“‘We are not the Greeks and Herodotus’ world is not our world. And yet, as with any great writer, it is possible to enter that world, helped by the inclusiveness of the author’s vision and the wide compass of his humanity.” (John Marincola, Herodotus’s Later Reputation, Marincola 36)
The boy was dazzled. He ought to be keeping an eye on his father, so as not to be lost in the crowd, but it was his first time in the Agora of Athens, and he hardly knew what to look at. Market-place, meeting-place, worship-place – the Agora was the beating heart of the city, where traders in merchandise crossed paths with traders in ideas and travellers from far places. The boy had never seen such riches: here was silk in every colour, piles of precious spices, gleaming metalwork, plump fruits he did not know the names of. A dark-skinned man fed a dried date to a golden monkey that sat on his shoulder.
The monkey’s way of eating made the boy laugh: first it would take eight or ten frenzied nibbles, then it would look shiftily about, as though it expected to have its treat snatched away at any moment. As it began gobbling again, the boy felt a hand fall on his shoulder: his father’s house slave. “You’re falling behind, young master,” the slave told him. “Your father says I’m to bring you to the painted stoa.”
The boy dutifully followed the slave away from the crush of people, crossing a field that led toward the new portico, its stately columns shining in the slanting sunlight. Further up the hill he could see the new temple being built – not the new Parthenon that Pericles had decreed should be built, but the smaller one to Hephaestus. Teams of men laboured to cut and fit marble for the steps. The boy thought Hephaestus, master of crafts, would be pleased to know so many craftsmen were working to build him a fine new home in Athens.
Soon he came into the shade of the painted stoa, a long portico where there were no shops, and the crowd was thinner – instead of many voices, there was only one: a deep male voice that seemed to be telling a story. The boy, prompted by the slave, insinuated himself through the audience until he found his father. He looked at the storyteller: a thick-set man of fifty or so, with a beard that split into two plump curls. The walls behind the man were all covered with painted figures: armed men stabbing and shooting, dying and triumphing. The boy recognized Athenian hoplites and the dreaded Persians in their peaked caps.
He realized that the storyteller was talking about the painting: telling the painting’s story. He was speaking the words of the great hero Militades, convincing the Athenians to face the Persian army at Marathon:
“‘Never in our history have we Athenians been in such peril as now. . . . Half of us are for a battle, half against it. If we refuse to fight, I have little doubt that the result will be bitter dissension; our purpose will be shaken, and we shall submit to Persia. But if we fight before the rot can show itself in any of us, then, if God gives us fair play, we can not only fight but win. Yours is the decision; all hangs upon you; vote on my side, and our country will be free – yes, and the first city of Greece. But if you support those who have voted against fighting, that happiness will be denied you – you will get the opposite.’” (Merincola 510-511)
The boy listened, rapt, as the storyteller described the brave charge of the Athenians toward the overwhelming Persian army. He shuddered at the description of Cynegirus losing his hand to a Persian axe in the fight to secure the Persian ships. And when the storyteller related how a mere 192 Athenians died compared to 6,400 Persians, the boy suddenly found himself in tears. How brave those heroes were, to fight so desperately! How frightened all the Athenians must have been, to see the great hosts arrayed on the plain below the city! How overjoyed they must have been in victory!
The story was beautiful in the telling, and most beautiful of all, it was true. He did not want to shame his father, but he could not help crying.
When the storyteller left off, he came over to the boy and his father. “Olorus, my honorable friend,” the storyteller said, addressing the boy’s father, “have I frightened your lad with my lecture?” “Upon my word, Herodotus, I don’t know what’s gotten into the boy. Speak up, son, and tell us what the waterworks are about.”
“Oh, sir,” said the boy, sniffling. “It’s only that I never understood how terrible war was before I heard you speaking about it.”
“Well,” said Herodotus, “Let’s pray that my stories are as close as you ever come to it. Olorus, your son yearns for knowledge! I hope you’ll not keep him out of the library at home, nor anywhere else.”
“Thucydides is a dutiful young fellow,” Olorus said, laying a hand on his son’s slender shoulder. “I’m certain that if he wishes to dedicate himself to knowledge, he will pursue it with a will.”
So, the Romans tell us, went the meeting between the two great historians of Greece: Thucydides son of Olorus, and Herodotus, Father of History.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 30: Herodotus, The Histories, Part 2 – Children of History. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
This is our third episode on Herodotus, the ancient Greek author of The Histories, who lived from approximately 484 to 425 BCE. If you missed our first two episodes, please do go back and listen: Herodotus is considered the founder of history, but he is far from dry and academic. He goes beyond what the scholar Jennifer T. Roberts, in her Very Short Introduction to Herodotus, calls the “maps and chaps” approach to history:
“In with maps and chaps, he has thrown hares, cannibals, mummies, pigs, dreams, prostitution, gold-digging ants, clever queens, bees . . . people who cannot so much as look at a bean, and a fart.” (Roberts 4)
Our previous episodes recapped all nine books of Herodotus’s sprawling and digressive history of the Greco-Persian wars, covering everything from his wonderfully off-base description of the hippopotamus to his exciting accounts of battles and court gossip.
