Herodotus and the Instabilities of Western Civilization

“What does it tell us about the modern historical sciences that we recognize as ‘the father of history’ a figure who has also been regularly vilified as ‘the father of lies’?” asks Marchard in her Academy project. Since the recovery of the full text of Herodotus’ Histories in the fifteenth century, a parade of both notorious and obscure European and American scholars and lay readers have reveled in and depended upon his reportage on subjects ranging from the habits of the crocodile to the battle logistics of Thermopylae. But Herodotus’ text was always tricky to use; his “oriental prelude” (Books 1-4) in particular relied upon the oral testimony of local informants and included improbable flying snakes and bloodthirsty barbarian queens. Using, and trusting, Herodotus required travel, decipherment, excavation, the collecting of massive amounts of new data–and the application of logical reasoning. Separating Herodotean truths from lies engaged generations of modern readers, for example, to glean secular data for substantiating the Hebrew Bible. In Berlin, Marchand will use the archives at the the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Museumsarchiv, the Handschriftsabteilung and orientalist and geographical departments of the Staatsbibliothek, and the archive of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. She writes, “Herodotus’ gloriously heterogenous text has, in fact, never given rise to a single narrative about western civilization; but post-Renaissance readers’ many attempts to undermine, fact-check, distill, or vindicate his claims have been instrumental in the making of modern historical knowledge.”