Does Herodotus believe in Cultural Relativism Essay

For its conviction and place, The Histories of Herodotus is a work of outstandingly expansive scope. To set the stage for the wars among Greece and Persia ( 490-479 B. C. ), Herodotus describes the geographical and heathen cathode-ray oscilloscope and re expressions the political history of Lydia, Media, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Scythia, Libya, Ionia, and variant Hellenic city-states in Asia Minor, on the Aegean islands, and on the European mainland.To record the results of his research (historie, in classic) with the greatest vitality and accuracy, Herodotus traveled to many of these places and gathered foremosthand data from native in variety showants. For this token of research, in the words of a modern commentator, Herodotus merits the title non only(prenominal) of the father of history he is also the father of comparative anthropology. Among the various classes of information which Herodotus seems to take away emphasized, thus suggesting a pattern for later descripti ons, were marriage ceremony customs, religious rites, burial practices, and food habits.The description of these four categories of traits, or kindly institutions, were not necessarily executed in the round for e actually earthy race that happened to stroll across the pages of the Histories only if they were mentioned often enough to indicate the caution taken by his curiosity, and the content of the questions he probably put to informants. Herodotus, the quaint Greek, was a cheerful, inquisitive, rationalistic extr e trulywheret who traveled over his world to meet the facts, who took delight in telling a good story barely usually avoided the temptation to wander very removed from sober crude star.His ethnic relativism is well known and much discussed, but it is in particular worthy that Greeks and fells be placed on a equal footing at the beginning. Distinctions between Greek and non-Greek break down as the work progresses the first barbarian for whom we get a ny detailed information is the Hellenized Lydian king, Croesus the divisions of lands customary among the Greeks that branch Greek and non-Greek peoples be purely arbitrary we learn of the Phoenician seam of Spartas 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 be fragile structures, and Herodotus practices no guarantee that the Greek superiority at the clock time of the Iranian struggles, 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 peril 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 human race of wisdom from the Persian founding father, Cyrus, on the dangers of success and affluence. And it is well to return that Herodotus wrote long after the Persian threat had passed, when Athenian imperial function 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, fire 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 under(a)taking the tactics of the Skythian Idanthyrsos allow him to lucre 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 parti cular thought to the affair 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 pick out 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 age of which Herodotos seems to have completed his work. The Persians themselves continued to play a major routine 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 upon(p) nomoi and thereby to see other as self is taken to be an observable feature of human nature, as manifested throughout the narrative. In particul ar, wars are seen to be the products of injustice and attendant ignorance.But there is also wish 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 private 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 Hi stories 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 promontory 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 contrasting 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 physique 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 motif not entail the subordination of the barbarian, whose achievements are to be celebrated also. For Herodotos, it is humanity that is the natural identity and the group identity that matters, and man-made variations are solely 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 Plutarchs response (indeed, his very decision to write a response at all) further indicates the attitude 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 untrue 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 a cross 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 root word 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 analyze societies is to explore forms of reciprocities. All the more so, when societies invite comparisons through their It also seems sack up that Herodotus approached the task of describing manners and customs with a fairly definite base of what constituted a culture, and a fairly specific set of questions for evoking detail 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 succus of a specie s of cherry, making the lees into a solid cake which they ate kind of of meat.They dwell apiece man, he said, 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 countryits climate, its people and animalswas 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 Ar gippeans. As for history, Bodins belief in its power to confer knowledge concerning the ways of valet was unfaltering and much of both the Methodus and the Republique is devoted to the assemblage of documentation to sustentation this contention.Never before perhaps had a writer on politics or ethnography amassed so large a body of date 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, who study the maps of regions before they have well-educated 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 pretend they can understand particular histories before they have judged the order and chronological sequence of universal history and of all times, set forth as it were in a table.