In this episode, we’re going to look a little bit at Herodotus’s reputation through the ages, and meet three early historians who can be said to have followed in his footsteps one way or another. We’ll finish off by considering history as literature, guided by an early 20th-century essay from the pen of a historical figure who himself would have made a meaty subject for Herodotus – Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States.
So, Herodotus’s afterlife. As mentioned in our previous episodes, we don’t exactly know when he died, though best guesses put it just after 430 BCE, at the start of the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens. What is known is that his work was immediately popular, and immediately controversial. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Histories, John Marincola explains that Herodotus’s writings show instant influence on the historians who followed him in both Greece and Rome, declaring that Herodotus was considered, “the [founder] and best [practitioner] of the genre of history, the appropriate [model] to be emulated and imitated.” (Marincola 32)
But Herodotus was also criticized. In fact, explains Marincola, in antiquity, “no historian . . . was more censured than Herodotus.” (32) He was accused “of inaccuracy, of bias, of telling tall tales and of general dishonesty.” (32) These accusations don’t just address the more outlandish stories, like the gold-digging ants. They also address the larger historical narrative Herodotus presents. J.A.S. Evans, in a 1968 essay about Herodotus’s reputation, notes that, “Herodotus was the father of history and yet, soon after his history was published, he began to enjoy an ambivalent reputation which is not easy to explain.” (Evans 12)
As you can imagine, Persian writers had issues with both Herodotus’s version of events and the way he characterised their kings. Ctesias (TEE-zhus) of Cnidus was a Greek-speaking doctor working for Artaxerxes II, king of Persia a few decades after Herodotus’s death. (I feel compelled to note that Artaxerxes used a regnal name – he was born Arses, spelled “arses,” which must have delighted generations of British schoolchildren.)
Ctesias moonlighted as the court historian, and he went through the Persian royal archives to check Herodotus’s writings point-by-point, “refuting him as a liar in many things, and calling him a fable-monger as well.” (Marincola 33) This is ironic, given that Ctesias’s own works – which only exist in fragments, but were summarised by later writers – appear to contain many Herodotean digressions and fanciful “facts”. For example, Ctesias’s book on India declared that one of India’s rivers flows with honey, that the sea off the south coast of India is too hot for fish to live in, and that there are a race of virtuous, long-lived people in the mountains who have the heads of dogs.
Hundreds of years later, during the first century CE, Herodotus prompted what scholar A.J. Bowen called “the earliest known book review”: a scathing essay by the historian Plutarch, who was a Roman citizen of Greek descent. Titled “On the Malice of Herodotus,” this essay lays into Herodotus not just for inaccuracies or digressions, but for his moral character. Plutarch addresses his essay to a friend, beginning:
“The style, O Alexander, of Herodotus, as being simple, free, and easily suiting itself to its subject, has deceived many; but more, a persuasion of his dispositions being equally sincere. For it is not only (as Plato says) an extreme injustice, to make a show of being just when one is not so; but it is also the highest malignity, to pretend to simplicity and mildness and be in the mean time really most malicious.” (Plutarch, De Herodoti Malignitate, 1)
So Herodotus, by pretending to be even-handed in his approach to evaluating his sources, is really concealing some sinister ulterior motive. Plutarch furthermore accuses Herodotus of being anti-Greek, calling him a “philobarbaros”, or a “barbarian-lover,” and declares him to be “the father of lies.” (Ford) Scholars over the centuries have differed about why Plutarch was so vicious toward Herodotus – perhaps he was offended as a Boetian Greek, or as a priest of the temple of Apollo, of the way Herodotus portrayed Boetians and the oracle at Delphi in his works. Bryant Kirkland of UCLA, writing for the delightful website “Herodotus Helpline” in 2023, noted that “Plutarch can convict Herodotus of being something of a failed artist who has cruelly painted ugly moles and zits on what Plutarch takes to be a clean complexion.”
Perhaps, as the writer Laura Ford put it in an essay for the Kosmos Society in 2016, “whenever a global, multicultural worldview challenges strongly held nationalistic traditions and cultural values, the debate is likely to become impassioned.” (Ford) Or perhaps this was written as a sort of thought experiment by Plutarch, an exercise in playing devil’s advocate about a widely read and debated writer.
Whatever the reason, Plutarch would certainly not be the last critic of Herodotus, though he may have been one of the most memorable. While Jennifer T. Roberts reports that Herodotus was in demand in Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance period – between 1450 and 1700 alone, scribes, scholars, and printers produced more than 44 different editions of The Histories (Roberts 111) – she notes that “sober modern critics often seek to distance themselves from Herodotus, even at times going so far as to deny him the name of historian.” (Roberts 4)
John Marincola describes the rap sheet modern scholars have assembled against Herodotus: since the early twentieth century, it’s been suggested that Herodotus never went to Egypt, or even that he never left Halicarnassus at all; that most of his source citations which use a formula like “the Persians say” or “the Spartans say” were made up out of whole cloth; finally, that Herodotus cribbed most of his information from other Greek influences like Homer and did not conduct any actual research with sources from the cultures he’s describing.
