Travels with Herodotus (31 page)

In those days, Sestus and its environs are ruled by a satrap appointed by Xerxes, one Artayctes,
a Persian who was both cunning and corrupt. Once at Elaeus, during Xerxes’ march towards Athens, he tricked him
. Herodotus faults him for stealing gold, silver, and all manner of other valuables, and also because
he used to have sex with women in the temple
.

The Greeks, chasing down the remnants of the Persian army and wishing to destroy the bridges over the Hellespont on which Xerxes’ troops had crossed into Greece, reached Sestus, the best-fortified Persian city on the European side, and started to lay siege to it. At first, the city seemed impregnable. The discouraged Greek soldiers wanted to return home, but their commanders refused to allow it. Meantime, in Sestus, what was left of the supplies was running out and hunger was starting to decimate the besieged.
Inside the stronghold the situation was so utterly dire that they were boiling the leather straps from their beds and eating them. When there were not even any straps left, the Persians, including Artayctes … escaped from the town under cover of darkness by climbing down the most remote wall, where there were hardly any enemy troops
.

The Greeks threw themselves after him in pursuit.
Artayctes and his men… overtaken … resisted for a long time, but eventually were either killed or captured. The prisoners, who included Artayctes and his son, were bound by the Greeks and taken back to Sestus…. The Athenians took him down to the shore on which Xerxes’ bridge across the straits had ended (or, in another version, to the hill which overlooks the town of Madytus), where they nailed him to a plank of wood and suspended him from it, and then stoned his son to death before his eyes
.

Herodotus does not say whether the crucified father is still alive when they split open his son’s head with stones. Is the phrase “before his eyes” to be taken literally or metaphorically? It could
be that Herodotus did not query witnesses about this sensitive and depressing detail. Or perhaps the witnesses themselves were unable to tell him, because they knew the story only from someone else’s account?

Herodotus reminds us that an ancestor of the crucified Artayctes was a certain Artembares, who once submitted a proposition, widely supported by his countrymen, to the then ruling Persian king, Cyrus the Great. It went as follows:
“Since Zeus has given sovereignty to the Persians and to you in particular, Cyrus,… lets emigrate from the country we currently own, which is small and rugged, and take over somewhere better…. Will we ever have a better opportunity than now, when we rule over so many peoples and the whole of Asia?
”

Cyrus was not impressed with the proposal. He told them to go ahead—but he also advised them to be prepared, in that case, to become subjects instead of rulers, on the grounds that soft lands tend to breed soft men. It is impossible, he said, for one and the same country to produce remarkable crops and good fighting men. So the Persians admitted the truth of his argument and took their leave. Cyrus’ point of view had proved more convincing than their own, and they chose to live in a harsh land and rule rather than to cultivate fertile plains and be others’ slaves
.

I read that final sentence of the book and put it down on the table. Abdou’s aromatic enchantments had long ceased working, and swarms of pesky flies, mosquitoes, and moths once again swirled all about. They were even more aggressive now. I surrendered and fled from the terrace.

In the morning I went to the post office to send home some dispatches. A telegram was waiting for me at the window. My kind, protective boss, Michał Hofman, was suggesting that unless there
was something extraordinary taking place in Africa, it would behoove me to come back to Warsaw to talk. I stayed in Dakar for a few days more, then bade goodbye to Mariem and Abdou, walked through the narrow, winding streets of Goree, and flew home.

A
friend came to visit me one evening before I left Goree, a Czech correspondent, Jarda, whom I had met once in Cairo. He, too, had come to Dakar for the festival of black art. We walked for hours through the exhibits, trying to puzzle out the meaning and purpose of the masks and sculptures of the Bambara, Makonde, and Ife. We understood how, seen at night in the flickering lights of fires and torches, they could come to life, arouse fear and dread.

