Does Herodotus believe in Cultural Relativism Essay

For its time and place, The Histories of Herodotus is a work of remarkably expansive scope. To set the stage for the wars between Greece and Persia ( 490-479 B. C. ), Herodotus describes the geographical and cultural background and reviews the political history of Lydia, Media, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Scythia, Libya, Ionia, and various Greek city-states in Asia Minor, on the Aegean islands, and on the European mainland. To record the results of his â€Å"research† (historie, in Greek) with the greatest vigor and accuracy, Herodotus traveled to many of these places and gathered firsthand data from native informants. For this type of research, in the words of a modern commentator, Herodotus merits the title not only of the father of history; he is also the father of comparative anthropology. Among the various classes of information which Herodotus seems to have emphasized, thus suggesting a pattern for later descriptions, were marriage customs, religious rites, burial practices, and food habits. The description of these four categories of traits, or â€Å"social institutions,† were not necessarily executed in the round for every tribe that happened to stroll across the pages of the Histories; but they were mentioned often enough to indicate the direction taken by his curiosity, and the content of the questions he probably put to informants. Herodotus, the ancient Greek, was a cheerful, inquisitive, rationalistic extrovert who traveled over his world to discover the facts, who took delight in telling a good story but usually avoided the temptation to wander very far from sober common sense. His cultural relativism is well known and much discussed, but it is particularly noteworthy that Greeks and barbarians are placed on a equal footing at the outset. Distinctions between Greek and non-Greek break down as the work progresses: the first barbarian for whom we get any detailed information is the Hellenized Lydian king, Croesus; the divisions of lands customary among the Greeks that separate Greek and non-Greek peoples are purely arbitrary; we learn of the Phoenician descent of Sparta’s kings; and Herodotus states that the descendants of Perseus came to be counted as Greeks. The key dichotomy is not the Hellenic-barbarian bipolarity, but rather the opposition of the ordered society based on law and the arbitrary rule of the despot. But political and social institutions are fragile structures, and Herodotus gives no guarantee that the Greek superiority at the time of the Persian Wars, which was based upon those institutions, will last. In fact his work closes on an ominous note that appears to warn imperial Athens that it is in danger of becoming, if it has not already become, the barbarian. We are presented with the gruesome picture of the crucifixion of the Persian satrap Artayctes at the command of the Athenian commander Xanthippus, father of Pericles, and a piece of wisdom from the Persian founding father, Cyrus, on the dangers of success and affluence. And it is well to remember that Herodotus wrote long after the Persian threat had passed, when Athenian imperial power was at its apogee. Herodotos’ interest in reciprocity is symptomatic of contemporary philosophy, not least in Ionia. Moreover, Herodotos’ very project, his attempt to explain and explore the Persian Wars, can be considered as a study of reciprocity in cross-cultural interaction, not least because those wars were for Herodotos a stage in a reciprocal, cross-cultural process, as he asserts in the proem. Indeed, war itself may be seen as an exchange, a reciprocal undertaking: the tactics of the Skythian Idanthyrsos allow him to wage war while explicitly rejecting the relationship that war usually entails. Herodotos’ origins in western Asia Minor, a key area of interface between Greek and non-Greek culture, may have led him to give particular thought to the issue of cross-cultural reciprocity, as also to the Persian Wars, for which the Ionian Revolt had been the catalyst, if not the cause. At the same time, the justice and injustice of imperialism remained a burning issue through the fifth century into the fourth, and not only Persian imperialism, but also Athenian, Spartan, and Macedonian. The Persian Wars were the great antecedents of the Peloponnesian War, in the early years of which Herodotos seems to have completed his work. The Persians themselves continued to play a major role in the politics of the Greek world: the onset of the Peloponnesian War seems to have inspired new attempts to deal with them, and with other non-Greeks, as indicated in comic style in Aristophanes’ Akharnians of 425 BC. 25 This is understandable, for it was to be Persian resources that would give ultimate victory to the Spartans in that war. Thus, it is quite possible that crosscultural reciprocity was a topical concern in Athens and elsewhere when Herodotos completed his work, though the issue had been close to the centre of Greek preoccupations at least since the time of the Persian Wars, Herodotos’ subject. The Persian Wars had reinforced a Hellenic self-image, defined by contrast with the ‘barbarian’ identity, and had thereby further problematized relationships between Greek and non-Greek. In particular, Greeks (especially Athenians, perhaps) could and did use their defeat of Persia as confirmation of a broader superiority over the barbarian. In exploring the difficulties of forming relationships with the ‘other’, Herodotos’ Histories present readers with failures and disasters, arising primarily from ignorance, over-confidence, and cultural chauvinism. There is a definite element of pessimism in the Histories, for the inability to penetrate beyond contingent nomoi and thereby to see ‘other’ as ‘self’ is taken to be an observable feature of human nature, as manifested throughout the narrative. In particular, wars are seen to be the products of injustice and attendant ignorance. But there is also hope; for the author claims for himself the ability to rise above commonplace failings and offers to provide his readers with a better understanding of themselves, of others, and of reciprocity. Like Kroisos, the reader may pass into a state of deeper understanding through advice confirmed by experience. Where Kroisos had the advice of Solon and suffered personal disaster, the reader has the advice of Herodotos the author and suffers vicarious disaster, ‘experiencing