Equity demands that we treat an historian conformably with his own professions. When he narrates events as well known to his contemporaries as to himself, he is not to be considered as sustaining any other responsibility than that of telling his story well:—in such instances we may ask for proof of his impartiality, or of the soundness of his judgment, but not of his veracity, which is not taxed. But when he relates incidents of a private or remote kind;—when he makes a demand upon the confidence of his contemporaries by affirming things in relation to which they could not generally detect his misstatements if he erred;—then, and in such cases, we may fairly search for evidence bearing upon the historian’s character, and circumstances, and his means of information. This is an important distinction, never to be lost sight of in reading history;—and the inference it contains is this—that a history of public transactions, published while many of the actors were still living, and while the events were familiarly remembered by a large number of persons, and which was commonly received as authentic, must be accepted, as to its principal facts, as true, even though there should be reason to suspect the impartiality, the veracity, or the judgment of the writer; but if in these respects, he is entitled to a common degree of confidence, then nothing more than a few errors of inadvertency can, with any fairness, be deducted from the narrative.
Every historical work, therefore, needs to be analyzed, and to have its several portions separately estimated.—Whatever is remote or particular will claim our credence according to the opinion we may form of the historian’s veracity, accuracy, judgment, and his means of information; but the truth of narratives relating to events that were matters of notoriety in the writer’s time, rests altogether upon a different ground; being necessarily involved in the fact that the work was published and accepted as authentic at such or such a date. The strength of this inference will best appear by examining a particular instance.
In adherence to the distinction above mentioned, we must detach from the History of Herodotus the following portions (not as if they were proved to be false, or even improbable; but simply because the truth of them cannot be directly inferred from the fact of the genuineness of the work). First—Geographical and antiquarian descriptions of countries remote from Greece: Secondly—The early history of such countries, and indeed the early history of Greece itself: Thirdly—Events or conferences said to have taken place at the Persian court during the war with Greece; and lastly, many single incidents, reported to have happened among the Greeks, but which rest upon suspicious or insufficient evidence. After making deductions of this sort, there will remain—all those principal events of the Persian invasion which were as well known to thousands of the author’s countrymen and contemporaries as to himself; and in describing which his responsibility is that of an author only, who is required to digest his materials in the best manner he can—not that of a witness, called to give evidence upon a matter of doubt.
The leading events which we may accept as vouched for by the antiquity and genuineness of the work are these—The invasion of Greece by a large Asiatic army, about five-and-forty years before the publication of the History:—the defeat of that army by the Athenians and Platæans on the plains of Marathon:—a second invasion of Greece ten years afterwards, by an immense host, gathered from many nations:—the desertion of their city by the Athenians:—an ineffectual contest with the invaders at the pass of Thermopylæ:—the occupation of Athens by the Persians:—the defeat of the invading fleet at Salamis:—the retreat of the Persians, and their second advance in the following year, when the destruction of Athens was completed; and—the final overthrow of the Asiatic army at Platæa and Mycale. That these events actually took place—assuming the History to be genuine—will appear if the circumstances of the case are examined.
At the time when, as it has been proved, the History of Herodotus was generally known and received as authentic, the several states of Greece were marshalled under the rival interests of Athens and Sparta; and an intestine war, carried on with the utmost animosity, raged by turns in all parts of this narrow territory. Such a period, therefore, was not the time when flagrant misrepresentations of recent facts, tending to flatter the vanity of one of these rival states, at the expense of the honour of others, could be endured, or could gain any credit. The Athenians gloried, beyond all bounds of modesty, in having, with the assistance of the Platæans only, repelled the Median invasion on the plains of Marathon. But would this boast have been allowed—would the account of the battle given by Herodotus have been suffered to pass without contradiction by the other states, if no such invasion had actually taken place, or if it had been much less formidable than is represented by the historian; or if the other states had in fact been present on the field? Our author affirms that the Lacedæmonians, though fully informed of the danger which threatened the independence of Greece, persisted in a scrupulous adherence to their custom of not setting out upon a military expedition till after the full moon. In the meantime the battle took place, and a body of two thousand Lacedæmonians, afterwards despatched from Sparta, reached the field of battle only time enough to gratify their curiosity by a sight of the slaughtered Medes. This absence of their allies was ever afterwards made matter of arrogant exultation by the Athenians; and the historian, in giving his support to their boast, dared the contradiction of one half of the people of Greece.
The second invasion of Greece, conducted by the Persian monarch in person, took place ten years after the defeat of the first at Marathon; or about five and thirty years before the publication of the History: many individuals, therefore, were then living who took part in the several battles and engagements; and every remarkable event of the war was then as well known and remembered in Greece as are the circumstances of the French Revolution by the people of Europe at the present time (1828).
Our immediate purpose does not demand that we should examine the credibility of the description given by Herodotus of the Asiatic army; for even if it were proved that the numbers stated by him are exaggerated, the principal facts would not be brought into doubt; nor would even the credit due to the historian be much impeached; for in all these particulars he is careful, again and again, to remind the reader that he brings forward the best accounts he could collect—not vouching for their absolute accuracy. That he did avail himself of authentic documents in compiling this description is rendered evident by the graphic truth and propriety of all the particulars. Indeed the picture of the Persian army, and of its discipline and movements, is strikingly accordant with the known modes of Asiatic warfare. The army of Xerxes consisted of a small body of brave and well-disciplined troops—Medes, Persians, and Saces, which, if it had been ably commanded, and unencumbered, might very probably have succeeded in their enterprise; but being impeded and embarrassed by the presence of a vast and disorderly mob of half-savage or dissolute attendants, they were, at every step, surrounded by a wide-spreading desolation—more fatal than the enemy, which rendered the advance of the army in the highest degree difficult, and its retreat desperate. To all this, parallel instances may be adduced from almost every page of Asiatic history.