We talked that evening on my terrace about the difficulties of writing about African art in a short article, in so few words. Visiting the exhibits, we were face-to-face with an alien, unknown world, our familiar concepts and vocabulary utterly inadequate for conveying its reality. We were aware of these problems, yet helpless before them.

If Jarda and I had lived in Herodotus’s times, we would have been Scythians—they had inhabited our part of Europe. We would have cavorted through forests and fields on the swift horses that so delighted our Greek, shooting arrows and drinking kumiss. Herodotus would have been very interested in us, would have asked about our customs and beliefs, about what we ate and what we wore. Next, he would have described precisely how, having drawn the Persians into the winter trap of frigid temperatures, we
had defeated their army, and how their great king, Darius, pursued by us, had barely escaped with his life.

As we talked, Jarda noticed Herodotus’s book lying on the table. He asked how I had chanced upon it. I told him I had been given the book as a traveling companion, and how in the course of reading it I had in fact embarked on two journeys simultaneously—the first being the one I undertook while carrying out my reportorial assignments, and the second one following the expeditions of the author of
The Histories
. I quickly added that in my opinion the translated title,
The Histories
, misses the point. In Herodotus’s days, the Greek word “history” meant something more like “investigation” or “inquiry,” and either of those terms would have been better suited to the author’s intentions and ambitions. He did not, after all, spend his time sitting in archives, and did not produce an academic text, as scholars for centuries after him did, but strove to find out, learn, and portray how history comes into being every day, how people create it, why its course often runs contrary to their efforts and expectations. Are the gods responsible for this, or is man, as a consequence of his flaws and limitations, unable to shape his own destiny wisely and rationally?

When I started reading this book, I told Jarda, I had asked myself the question, In what way did its author gather his material? There were no libraries back then, after all, no swollen archives, no files stuffed with newspaper clippings, none of the countless data banks now at our disposal. But Herodotus addresses my question on the very first pages, writing, for instance,
According to learned Persians
… Or
The Phoenicians say that
and adding:
So this is what the Persians and Phoenicians say. I am not going to come down in favour of this or that account of events, but I will talk about the man who, to my certain knowledge, first undertook criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks. I will
show who it was who did this, and then proceed with the rest of the account. I will cover minor and major human settlements equally, because most of those which were important in the past have diminished in significance by now, and those which were great in my own time were small in times past. I will mention both equally because I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place
.

But how could Herodotus, a Greek, know what the faraway Persians or Phoenicians are saying, or the inhabitants of Egypt or Libya? It was because he traveled to where they were, asked, observed, and collected his information from what he himself saw and what others told him. His first act, therefore, was the journey. But is that not the case for all reporters? Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the reporter feel like himself, at home.

What set him into motion? Made him act? Compelled him to undertake the hardships of travel, to subject himself to the hazards of one expedition after another? I think that it was simply curiosity about the world. The desire to be there, to see it at any cost, to experience it no matter what.

It is actually a seldom encountered passion. Man is by nature a sedentary creature; from the moment he began cultivating the land and left behind the perilous and uncertain existence of a hunter or gatherer, he settled down happily, naturally, on his particular patch of earth and fenced himself off from others with a wall or a ditch, prepared to shed blood, even give his life to defend what was his. If he moved, it was only under duress, because he was driven by hunger, disease, or war, or by the search for better work, or for professional reasons—because he was a sailor, an itinerant merchant, leader of a caravan. But to traverse the world for years
on end of his own free will, in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.

Where did this passion of Herodotus’s come from? Perhaps from the question that arose in a child’s mind, the one about where ships come from. Children playing in the sand at the edge of a bay can see a ship suddenly appear far away on the horizon line and grow larger and larger as it sails toward them. Where did it originate? Most children do not ask themselves this question. But one, making castles out of sand, suddenly might. Where did this ship come from? That line between the sky and sea, very, very far away, had always seemed the end of the world; could it be that there is another world beyond that line? And then another one beyond that? What kind of world might it be? The child starts to seek answers. Later, when he grows up, he may have the freedom to seek even more persistently.