Roberts points out how various modern historians have tried to prove or disprove Herodotus through novel experiments, such as a test at Penn State which showed that Herodotus’s account of the charge at the Battle of Marathon couldn’t have been factual, because it turns out it’s very hard to run a mile in hoplite armor. (Roberts 103)
Herodotus has his modern defenders, too – for example, many writers point out that he did his best to cite his sources and include disclaimers in his writing, which is complicated by the physical medium of papyrus scrolls – it’s hard to go back and update or correct a citation when you have to physically roll through a long, brittle document.
There’s also the fact that he was acting as a bridge between cultures that were heavily oral and a new, emerging written culture. From our position within a heavily text-based society, that can make it difficult to accept Herodotus’s assertions in some places. Oral societies preserve knowledge and tradition differently from writing-based societies. “Assumptions that we make as members of a society where writing is an everyday part of life,” writes Marincola, “may be invalid when applied to the very different cultures of the ancient world.” (Marincola 35-36)
Still, whatever we may think of Herodotus’s reliability, “for all the criticism his work was read and debated, and no one ever replaced him.” (Marincola 34)
There is one other ancient Greek historian who could have come close to replacing Herodotus, however. He was that boy in the marketplace I described at the top of the show – the boy who would become Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian War.
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Thucydides was born about 460 BCE in Athens, which would make him roughly a generation younger than Herodotus. Little is known about his life aside from what he tells us – that he was from a wealthy family, that his father was called Olorus, and that he would himself serve in the wars he was writing about: the Second Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which lasted from 431 to 404 BCE. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the “Peloponnesian War”, it’s because Sparta is located on the Peloponnesian peninsula south of Athens – the city of Corinth lies on the neck of the peninsula between the two cities, which must have been very bothersome for the Corinthians).
Thucydides’s family owned estates, including gold mines, in Thrace. When the war broke out, Thucydides was somewhere around 30, and he was enlisted to served as a general, leading campaigns in Thrace due to his family’s influence there. He was blamed for losing a key town called Amphipolis to a Spartan general named Brasidas, and his loss got him drummed out of military service – bad for his reputation in Athens, but fortunate for us readers. As he tells us in book five:
“I lived through the whole of [the Peloponnesian War], being of an age to understand what was happening, and I put my mind to the subject so as to get an accurate view of it. It happened, too, that I was banished from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; I saw what was being done on both sides, particularly on the Peloponnesian side, because of my exile, and this leisure gave me rather exceptional facilities for looking into things.” (Warner 449)
And look into things he did. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, according to his own account, was written in stages during the war and after it ended, with the bulk of the writing probably taking place after 424 BCE, when he was exiled to his family’s estate in Thrace. The eminient classicist M.I. Finley, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Thucydides, declares that we likely would not have paid much attention to this war had it not been for its chronicler:
“The [Peloponnesian War] lives on not so much for anything that happened or because of any of the participants, but because of the man who wrote its history, Thucydides the Athenian. No other historian can match this achievement; no other war, or for that matter no other historical subject, is so much the product of its reporter.” (Warner 9)
Now, I thought about giving Thucydides his own place on the show’s list. I also thought about making this episode just about him. But after reading him, I decided against it. There are three reasons: First, this year’s list is already so very, very Greek, and I wanted to include some works from other cultures. Next, the best order would have been Herodotus, then Thucydides, then Sun Tzu and the Art of War. That’s a full quarter of non-fiction, and I want to try to vary genres, too. Finally, Thucydides’s style, is, well… here’s Professor Finley describing it:
“He was a humourless man, pessimistic, sceptical, highly intelligent, cold and reserved . . . . He wrote in a complicated style, overloaded and lacking in charm. . . . In his struggle to convey the sense of an action or a statement precisely, Thucydides juggled tenses in a sophisticated way, piled up subordinate clauses and resorted to other devices that are often the despair of modern readers.” (Warner 9-10)
We could learn a lot from Thucydides about the development not just of the writing of history, but also of political science and international relations, two disciplines he’s considered a founding father of. But, dear listeners, in so doing, we wouldn’t have much fun. That’s why this little overview is all you’ll get from me on Thucydides.
Anyway. Athens – spoiler alert – loses the Peloponnesian War through its own disastrous mismanagement, overreach, and plain bad luck, and it is Thucydides’s mission to provide for his readers as objective, straightforward, and unadorned a narrative as possible of this loss. Without ever naming Herodotus, Thucydides sets out to break free of him: his history is presented chronologically, year by year, and it is completely stripped of details about culture, or about omens or divine intervention, or about anything except the personalities and events of the war. Where Herodotus worked from a variety of sources – folklore, traveler’s tales, eyewitness accounts, temple records, and so on – Thucydides claims that he relied wherever possible on eyewitness events which he then checked and cross-checked.
