"Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World"

[Jona Lendering]

Leonidas can be accused for poor reconnaissance or poor estimation of the threat but to deny that he fought is absurd!

I think that nobody has ever said so. It is based on what I call "the diary source" behind Herodotus. It is independently confirmed by Diodorus=Ephorus.

The point at issue in this thread is: how reliable is Hdt.7.220ff? I think we all agree that it is not based on the Diary; Rich Marinaccio suggests that after that, we have a source from "the other site", e.g. Demaratus, which I doubt. Rich takes the gnomê in 7.220 as relating to the return of the Greeks only; I think the entire last part book 7 is meant. I think Rich's position can be defended, although I note that in 2.99, gnomê introduces a substantial part, not a brief section.

He does make clear and obvious mistakes, but only in the smaller details like numbers and dates, not for major plot points.

I beg to differ. The Babylonian logos is one big fake, and this is a major error; and although Herodotus does not claim to have been in Babylon, he strongly suggests it. He is, like it or not, deliberately misleading.

At this point, there's no room for debate; there are hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, which contain the equivalent of tens of thousands of A4-pages of information. (120,000 tablets more are waiting for decipherment in the British Museum alone.) Babylon has been excavated. We know so much about Babylon, and believe me: Herodotus was never there. (See Brill's Companion to Herodotus for literature, or Boiy, Achaemenid Babylon, 2004)

For someone in our time to say that the whole thing probably didn't happen, is really an accusation of fraud.

But that's not what I am saying. I am saying that we do not know why Leonidas stayed at Thermopylae, because Herodotus presents not facts, but a hypothesis. And I point at the uncontested fact that Leonidas was not there to sacrifice himself, as Herodotus says, but as an advance-guard waiting for reinforcements. I think it is possible, probably even likely, that Leonidas was retreating but cut off before he could make progress.

An accusation of fraud? No, I believe I am just taking the Greeks as they are, and not demanding them to write like we. To us, there is a difference between fiction and non-fiction, and if a historian includes non-fiction, we call it fraud. But this is unGreek.

The relevant distinction is between mythos, plasma, and historia. The standard examples of myth are the stories of the Titans, the Gorgon, or Hecabe turning into a dog. They are false (pseude) and are not true because they can not be true.

Historia is the presentation (ekthesis) of things that are true because they must be true, and may actually have happened. An example is a philosophical discourse, because one has to investigate (historein).

Platonic dialogs and Homeric epes belong to the third category, plasma: things that are true, may or may not have happened, but in any case resemble things that have happened.

If Herodotus must be placed in one of these categories, it is the last. He includes entirely fictitious dialogs and speculates. He had a truth to tell about greatness in defeat, but he did not know all the facts; so he included a speculation, and marked it as gnomê. There is nothing strange about this. Cf. Plato's Atlantis, which illustrates a deep truth, may or may not have happened, and does not contain things that can not have happened.

Of course Herodotus and especially Thucydides set a new standard. After them, the study of the past was no longer plasma, but historia. But the Histories are not yet historia, and must not be regarded as such.

To return to the original question: I try to take Herodotus serious as a Greek author that must be studied in a Greek context, and I refuse to pin him down on the dichotomy of fiction/non-fiction. Applying our modern model on Herodotus, is killing him in Procrustes' bed. I also think it is my historian's duty to try to find the facts behind Herodotus' story. Analysing him as the author of plasma has nothing to do with an accusation of fraud.