The road itself offers some relief. Motion. Travel. Herodotus’s book arose from travel; it is world literature’s first great work of reportage. Its author has reportorial instincts, a journalistic eye and ear. He is indefatigable; he sails over the sea, traverses the steppe, ventures deep into the desert—we have his accounts of all this. He astonishes us with his relentlessness, never complains of exhaustion. Nothing discourages him, and not once does he say that he is afraid.

What propelled him, fearless and tireless as he was, to throw himself into this great adventure? I think that it was an optimistic faith, one that we men lost long ago: faith in the possibility and value of truly describing the world.

Herodotus absorbed me from the start. I opened his book frequently, returning time and again to it, to him, to the scenes he
depicted, to his dozens of stories, his countless digressions. I kept trying to enter his universe, find my way around it, familiarize myself with it.

This was not difficult to do, to judge by the way he saw and portrayed people and events. There is no anger in him, no animus. He tries to understand everything, find out why someone behaves in one way and not another. He does not blame the human being, but blames the system; it is not the individual who is by nature evil, depraved, villainous—it is the social arrangement in which he happens to live that is evil. That is why Herodotus is a passionate advocate of freedom and democracy and a foe of despotism, authoritarianism, and tyranny—he believes that only under the former circumstances does man have a chance to act with dignity, to be himself, to be human. Look, Herodotus seems to be saying, a small handful of Greek states defeated a great eastern power only because the Greeks felt free and for that freedom were willing to sacrifice everything.

But while maintaining the superiority of his fellow countrymen, Herodotus is not uncritical of them. He understands how the laudable principle of open discussion and freedom of speech can easily lead to pointless and destructive quarreling. He shows us that the free-speaking Greeks can bicker even on the field of battle, with the enemy poised to strike. Seeing that Xerxes’ soldiers are advancing on them, that they are already letting their first arrows fly and are reaching for their swords, the Greeks start to argue about which Persians to attack first—the ones coming from the left, or the ones threatening from the right? Was this propensity to disputatiousness not one reason why the Greeks were never able to form a single, common state?

The insect brigades, which earlier had only me to attack, now, because there is also Jarda, have divided and formed two great
buzzing and belligerent squadrons. Unable to cope with them, exhausted by their unflagging incursions, we call on Abdou for help, who like an ancient priest drives back with his fragrant incense the forces of evil, which in this case have assumed a bloodthirsty airborne guise.

Leaving for later the conversation about the current situation in Africa (a subject with which we must occupy ourselves daily), we stay on Herodotus. Jarda, who read the Greek long ago and says that he remembers little, asks what struck me most about this book.

I answer that it is its tragic dimension. Herodotus was the contemporary of the greatest Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles (with whom he may have been personally acquainted), and Euripides. His times were the golden age of theater (as well as much else), and stage art in those days was influenced by mysteries, folk rituals, national festivals, religious services, Dionysian rites. This affected how Greeks wrote, how Herodotus wrote. He explains the history of the world through the fortunes of individuals. The pages of his book, whose goal is the recording of human history, are full of flesh-and-blood people, specific human beings with specific names, who are either powerful or weak, kind or cruel, triumphant or despondent. Under different appellations and in ever-changing contexts and situations, here are Antigones and Medeas, Cassandras and the servants of Clytemnestra, the Ghost of Darius and the lance-bearing knights of Aegisthus. Myths blend with reality, legends with facts. Herodotus tries to separate one from the other, without neglecting either or presuming to establish hierarchy. He knows to what great degree a man’s way of thinking and his decision-making are determined by an inner realm of spirits, dreams, anxieties, and premonitions. He understands that the phantom which the king sees in his sleep can decide the fate of his nation and millions of his subjects. He
knows how weak a human being is, how defenseless, in the face of terrors born of his own imagination.