This need for checking and cross-checking requires him to limit the scope of his investigations: unlike Herodotus, who swooped in and out of the distant past and recent history to create a sense of deep time behind his narrative, Thucydides focuses as much as possible on those 27 years of war in which he played a part. “The past cannot be cross-examined,” explained M.I. Finley, “and Thucydides made it plain at the outset that only the most patient checking and double-checking could reach the truth. Therefore the past can never be really known.” (Warner 18)
This doesn’t mean Thucydides is above a little invention. While he would never stoop to the level of talking about gold-digging ants, the way Herodotus did, he does really love to include long speeches he would have had no way of being present for – and no reliable record of beyond the dim recollections of eyewitnesses, sometimes as much as 30 years after the fact. One of the most famous speeches included in Thucydides is the Funeral Oration of Pericles.
Pericles was a real person; he was the pre-eminent citizen of democratic Athens from about 460 BCE until his death in 429 BCE during the Plague of Athens – a plague Thucydides survived and which he chronicles in his history, given how it impacted Athens’s ability to prosecute its war with Sparta. At the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian war, Pericles was asked to give a funeral address in honor of the dead – think of Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address during the American Civil War, except where Lincoln got the job done in 271 words, Pericles took over 3,000.
The oration is truly worth reading, as dense as it is, in this, the year of our lord 2025. In it, Pericles praises the Athenian way of life for which these men died. He speaks eloquently of the virtues of democracy and justice – words somewhat tarnished, however, when you consider that democratic participation only extended to a small fraction of the male population of Athens. He lauds the self-sufficiency of the Athenians and the craven reliance of the Spartans on allies – despite the fact that those alliances would help the Spartans prevail. But there are shafts of light that pierce the heavy irony that clouds the oration. I can’t argue with this, for instance:
“Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.” (Warner 181)
There is also this passage, which I wish I didn’t agree with quite so violently:
“We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.” (181)
And this, which is really stirring:
“Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.” (Warner 185)
As beautiful as all of this is, it is extremely unlikely that Thucydides himself witnessed this oration, or that he received even a near-verbatim retelling of it from someone who did. Instead, as Jennifer T. Roberts puts it in her Thucydides: A Very Short Introduction, “it probably represents a mélange of Thucydidean and Periclean thinking.” (Roberts 2, 128) The more than 40 other significant speeches in Thucydides’s history should also be viewed through this lens. Thucydides was attempting to take a very different approach to history than Herodotus – one without mythical elements, one that did not try to understand people’s actions within their cultural contexts, but within what Thucydides considered to be rational human nature. In an article for the University of Cambridge’s Doing History in Public blog from this past February, Chris Campbell outlines the difference between the two fathers of history like this:
“Herodotus saw his accounts as tales of morality, with ethical lessons to be learned from the wars and perceived societal injustices that he covered. Thucydides roundly rejected the idea that history should be a public moralising force, but subscribed all the same to the power of history to teach; in particular, the idea that future civic and military leaders could learn from the successes of the past and improve on the mistakes.” (Campbell)
Thucydides’s methods of research would quickly become outdated, but his attitude towards history would dominate for centuries to come. One of his successors was the late Roman historian Procopius – a historian lauded in his time for his rational and lucid histories of various wars. He’s most famous today, however, for a work that leans heavily into one of the great Herodotean traditions – smutty court gossip.
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Procopius was born around 500 CE – yes, we’ve leaped ahead a thousand years or so – in Caesarea in what was then a province of the Eastern Roman Empire – also known as the Byzantine Empire. Caesarea is on the north coast of modern Israel. Like Herodotus and Thucydides, he wrote in Greek, but unlike them, he was very much a kept man: he was an official advisor and chronicler for the emperor Justinian I, who reigned from 527 to 565 CE. Justinian is famed as a military leader, as a legal reformer, a commissioner of great buildings like the Hagia Sophia, and as a champion of the Christian faith – in fact, he’s venerated as a saint by Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
His reputation on all four of the preceding points is creditable in part to his depiction by Procopius, who wrote a multi-volume history of the wars Justinian led the empire through (or into). This was titled, rather unimaginatively, The History of the Wars, but it was immediately lauded as a great achievement. Less popular, but no less inoffensive to Justinian’s reputation, was Buildings, which described the various churches and castles and fortifications Justinian commissioned, no doubt in the kind of detail that would have made Herodotus, an infrastructure nerd, very happy.
Based just on the quality of these two works, Procopius was praised as an heir to Thucydides and Herodotus in his own day.Another historian, writing approximately 30 years after Procopius’s death, said of Procopius’s History of the Wars that: “‘I am not able, nor do I wish, to hold up my candle before such a beam of eloquence.’” (Procopius X)
It’s in The Secret History, however, that Procopius turns his beam of eloquence squarely against his great imperial patron, in a brief but scorching book of about 45,000 words in English. Peter Sarris, in his introduction to the (again) Penguin Classics edition of The Secret History, writes that “[Procopius] lambasts Justinian as a demon-king, an inveterate destroyer of established institutions and a compulsive liar, married to a former whore with voracious sexual appetites, in particular a predilection for group sex.” (Procopius xii)
Byzantine polycules. Spicy. In case you’re wondering, yes, I am considering giving this book its own place in a future year’s reading list – we’ll probably get into the 500s CE in late 2027 or early 2028 – but for now, a quick precis of the action will have to do.
