John Keay
WHO'S THE DADDY
The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus
By Justin Marozzi (John Murray 352pp £25)
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!
Once it was Horace who was the discerning traveller's author of choice. Richard Burton supposedly took the Odes to Lake Tanganyika, and the naturalist Charles Waterton was never without them up the Orinoco (he even recited them in his hammock while waiting for vampire bats to alight on his proffered big toe). Horace soothed the spirit, passed the time; his syntax no less than his urbanity provided food for lofty thought. But tastes have changed. Nowadays the educated adventurer's hand luggage is more likely to contain Herodotus. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the legendary Polish correspondent, was despatched on his first assignment with a copy of The Histories by way of an induction to news gathering. He carried it throughout an infallibly unnerving career and then celebrated it in the memoir Travels with Herodotus. First published in English in 2007, Kapuscinski's book must have appeared just as Justin Marozzi was completing The Man Who Invented History, an account of his own travels with Herodotus.
Seemingly Herodotus is more of our times than Horace. He wrote in admirably accessible prose, loved a good story, punctuated it with endearing asides, and focused on war - specifically the Graeco-Persian conflict of the early fifth century BC that included the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea. Great deeds, whether Greek or Persian, must not become 'forgotten in time', he explained; and it was especially important to probe the causes of the conflict. Indeed, so generous were his sentiments and so even-handed his judgements that The Histories have recommended themselves to those entrusted with conflict resolution in later East-West confrontations. Marozzi credits Herodotus with actually inventing 'the West' as a meaningful concept and regrets that neither Bush nor Blair thought fit to read The Histories prior to invading Iraq. A cosmopolitan to the core, he calls Herodotus the first multiculturalist.
He calls him a lot of other things too. The 'father of history' is further awarded the paternity of travel writing, foreign reporting, investigative journalism, anthropology, the study of comparative religions, and the prose narrative. Additionally we are to recognise 'an aspiring geographer, a budding moralist, a skilful dramatist, a high-spirited explorer and an inveterate storyteller'. Marozzi, in short, is smitten. Plutarch's On the Malice of Herodotus, in which the father of history became 'the father of lies', is dismissed 'as a fantastically unpleasant little volume'. Like those who later pilloried Herodotus as a purveyor of 'fabulosities', Plutarch took particular exception to the undeniable readability of The Histories. Mellifluous prose and compelling narrative evidently triggered academic resentment in the ancient world much as they do in the modern.
Marozzi invites a similar reaction. Faithful to the spirit of The Histories and never less than entertaining, he too writes with unbounded enthusiasm and refreshing vigour. The Man Who Invented History proves to be a tour de force of travel writing, unmarred by authorial conceit and enriched by delicious connections, the crispest descriptions and some memorable characterisation. From Bodrum (once the Halicarnassus where Herodotus may have been born) to Baghdad (which didn't exist then) and Babylon (which Herodotus may never have visited), then Egypt, Thessalonica, Athens and the archipelago (with all of which he seems familiar), Marozzi doggedly 'travels in history with the father of history'. It cannot have been easy. There are practically no contemporary notices of the great man and precious few hints in The Histories as to his actual movements. Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum in his native Halicarnassus had not yet been built and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon somehow escaped his attention. That leaves the Pyramids as the one wonder shared by both Marozzi and his esteemed predecessor; but in Egypt, Herodotus was more interested in the behaviour of the Nile, the techniques of mummification and the perversity of the Egyptians. Luckily Marozzi discovers an eighth wonder, the Tunnel of Eupalinos on the island of Samos. 'It's difficult to get excited about a tunnel', he concedes. But braving the bats and the rats, and with the help of a couple of sketch maps, he makes an even better case for its inclusion among the ancient wonders than Herodotus did.
Herodotean crumbs being so few, the temptation to over-egg them must have been great. Marozzi insists that 'a journey without digressions is not worth making' and rightly notes that Herodotus himself was incorrigibly discursive. Had the historian encountered an exorcism in progress, he too might have felt compelled to regale his readers with a highly coloured and completely irrelevant account of it. Using The Histories less as an itinerary and more as a style guide, Marozzi takes full advantage of this licence. I winced just once. For no better reason than adulation to rival his regard for Herodotus, he descends on the ninety-something Patrick Leigh Fermor in remote Mani. The visit is accounted a success. Leigh Fermor gives him lunch and is pleased to be introduced to The Histories; he ushers him away with a graciously dismissive 'Do drop in again if you're ever in the area'. Marozzi takes this literally and plans to be in the area a lot. I hope he changes his mind. Celebrating the dead Herodotus is OK; hobnobbing with one he calls 'the Herodotus of our times' borders on the nauseating.
John Keay's 'China: A History' was published in July by HarperPress.