experiences’. Baldry notices that Herodotos calls into question the whole dichotomy between Greek and barbarian, when he presents the Egyptian perspective, according to which barbarians are not those who do not speak Greek, but those who do not speak Egyptian. At the same time, as Laurot has shown, Herodotos displays no interest in condemning barbarians as such, nor in subordinating them to Greeks. Rather, his presentation in the Histories of nomoi of the barbarian ‘other’ offers insights into the nomoi of the Greek ‘self’ (or better, ‘selves’), insofar as the various Greek nomoi constitute Herodotos’ principal frame of reference and benchmark. However, as Rosellini and Said valuably stress, Herodotos does not present the barbarian ‘other’ as a monolithic unity, any more than he presents the Greeks themselves as a unity: rather he ranges across the different nomoi that exist among barbarians and through the complexities of interaction between various barbarian peoples. The Histories are not so much a mirror, as Hartog would have it, but a hall of mirrors with multiple reflections. The key point is that in the Histories cultural differences, however profound they may be, are presented as secondary to a common human nature and a common human condition: in that sense too Greek is barbarian, ‘self’ is ‘other’. The categories of Greek and barbarian are familiar to Herodotos, but on his view, as the proem indicates, they need not entail the subordination of the barbarian, whose achievements are to be celebrated also. For Herodotos, it is humanness that is the natural identity and the group identity that matters, and man-made variations are merely contingent, for all their exotic character and interest. Confirmation of such a view of Herodotos may be found in the condemnatory response of Plutarch, for whom Herodotos is far too positive about barbarians. The ferocity of Plutarch’s response (indeed, his very decision to write a response at all) further indicates the strength of the challenge that Herodotos’ case presented to the smug asseverations of Greek specialness that seem to have developed through the fifth century and which Plutarch in his day assumed to be right and proper. Cross-cultural interaction was central to Herodotos’ project in the Histories. At the same time, the problematic nature of reciprocity the uncertainty that arises from its under-negotiation — is particularly apparent in interaction across cultures. Indeed, Herodotos’ concern with the problematics of reciprocity as a phenomenon can be seen as intimately bound up with his concern with cross-cultural interaction. Of course, Herodotos’ starting-point is a matter of mere speculation. But we can and should observe the organic relationship between cross-cultural interaction, crosscultural reciprocity, and the problematics of reciprocity as a phenomenon. It is precisely within the problematics of cross-cultural reciprocity that the appreciation of cultural relativism is particularly necessary. Therefore, if we move from the claim, already mentioned, that there is a strong sense in which the Histories are about reciprocity to ask why Herodotos should be so interested in the phenomenon, I would suggest that an answer is to be found not in the topicality of reciprocity as a theme in the later fifth century, but in the rationale of Herodotos’ very undertaking. A broadlybased treatment of the Persian Wars by its very nature invites a simultaneous and inherent treatment of reciprocity as a phenomenon. To examine societies is to explore forms of reciprocities. All the more so, when societies invite comparisons through their It also seems clear that Herodotus approached the task of describing manners and customs with a fairly definite idea of what constituted a culture, and a fairly specific set of questions for evoking details from informants. The criteria which separated one group from another and gave individuality to his descriptive portraits were common descent, common language, common religion, and the observance of like manners in the smaller details of living, such as dress, diet, and dwellings. The Argippeans, who lived at the foot of the Ural Mountains, were presented vividly as being bald from birth, speaking a language of their own, using no weapons, dispensing justice in the quarrels of their neighbors, and dressing after the manner of the Scythians. They lived on the juice of a species of cherry, making the lees into a solid cake which they ate instead of meat. They dwell each man,† he said, â€Å"under a tree, covering it in winter with a white felt cloth, but using no felt in summer. † For each group, in other words, seven categories of cultural fact are given. We are told their geographical location and something of their environment. We are told of their language, their dress, their food, their dwellings, their form of self-defense, or their lack of it, their prestige as judges among other peoples. On the other hand, concerning Egypt, one of the more important culture areas, Herodotus says at the outset that he will have to extend his remarks to some length. This country–its climate, its people and animals–was a constant surprise and challenge to the observer, very much as Japan with its customs and Australia with its fauna have challenged the modern traveller. For the Egyptians the number of cultural categories evoked far exceeds the seven used in describing the Argippeans. As for history, Bodin’s belief in its power to confer knowledge concerning the ways of mankind was unfaltering; and much of both the Methodus and the Republique is devoted to the assemblage of documentation to support this contention. Never before perhaps had a writer on politics or ethnography amassed so large a body of dated materials or laid so large a literature under tribute. He was well-read, not only in the law and the Bible, but in the Talmud and the Cabala; in the ancients, including Herodotus, Strabo, Cicero, Tacitus, and Caesar; in the modern historians, such as Joinville, Froissart, Monstrelet, Commines; and in the travelers, Marco Polo, Leo Africanus, and Las Casas. As they err, said he, â€Å"who study the maps of regions before they have learned accurately the relation of the whole universe and the separate parts to each other and to the whole, so they are not less mistaken who think they can understand particular histories before they have judged the order and sequence of universal history and of all times, set forth as it were in a table. †