Procopius begins by justifying his decision to delay publication of this book given how combustible its topic is:
“It was out of the question to tell the story in the way that it should have been recorded as long as those responsible for what happened were still alive. For it was impossible either to avoid detection by swarms of spies or if caught to escape death in its most agonizing form. Indeed, even in the company of my nearest relations I felt far from safe.” (Procopius 1)
Fair enough. He also frets that people won’t believe what he writes in this book, and that it will ruin his hard-earned reputation as a historian – but he takes comfort in the fact that many of his contemporaries could corroborate the wildest stories for him. Finally, he worries that the deeds of Justinian and his wife Theodora (the aforementioned fan of orgies) will inspire future tyrants to greater debaucheries and crimes. However, he considers that people in his own time would not have known about, say, the Emperor Nero if not for the courage of historians, and adds that:
“Those who in the future, if it so happens, are similarly ill-used at the hands of tyrants will not find this record altogether useless; for it is always comforting for those in distress to know that they are not the only ones on whom these blows have fallen.” (Procopius 2)
The Secret History is in three sections: the first, called “The Tyranny of Women,” details how the great general Count Belisarius, with whom Procopius began his career, was undermined by his slavish love for his awful, conniving wife Antonina and her machinations both with and against Empress Theodora. Antonina, Procopius tells us, was the daughter of a charioteer and “one of the theatre tarts” (Procopius 3), which had primed her to live a debauched life without any instinct for faithfulness to her husband, whom she ensnared by magic.
Belisarius, instead of focusing on leading his campaigns, was distracted by his wife’s constant infidelities – including her seduction of their adopted son, Theodosius. “He kept [Antonina] under guard in disgrace,” writes Procopius, “and made repeated moves to get rid of her altogether. But he always relented, overcome, it seems to me, by fiery passion. Rumour has it that his wife used magic arts to enslave him, instantly destroying his resolution.” (Procopius 12)
But Procopius isn’t content to portray Belisarius, a beloved military hero, as a dupe for his wife – he also takes great pains to mention that Belisarius never passed up an opportunity to plunder a city or cheat a colleague out of money:
“[Belisarius] devoted himself heart and soul to the pursuit of wealth and the unlimited acquisition of illicit gain, on the plea that he had not received a penny from the Emperor. In fact, he plundered indiscriminately nearly all the Italians who lived at Ravenna or in Sicily and anyone else he could reach, pretending that he was making them pay the penalty for their misdeeds.” (Procopius 20)
However, this is all just a warm-up to part two: Justinian and Theodora. Justinian, declares Procopius, was not a reformer but a destroyer: “The maintenance of established institutions meant nothing to him: endless innovations were his constant preoccupation. In a word, he was a great destroyer of well-established institutions.” (Procopius 27) When he wasn’t moving fast and breaking things politically, Justinian was plotting ruinous wars of conquest, having palace eunuchs executed for making off-color jokes, and allowing the Blues – a kind of gang that grew up around a chariot-racing team he supported – to run riot in Constantinople.
The litany of outrages which flourish under Justinian, in Procopius’s telling, begin to sound like something out of Isaiah:
“And many creditors were under irresistible pressure to return promissory notes to their debtors without recovering any of the debt, and many people to their chagrin had to free their household slaves, and it is said that a number of women were forced by their own slaves to yield to many acts most repugnant to them. And by now the sons of men in high positions, after associating with these young criminals, compelled their fathers to do a number of things they were most reluctant to do, particularly to hand over their money to them. Many unwilling boys, with the full knowledge of their fathers, were forced to have unholy intercourse with faction members, and women who were happily married suffered the same treatment.” (Procopius 31)
All this, and Justinian hasn’t even gotten married yet. Procopius relates the early life of empress Theodora with relish: like Belisarius’s wife Antonina, Theodora comes from low-born travelling performer stock: after her father, a keeper of performing bears, dies, she and her sisters are obliged to become comic actresses, and then gradually prostitutes. To modern readers like you and me, this is a terrible tale of human trafficking. To Procopius, it’s a sign that this woman is marked for depravity from birth.
Regardless, by the time Theodora is a young woman, she has developed a signature performance involving geese. Wearing only the underpants required by law for performers, she would:
“Spread herself out and lie on her back on the floor. Certain menials on whom this task had been imposed would sprinkle barley grains over her private parts, and geese trained for the purpose used to pick them off with their beaks one by one and swallow them. Theodora, far from blushing when she stood up again, actually seemed to be proud of this performance. For she was not only shameless herself but did more than anyone else to encourage shamelessness.” (Procopius 38)
Naturally, Justinian falls madly in love with her, and overturns both legal and social precedent to make her his wife. Once married, the couple begin a career of criminality, conspiring to seize estates, create strife in the church, dictate the marriages of subjects (taking a cut of the dowries) and engage in more and more lurid depravities in their own bedrooms.
