on had to read him in the first semester of her obligatory humanities class at Reed College last fall.  I bought the entire reading list and tried to keep up with her.  I read just about everything, eventually and though she and her classmates only needed to read sections of the Old Testament and Herodotus, I figured I may as well see these civilizational pillars through in their fullness, And though it clearly sidetracked me from Humanities course progression, I’m glad I made time for both.

In both cases there was a keen sense that I was finally doing what any reasonably educated person should have done during their formative education.  Why did it take me till I was fifty-two?  The “Old Testament” is uniquely complicated, of course, as it represents absolute truth for so many, for so long so that a secular mind is often inclined to ignore it wholesale.  And this is ignorance, for there is arguably no, more important work to familiarize oneself with, in trying to make sense of western civilization.

The version I have of “The Histories,” the Landmark version, by Robert Strassler is enormous to consider, but filled with tasteful photos and copious maps it is a joy to read and soon you find you’re drawn in, to his remarkably objective style.  The “father of history” from the fifth century B.C.    Is there a proper Chinese historian to point to who antedates Sima Qian in the early Han Dynasty?  (145 to 86 BCE).  I’m sure there must be something that acts as a chronicle, but the flowering of philosophical writings from the axial age in China are not generally thought of as histories and it is Sima Qian who is usually credited as being the father of Chinese history, someone who tries to objectively make sense of the past.

Sima Qian wouldn’t have had much of an empirical evidence to make him question whether or not China was the only civilized place on earth.  What else but ferocious horseback warriors to the north and animist tribes to the south would there have been to point to that wasn't part of the Chinese civilized world?  I checked and it does not appear that Sima Qian ever mentions Buddhism, the first major challenge Chinese civilization ever properly confronts.  But Herodotus is wonderfully and completely disabused of any such presumptions.  He visits Egypt!  What else is there to say?  This is clearly an older, extraordinary civilization which he rightly notes, the Greeks borrowed heavily from.  He describes the extraordinary Persian with a level head and instinctive respect and curiosity.  Perpetual conflict of competing civilizational expressions then, there in the Mediterranean, in the Near East.    

I used to be amazed that people knew great detail about the battles of Cyrus or Xerxes against the Greeks.  Literature and period movies would have us believe that every English school boy knew the details of Themistocles at Salamis, of Leonidas at Thermopylae.  Now I realize they largely were simply familiar with Herodotus and “The Histories.”  

Friday, 3/20/20