Herodotus and the Persians

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–c. 425 BCE) wrote the Histories, the longest surviving account of the Persian Empire from its rise under Cyrus to Xerxes’ defeat in Greece. He was born a Persian subject and described Persian customs, kings and debates with real curiosity, but he wrote in Greek, for Greeks, about a war Greece had won. Historians now read him alongside the Persian inscriptions and archives, which confirm some of what he says and correct a good deal of it.

A Persian subject from Halicarnassus

Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, was a Greek city on the coast of Caria that had been inside the Persian Empire since the 540s BCE. Its ruling family were loyal vassals: Queen Artemisia commanded ships for Xerxes at Salamis when Herodotus was a small child. Herodotus later quarrelled with her successor, the tyrant Lygdamis, left the city and spent his life travelling, in Egypt, the Black Sea, Babylonia by his own account, and the Greek mainland, before settling at Thurii in southern Italy.

He therefore knew Persian rule from the inside. He moved through territories run by satraps, met people who had served the king and claims Persian informants. One possible source he names is Zopyrus, the son of the Persian general Megabyzus, who deserted to Athens. Herodotus finished the Histories in the 420s BCE, when Athens and Persia were no longer at war but still enemies.

What Herodotus says about Persian customs

In Book 1, chapters 131 to 140, Herodotus gives a short description of the Persians, one of the first ethnographies in Western literature. Some of it fits what we know from other evidence, and some does not.

• Religion. The Persians, he says, have no statues, temples or altars, and sacrifice on mountain tops to the whole circle of the sky, as well as to sun, moon, earth, fire, water and winds. This roughly matches the absence of temple buildings in early Achaemenid Persia. But he adds that the Persians call a goddess of love “Mitra”, confusing Mithra, a male god of contracts, with something else entirely.
• Education. Boys from five to twenty learn three things: to ride, to shoot the bow and to tell the truth. Darius’s tomb inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam praises the king as a rider and archer, and the Behistun inscription attacks “the Lie” again and again, so here Herodotus seems well informed.
• Lies and debt. The most shameful thing for a Persian, he says, is to lie, and the next is to owe money, because a debtor is forced to lie.
• Borrowing. No people adopt foreign customs so readily: they wear Median dress and Egyptian breastplates. The mixed court art of Persepolis supports this.
• Burial. He says the Magi expose corpses to birds and dogs before burial, but admits he is not sure about other Persians. His caution is justified: royal practice, as the rock tombs show, was quite different.
• Names. He claims all Persian names end in the same letter, s. That is only true of Persian names as Greeks wrote them, a sign that he did not know the language.

Persian voices in the Histories

Herodotus gives Persians speeches and points of view. The work opens with “learned Persians” blaming the Phoenicians and then the Greeks for the hatred between Europe and Asia. In Book 3 three of the nobles who overthrew the Magus debate whether Persia should be a democracy, an oligarchy or a monarchy, and Darius wins the argument for kingship. Herodotus insists this debate really happened, although he knew Greek readers found it hard to believe; most modern historians treat it as a Greek political discussion in Persian costume.

Xerxes is a complex figure, not a cartoon tyrant. He listens to his uncle Artabanus’ warnings, weeps at Abydos when he reviews his army because none of those men will be alive in a hundred years, and is shown both generous and cruel. One of the most moving passages in Book 9 is a Persian guest at a banquet in Thebes before Plataea, telling his Greek neighbour that he knows the army is doomed and can do nothing about it.

Checking Herodotus against Persian sources

Since the Behistun inscription was deciphered in the 19th century, historians have been able to test Herodotus directly. His version of Darius’s rise follows the same broad outline: a false Bardiya, a conspiracy of seven nobles, the killing of the usurper. He names six conspirators besides Darius, and five match the names Darius himself gives; only one differs. That is a remarkable record for a writer working seventy years later.

Elsewhere the fit is worse. His tribute list of twenty satrapies does not match the lists of lands in Darius’s inscriptions, and his figure of over five million men for Xerxes’ expedition is impossible. His picture of Cambyses as a mad king who killed the sacred Apis bull is contradicted by Egyptian evidence, as the page on Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt explains. The Persepolis tablets confirm road stations and some names but show a working, ration-paying bureaucracy that Herodotus barely hints at.

Barbarian-lover or propagandist

Ancient readers did not all think Herodotus was anti-Persian. Plutarch, writing around 100 CE, attacked him in an essay On the Malice of Herodotus and called him philobarbaros, a “barbarian-lover”, for being too fair to the enemy. Modern critics have taken the opposite line, seeing in him the beginning of a Western habit of picturing Asia as luxurious, despotic and effeminate. Others, such as Detlev Fehling, argued that he invented many of his sources outright.

Since the 1980s a group of scholars led by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amélie Kuhrt, in the Achaemenid History workshops, has tried to write Persian history from Persian, Elamite, Babylonian and Egyptian evidence first, with Greek writers used as a supplement. The result is a more balanced view: Herodotus is indispensable for events, especially in the west, but on how the empire was run he is one witness among many and not the most reliable. For his treatment of the earlier kingdom, see Herodotus and the Medes.

Reading him today

A practical rule used by many historians: trust Herodotus most where he describes what he or his informants could see, less where he reports speeches and motives, and least on numbers. Read him for the Greek wars in the episodes on our Greco-Persian Wars overview, and set his picture of the empire next to the history of the Persian Empire drawn from Persian sources.