“While [Justinian and Theodora] ruled the Romans,” groans Procopius, “neither faith nor doctrine about God continued stable, no law had any permanence, no business dealing could be trusted, no contract meant anything.” (Procopius 56) Procopius further declares that the Emperor displayed an unnatural lack of hunger and a similarly uncanny ability to go without sleep, and that furthermore many of his servants saw his body change shape, or his face dissolve into a shapeless mass, the way a demon’s would. In spite of this, he’s also portrayed as a bit scatter-brained:
“Even in matters which roused [Justinian] to the greatest enthusiasm he would do an about-turn for no reason at all, and he had become as unsteadfast as a cloud of dust. Consequently not one of his relations, or even of his acquaintances, ever placed any real confidence in him: he was forever changing his mind about what he proposed to do.” (Procopius 91-92)
Wow, sounds awful.
The third part of The Secret History, “Anatomy of a Regime,” is a somewhat more sober forensic account of Justinian’s corruption and embezzlement. He begins with the public funds and then moves on to stripping wealth out of the church and the estates of private citizens. He contrives to make himself the heir of every senator, allows market vendors to jack up their prices as high as they like so long as he gets a cut of the profits, and downsizes the gold coinage, keeping the difference for himself. Into every aspect of life, from the salaries of soldiers and sailors down to the alms allowed for the most miserable beggars, says Procopius, the tentacles of Justinian and Theodora come wriggling, seeking gain or destruction.
Now, which Procopius is the “real” Procopius? The one who wrote History of the Wars, or the one who wrote The Secret History? Peter Sarris suggests they’re one and the same: he points out several places in both Wars and Buildings where Procopius lets his animus toward Justinian show: the accusations he makes in the Secret History show up as charges levelled against Justinian by ambassadors or enemies of the state, or as deeds done by the Persian Shah (one of the nations Justinian was obliged to do battle with), and in Buildings, Justinian is depicted as overriding the anxieties of his architects as they build the dome of the Hagia Sophia – a dome which, after being built to Justinian’s specifications, would collapse in 558. (Procopius xix)
“The Secret History is … a startlingly original composition,” concludes Sarris, “the author of which shows very little sign of having been constrained by anything, let alone genre. We quite simply know of no other text like it.” Agreed! I recommend you read this one, though do be aware the middle section can be a bit repetitively ranty. There is also a solid historical novel, Count Belisarius, by one of the all-time great historical novelists, Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, which draws heavily on Procopius as a source. If you’re intrigued by Procopius, that book is well worth your time.
From an all-gossip approach to history, let’s move on to the other vein of Herodotean inquiry, and examine an all-myths approach to history – a work of the high Middle Ages that transformed European literature and continues to shape the identity of two nations to this day. Let us now head to Britain, friends, to meet Geoffrey of Monmouth: the monk who gave us Merlin.
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Geoffrey of Monmouth lived in the early and middle 12th century CE. We don’t know his exact dates, but he pops up as a witness to various documents between 1129 and 1151 that relate to various religious institutions around Oxford, and he is even a witness to the Treaty of Westminster which ended the civil war between King Stephen and Henry Fitzempress, the future Henry II. (Thorpe 14)
“Everything in his writings and his thinly sketched biography,” writes the late Lewis Thorpe, in his introduction to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s great work, The History of the Kings of Britain, “points to his having been a Welshman, or perhaps a Breton born in Wales.” (Thorpe 13) Geoffrey spoke Welsh, claimed to be “of Monmouth,” which is today just over the Welsh border, and was later given a parish in Wales, though he may never have visited it. And his book also has a strong patriotic Welsh element to it – a Welsh supremacy claim, if you like.
Geoffrey’s book, completed around 1135, is a pseudo-history: one that seeks to explain the present order by appealing to mythical events or legends. There may be sprinklings of truth in this work – in his introduction, Lewis Thorpe mentions a few tantalizing bits of archaeological evidence which seem to corroborate some events in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book, being careful to note that “much, if not most, of his material is unacceptable as history; and yet history keeps peeping through the fiction.” (Thorpe 19)
Immediately controversial, History of the Kings of Britain was nevertheless taken as historical fact by a significant number of readers for several centuries – including negotiators for King Edward I, when he was trying to legally prove his right to overlordship of Scotland in the late 1200s. Even after it was fully dismissed as fiction, the stories within the Kings of Britain continued to inspire writers and thinkers including, as you’ll soon hear, William Shakespeare.
In his introduction, Geoffrey claims he is working from “a certain very ancient book written in the British language” (Thorpe 14) given to him by his superior at the institution where he lives and writes – this was possibly a monastery or a college near Oxford (the University of Oxford didn’t yet exist). By “British” he means “Welsh,” and he means that in every particular throughout his work. Scholars, as usual, are not able to confirm the existence of this book, but it’s possible he was legitimately working from some sources written in Welsh, such as genealogies or king lists, along with early versions of the King Arthur stories from the 9th-century chronicler Nennius.