When speaking of the twenty Satrapies of Darius, Major Rennell, in his Essay on the Geography of Herodotus, avails himself of the information contained in our author’s description of the army of Xerxes, to which he attributes a high degree of authority. Now it is evident that, unless Herodotus had possessed authentic and accurate documents, it would have been impossible for him to have given the consistency of truth to two distinct accounts of nations and of people, so various and so remote from Greece. “Although,” says this writer, “there are some errors in the description, as there must necessarily be where the subject is so very extensive, yet it is on the whole so remarkably consistent, that one is surprised how the Greeks found means to acquire so much knowledge respecting so distant a part. It is possible that we have been in the habit of doing them an injustice, by allowing them a less degree of knowledge of the geography of Asia, down to the expedition of Alexander, than they really possessed; that is, we have, in some instances, ascribed to Alexander, certain geographical discoveries which perhaps were made long anterior to his expedition.... We shall close the account of the Satrapies, and our remarks on the armament of Xerxes, with some additional ones on the general truth of the statement of the latter, and on the final object of the expedition. Brief as the descriptions in the text are, they contain a great variety of information, and furnish a number of proofs of the general truth of our author’s history; for the descriptions of the dress and weapons of several of the remote nations, engaged in the expedition of Xerxes, agree with what appears amongst them at this day; which is a strong confirmation of it; notwithstanding that some attempts have been made to ridicule it by different writers. Herodotus had conversed with those who had seen the dress and weapons of these tribes during the invasion; and therefore we cannot doubt that the Indians clothed in cotton, and with bows made of reeds (i. e. bamboos), were amongst them: of course, that the great king had summoned his vassals and allies, generally, to this European war; a war intended, not merely against Greece, but against Europe in general, as appears by the speeches of Xerxes, and other circumstances.... The evident cause of the assemblage of so many nations was that the Europeans (as at the present day) were deemed so far superior to Asiatics as to require a vastly greater number of the latter to oppose them. This is no less apparent in the history of the wars of Alexander, and of the wars made by Europeans in the East in modern times. However, we do not by any means believe in the numbers described by the Greek historians; because we cannot comprehend, from what is seen and known, how such a multitude could be provided with food, and their beasts with forage. But that the army of Xerxes was great beyond all example, may be readily believed, because it was collected from a vastly extended empire, every part of which, as well as its allies, furnished a proportion; and if the aggregate had amounted to a moderate number only, it would have been nugatory to levy that number throughout the whole empire; and to collect troops from India and Ethiopia to attack Greece, when the whole number required might be collected in Lower Asia.”
It seems impracticable, from the existing evidence, to ascertain how great a deduction ought to be made from the calculations of Herodotus, as to the numbers of the invading army; but it is easy to believe that his authorities, which unquestionably were authentic in what relates to the description of the forces, might lead him astray, without any fault on his part. Or probably, as the numbers exceeded the facilities of common computation, some conjectural mode of calculation was adopted by the contemporary Greeks, which might easily exceed the truth.—For example, the length of time occupied by the barbarian train in passing certain defiles:—or the very fallacious mode of reckoning employed by the Persians was perhaps followed:—this, as Herodotus describes it, consisted in counting ten thousand men, who were packed in a circle as closely as possible, and a fence formed round them: they were then removed, and the entire army, in turns, was made to pass within the inclosure: the whole was thus counted into ten thousands. But how probable is it, that, by the inattention of the persons who conducted this process, the successive packages were less and less dense.—Seven thousand men might easily seem to fill the space in which ten had been at first crammed. Nor is it at all safe to argue à priori on the supposition that so many could not have been supported on the march. The power which drew a large levy of men from twenty-nine nations, might also drain those nations of their grain. A vast fleet of flat-bottomed barges attended the army along the coast; and as soon as this fleet was separated from it, all the extremities of famine were suffered by the retreating host. This armament is not fairly compared with those which, in later times, have traversed the continent of Asia; for in these instances the aid of an attendant fleet was not available. Without this aid the distant movement of five hundred thousand men is scarcely practicable; with it, three or four times that number might with little difficulty be led a distance of three or six months’ march. This important difference has not been duly regarded by those who have discussed the question. If then such a deduction from the army of Xerxes is made as may readily be accounted for from the inaccurate mode of computation employed by the Persians or the Greeks; and if the attendance of so large a fleet of store ships is considered, we may well hold Herodotus excused from the charge, either of deliberate falsification, or of intended exaggeration.
If it were alleged that Herodotus discovers an inclination on every occasion to place the conduct of the Athenians in the most advantageous light, it may be replied that, if such a disposition is charged upon him, then his substantial impartiality, and the authenticity of the narrative are convincingly proved, by his allowing to the Spartans the undivided and enviable glory of having first encountered the invaders at the pass of Thermopylæ. In relating this memorable action he affirms that all the allies under the command of Leonidas, excepting only a small body of Thebans and of Thespians, retired from the pass as soon as it was known that they were circumvented by the Barbarians; and he plainly attributes this desertion to the prevalence of unsoldier-like fears. This statement therefore—like many others in the History—challenged contradiction from the parties implicated in the dishonour.