Travels with Herodotus (33 page)

There were times when journeys into the past appealed to me more than my present-day journeys as correspondent and reporter. I felt this way especially in moments of fatigue with the present. Everything in the present kept repeating itself: politics—always perfidious, unclean games and lies; the life of the ordinary man—unrelenting poverty and hopelessness; the division of the world into East and West—eternal duality.

And just as I had once desired to cross a physical border, so now I was fascinated by crossing a temporal one.

I was afraid that I might fall into the trap of provincialism. We normally associate the concept of provincialism with geographic space. A provincial is one whose worldview is shaped by a certain marginal area to which he ascribes an undue importance, inaptly
universalizing the particular. But T. S. Eliot cautions against another kind of provincialism—not of space, but of time. “In our age,” he writes in a 1944 essay about Virgil, “when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits.”

So there are spatial and temporal provincials. Every globe, every map of the world, shows the former how lost and blind they are in their provincialism; similarly, every history—including every page of Herodotus—demonstrates to the latter that the present existed always, that history is merely an uninterrupted progression of presents, that what for us are ancient events were for those who lived them immediate and present reality.

To protect myself from this temporal provincialism, I set off into Herodotus’s world, the wise, experienced Greek as my guide. We wandered together for years. And although one travels best alone, I do not think we disturbed each other—we were separated by twenty-five hundred years and also by distance of another kind, born of my feelings of respect. For although Herodotus was always straightforward, kind, and gentle in relation to others, there was always with me the feeling of rubbing shoulders undeservedly, perhaps presumptuously, but always thankfully, with a giant.

•   •   •

Did I do the right thing, trying to escape into history? Did this ambition make any sense? After all, we encounter in historical accounts the very same things such as we thought we could flee in our time.

Herodotus is entangled in a rather insoluble dilemma: he devotes his life to preserving historic truth,
to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time
; at the same time, however, his main source of research is not firsthand experience, but history as it was recounted by others, as it appeared to them, therefore as it was selectively remembered and later more or less intentionally presented. In short, not primary history, but history as his interlocutors would have had it. There is no way around this divergence of purpose and means. We can try to minimize or mitigate it, but we will never approach the objective ideal. The subjective factor, its deforming presence, will remain impossible to strain out. Herodotus expresses an awareness of this predicament, constantly qualifying what he reports: “as they tell me,” “as they maintain,” “they present this in various ways,” etc. In fact, though, however evolved our methods, we are never in the presence of unmediated history, but of history recounted, presented, history as it appeared to someone, as he or she believes it to have been. This has been the nature of the enterprise always, and the folly may be to believe one can resist it.

This fact is perhaps Herodotus’s greatest discovery.

From the island of Kos I sailed to Halicarnassus, where Herodotus was born, on a small ship. En route, the taciturn, aged sailor lowered the Greek flag on the mast and hoisted the Turkish one. Both were crumpled, faded, and frayed.

The town lay well inside the arc of the blue-green bay, on whose waters, in this autumnal time of year, many yachts were idling. The policeman whom I queried about the way to Halicarnassus corrected me—to Bodrum, he said, that is how the place is now known in Turkish. He was understanding and polite. The boy at the reception desk in the cheap little hotel near the shore had an acute case of periostitis, with a face so horribly swollen that I was afraid the pus would tear his cheek apart at any moment. Just in case, I maintained a certain judicious distance. In the shabby little room on the first floor nothing closed properly—not the doors, not the window, not the armoire—which made me feel right at home, as if in an environment I knew long and well. For breakfast I was given delicious Turkish coffee with cardamom, pita bread, a piece of goat cheese, some onion and olives.

I set out along the town’s main street, planted with palm trees and fig and azalea bushes. In one spot, at the edge of the bay, fishermen were selling their morning catch at a long table dripping water. They grabbed the floundering fish that had been dumped onto the tabletop, smashed open their heads with a blunt object, gutted them with lightning speed, and with sweeping dexterity tossed the entrails into the bay. The waters were swarming with other fish feeding on the bloody scraps. At dawn the next day, the fishermen would gather another day’s fresh catch into their nets and toss those fish now caught onto the slippery table—where each fell straight under the knife. In this way nature, devouring its own tail, fed both itself and humans.

Halfway down the road, on a hill on a promontory jutting out to sea, stands the castle of Saint Peter, built by the Crusaders. It houses the rather extraordinary Museum of Underwater Archeology, a collection of objects found by divers at the bottom of the Aegean. Especially striking is the large collection of amphorae.
Amphorae have existed for five thousand years. Slender, with swanlike necks, they combine an elegant shape with the strength and resilience of their material—fired clay and stone. They were used to transport olive oil and wine, honey and cheese, wheat and fruit, and circulated throughout the entire antique world—from the Pillars of Heracles to Colchis and India. The bottom of the Aegean is strewn with their shards, but there are also plenty of intact amphorae about, perhaps still filled with olive oil and honey, reposing on the shelves of underwater cliffs or buried in the sand, like lurking, motionless beasts.

What the divers brought up is but a fragment of the whole watery world, whose depths are as rich and variegated as is the realm above, which we inhabit. There are sunken islands down there, and on them sunken towns and villages, ports and harbors, temples and sanctuaries, altars and statues. There are sunken ships and a good many fishing boats. There are merchant ships and the pirate vessels awaiting discovery. Galleys of the Phoenicians lie beneath the surface and, at Salamis, the great Persian fleet, the pride of Xerxes. Countless teams of horses, flocks of goats and sheep. Forests and arable fields. Vineyards and olive groves.

The world that Herodotus knew.

What moved me most, however, was one of the museum’s dark chambers, mysterious as a murky cave, in which, on tables, in display cabinets, and on shelves lie illuminated glass objects which had been pulled up from the depths—cups, bowls, pitchers, perfume flasks, goblets. They are not clearly visible at first, when the doors to the room are still open and daylight penetrates its interior. But when the doors close and it grows dark, the curator presses a switch turning on small lightbulbs inside the little vessels, bringing to life the fragile, matte pieces of glass, which start to
sparkle, brighten, pulsate. We stand in deep, thick darkness, as if at the bottom of the sea, at a feast of Poseidon’s, surrounded by goddesses each holding an olive oil lamp above her head.

We stand in darkness, surrounded by light.

I returned to the hotel. At reception, in place of the dolorous boy, stood a young black-eyed Turkish girl. When she saw me, she adjusted her facial expression so that the professional smile meant to invite and tempt tourists was tempered by tradition’s injunction always to maintain a serious and indifferent mien toward a strange man.