He begins in fine patriotic style:
“Britain, the best of islands, is situated in the Western Ocean between France and Ireland. It stretches for eight hundred miles in length and for two hundred in breadth. It provides in unfailing plenty everything that is suited to the use of human beings.” (Thorpe 37)
He begins the story of Britain with the oldest event he can think of: the Trojan War. Specifically, Geoffrey claims that Britain was initially inhabited by one Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, who fled Troy after the defeat by the Greeks and settled in Italy. Brutus wound up exiled from Italy following a hunting accident in which he killed someone. Through various adventures and misadventures he gathers a following of fellow Trojans, and winds up at a temple of the goddess Diana. Falling asleep before the altar, Brutus hears the goddess speak to him:
“‘Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and to your people; and for your descendants it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them.’” (Thorpe 65)
And so it is. Brutus and his followers push west, dodging sirens and making themselves distinctly unwelcome in France before finally arriving at . . . Totnes. Only my UK listeners will appreciate the irony of that. Anyway, Brutus names the island Britain after himself. He establishes a settlement which will become London. He gives the southwestern bit of the island to his companion Corineus, who names that region Cornwall, after himself. Thus we have the British and the Cornish. (Thorpe 70-71)
Geoffrey gives us the history of Brutus’s descendants prior to the arrival of the Romans in brisk fashion, occasionally stopping the action to mention events elsewhere, such as Solomon building the temple of Jerusalem, so we can judge when events in Britain are happening. One story stands out: the tale of King Leir (or Lear), founder of Leicester, who was obliged to divide his kingdom among his daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. This little tale – perhaps two thousand words long at most – serves as the kernel of one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. (Thorpe, 81-86)
The Romans arrive in the form of Julius Caesar, and are immediately repulsed by the valiant Britons – it takes treachery, not superior military tactics, to defeat them – and we are swept along through a list of Britons who are vassals to the Romans. The Saxons – the English – arrive, and the Britons fail to repulse them. A King Vortigern comes to rule the British. He’s harried into Wales, and is struggling to build a tower which is constantly falling down. His magicians advise him to:
“…look for a lad without a father, and that, when he had found one, he should kill him, so that the mortar and the stones could be sprinkled with the lad’s blood. According to them the result of this would be that the foundations would hold firm.” (Thorpe 167)
His messengers find the boy, the illegitimate son of a noblewoman, in Carmarthen. His name is Merlin. The boy declares that his blood is not necessary to steady the tower – instead, he orders the King’s men to dig, because there is a pool beneath the tower, and beneath the pool there are two dragons sleeping. Vortigern’s people find that this is so, and realize that this boy is supernatural.
Geoffrey now gets into the meat of his story, the bit he (and we, and all of medieval Europe) enjoy the most: the legends of Arthur. He recounts the prophecies of Merlin, which foretell an eventual Welsh reconquest of Britain. A taste:
“A Hedgehog loaded with apples shall re-build [Winchester] and, attracted by the smell of these apples, birds will flock there from many different forests. The Hedgehog shall add a huge palace and then wall it round with six hundred towers. London will view this with envy and will increase her own fortifications threefold. The River Thames will surround London on all sides and the report of that engineering feat will cross the Alps.
The Hedgehog will hide its apples inside Winchester and will construct hidden passages under the earth. In that time the stones shall speak.” (Thorpe 178-179)
Just delightfully wacky. These prophecies, amusingly, were held to have been fulfilled when Henry Tudor (Henry VII) took the throne in 1485. I’m not sure whether or not he was the Hedgehog, though.
You probably know the beats of the King Arthur legend. He’s conceived in Cornwall by deception, tutored by Merlin as a boy, and comes to the throne after the death of his father, Uther Pendragon (the sword and the stone are a later innovation). Geoffrey depicts Arthur as defeating the Saxons and then going on to conquer most of northern Europe, including Ireland, Norway, France, and even Rome, before ultimately being betrayed by Mordred, his own kinsman – here a nephew, later his illegitimate son. They engage in battle, which Arthur wins, but at a terrible cost:
“Arthur himself, our renowned King, was mortally wounded and was carried off to the Isle of Avalon, so that his wounds might be attended to. He handed the crown of Britain over to his cousin Constantine, the son of Cador Duke of Cornwall: this in the year 542 after our Lord’s Incarnation.” (Thorpe 261)
I have to agree with Lewis Thorpe when he says that “With the passing of Arthur [Geoffrey’s] interest gradually died away, and so indeed, does that of the modern reader.” (Thorpe 9) The latter material in the history contains a few stirring promises that the Welsh will rise again, but is otherwise not as much fun.
It’s certainly not accurate to call Geoffrey of Monmouth a true historian in the Herodotean sense – Geoffrey was writing history as he wanted it to be, rather than reporting what his various sources told him. While Herodotus had his biases, he didn’t have an agenda. But Geoffrey does offer a link between the practice of writing history, however flawed, and the creation of literature.
I’ve mentioned Shakespeare, but this is most obvious in the afterlife of Geoffrey’s chapters about King Arthur. While legends about Arthur had been circulating for at least 200 years before Geoffrey started writing, his work is the first that gives us a glimpse of Arthur’s court at peace, laying the foundation for a tradition of chivalry that would inspire future generations. In the High Middle Ages, rulers of any distinction tried to ape the games, tournaments, and traditions of Arthur’s court described by Geoffrey. But his “history” is today most notable not just as literature in itself, but as the inspiration for an entire tradition of literature.
The poet Marie de France, who we last encountered translating Aesop’s Fables, seized on Geoffrey’s work. She was followed down the ages by a procession of poets, chief among them Sir Thomas Malory, who gave us Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail and Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose poem Idylls of the King is a must-read. In more recent years, elements of Geoffrey are woven into work by the underappreciated T.H. White, whose excellent novel The Sword in the Stone is done a disservice by the Disney movie based on it, and by the late Mary Stewart, who wrote a trilogy of novels from the point of view of Merlin, beginning with The Crystal Cave. I recommend all of these works to you, and even plan to get to some of them on this show. You know, eventually.
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That’s the end of our epic journey with Herodotus. In our three episodes with the Father of History, we’ve been bumping up against the boundaries between history as we conceive it – as a modern scientific discipline concerned with accurate recording of events based on primary sources – and history as Herodotus might have conceived it: an opportunity for moral education and a way to understand national culture through the study of people and their actions. It’s possible to hold both these concepts in mind at once as we consider Herodotus – and Polybius later this year, and other historians we’ll encounter along the way as we progress through our Books of All Time.
Many writers have grappled with balancing the tensions between history and literature. One of the most notable was Theodore Roosevelt, who lived from 1858 to 1919. Roosevelt was a man of tremendous energy and wide-ranging achievements. Summarizing his life would take another 15 minutes of showtime – scratch that, summarizing the first 42 years of his life before he became president would require that much time.
He was a complex, fascinating man – domestically progressive, and set against the “great malefactors of wealth”, he was also a sabre-rattling imperialist abroad, in spite of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. From his days teaching Sunday school to the poor as a student at Harvard to his exploits with the Rough Riders in Cuba, he seems to have crammed at least six different lifetimes into one. He is the sort of borderline-unbelievable figure Herodotus would have loved to write about.
Roosevelt was also a historian. He published several works, mostly on military history, which were well-received in his time. But today he seems to be regarded (along with Winston Churchill) as a kind of transitional figure between the 19th-century gentleman scholars – enthusiastic amateurs like yours truly, but richer and with better libraries – and the professional, academic historians of the 20th century. He seems to have recognized this, and wrote about it in a 1912 address to the American Historical Association, “History as Literature.” It’s worth quoting at length:
“Because history, science, and literature have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit. Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history but I do not even accept it as true for science.
Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great work of literature there is the same demand now that there always has been; and in any great work of literature the first element is great imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past, can come only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong.” (Roosevelt 1912)
Imagination as necessary to history: Herodotus would surely have agreed. Another point of agreement between the Father of the Progressive Era and the Father of History? That the study of history is essential for supporting democratic values and society, and that such a history cannot be merely a record of triumphs:
“Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is unpleasant. Nevertheless when the tale is finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works.”
Imagination, curiosity, a capacity to admit of many viewpoints, and a desire to understand the failures of the past as well as the glories: these are gifts Herodotus gave us with his Histories, and they are gifts we can still use, now and in the future.
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That’s it for this episode. Thanks for bearing with me as I wrestled with this work – I hope the extra episode made up for the delayed appearance of this one. We’re going to take a break from Greek epics for a bit, as we have a big summer of Greek drama planned, followed by a Greek philosophy autumn (which, honestly, I’m dreading. I hope 40-something me can find a way to appreciate Greek philosophy that 19-year-old-me couldn’t). We are going back to China, to meet with the master: Join me on Thursday, May 1, for Episode 31: “Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Part 1: A Way of Deception.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Campbell, Chris. “Historian Highlight – Herodotus and Thucydides.” Doing History in Public, The University of Cambridge, 8 Feb. 2025, doinghistoryinpublic.org/2025/02/10/historian-highlight-herodotus-and-thucydides/.
“Ctesias, Overview of the Works.” Livius, http://www.livius.org/sources/content/ctesias-overview-of-the-works/.
Evans, J. A. “Father of History or Father of Lies; The Reputation of Herodotus.” The Classical Journal, vol. 64, no. 1, 1968, pp. 11–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296527.
Ford, Laura. “Plutarch’s ‘on the Malice of Herodotus.’” Kosmos Society, 27 May 2022, kosmossociety.org/plutarchs-on-the-malice-of-herodotus/#footnote-1.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Edited by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Books Ltd, 2015.
Herodotus. The Histories. Edited by John Marincola. Translated by Aubrey De Selincourt, Penguin, 2003.
Kirkland, Bryant. “Why Is Plutarch so Angry about Herodotus?” Herodotus Helpline, 3 Aug. 2023, herodotushelpline.org/why-is-plutarch-so-angry-about-herodotus/.
Plutarch. “On the Malice of Herodotus.” Edited by William Goodwin, Perseus Digital Library Project, Tufts University, data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg123.perseus-eng1:1.
Procopius. The Secret History. Edited by Peter Sarris. Translated by G. A. Williamson, Penguin, 2007.
Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert. Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert. Thucydides: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “History as Literature.” Historians.Org, American Historical Society, 27 Dec. 1912, http://www.historians.org/presidential-address/theodore-roosevelt/.
Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Rex Warner, Penguin Books, 1972.
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