Answer by Anthony Ellis
Herodotus was clearly fascinated by the discrepancies in how different people imagined and worshipped the gods. But he didn’t think of the world as divided into a series of separate and distinct ‘religions’. Instead, he took it for granted that, by and large, most societies worship the same gods but simply imagine them differently: each group of people has its own names for the gods, worships them using its own rites, depicts them differently in its icons and sculptures, and tells different stories about their birth, powers, and functions. So, in Herodotus’ view, it’s not the case that you have your gods and we have ours. Rather the god whom we (Greeks) know as ‘Aphrodite’ is also worshipped by the Arabians, who call her ‘Alilat’, and by the Assyrians, who call her ‘Mylitta’, and by the Persians, who call her ‘Mitra’ (see his comments at 1.131.3). This practice of theological ‘translation’, which equated the pantheons of different peoples, was not Herodotus’ own invention – it was part of a long tradition in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
If this tolerant attitude to what we would think of as ‘foreign religions’ seems unfamiliar, that’s in large part because the ‘Abrahamic faiths’ and the cultures which evolved out of them have historically understood religious difference in other ways. In the early Christian centuries, for instance, another model prevailed: that of ‘heresy’. Christian heresiologists contended that a primal ‘orthodoxy’ had always been known to God’s chosen people, but that it had been continuously assailed by ‘heresies’ which led the faithful into idolatry, producing a vast and sinister diversity of religious practice. Only over the last few centuries has it become common to think of humanity as being divided into a series of ‘world religions’ which exist on a level footing with one another and worship different and historically unrelated deities. Both of these approaches would have left Herodotus and his contemporaries scratching their heads.
For anyone wondering how so many different peoples came to worship the same gods, Herodotus has an explanation: knowledge of individual gods spread gradually from one people to another through mutual contact, typically flowing from older societies (like the Egyptians) to younger ones (like the Greeks; for an example, see 2.145-6). The first inhabitants of Greece, he says, thought of the gods as an undifferentiated group (known simply as ‘the gods’); but later they learned the Egyptian names for the gods and, once an oracle gave them permission, they began to use them. Remarkably, Herodotus claims that most of what makes Greek religion distinctive – including the gods’ cultic epithets, powers, and the stories of their births, marriages, and conflicts – was first formulated long after this by the great poets Hesiod and Homer, whom Herodotus dates at 400 years before his own day (2.50-3). Although Herodotus never makes explicit global criticisms of how the ‘Greeks’ imagine the gods, he clearly thought that some of what these poets said was untrue – for instance, that gods took mortal lovers and had semi-divine children (for his discussion of confused or foolish Greek ideas about the gods see, for instance, 2.43-5). Like many other Ionian and Athenian intellectuals, he probably doubted that the gods resemble humans in the way that traditional Greek epics and cult-depictions implied.
All this might suggest that Herodotus had a critical – perhaps even sceptical – view of religion. But most of this is based on what Herodotus writes in his more ‘anthropological’ moments. Herodotus’ Enquiries are extremely diverse and, when he embarks on more literary narratives, he writes about the gods in ways which would have been more familiar to Greek readers. Much as in Greek tragedy, his stories give prominence to gods, oracles, fate, prodigies, and other forms of divine intervention. He makes it clear that human life is wholly dependent on the good will of deities who are strict in their punishment of injustice – but who do not rule the world in a manner conducive to human flourishing. In fact, some of the work’s most prominent descriptions of the gods present them as hostile to humans, so jealous that they constantly disrupt mortal life and ensure that no human enjoys unlimited success, happiness, reputation, youth, or health (for example, see chapters 1.32-3, 3.40, 7.10ε, and 7.46). These passages have, quite rightly, led many to think that Herodotus had deep religious convictions.
The second part of this question took me by surprise, since I’d never thought of Herodotus being viewed as a religious or spiritual figure. In antiquity he had a very chequered reputation: although he was respected by many – dubbed the ‘father of history’ by Cicero and others – he was also criticized as a liar who intentionally spread mistruths and slander about the most glorious episodes of Greek history. On the rare occasions that his religious views came under scrutiny in antiquity and the Middle Ages, his descriptions of the gods as jealous and hostile towards humanity tended to be dismissed as blasphemy, by pagan philosophers and Christians alike (I discussed some examples here). Herodotus certainly achieved cult status among some historians, but few have claimed him as a source of spiritual guidance and none, to my knowledge, have actually worshipped him in a religious sense.
Ironically, the closest example might be Protestant humanism. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the Lutheran reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) claimed that Herodotus’ writing was part of God’s plan to provide humans with a continual record of world history. Melanchthon and his students argued that God inspired Herodotus to start his history at the point where the Old Testament finished, and declared that his writings provided a perfect illustration of the Ten Commandments. This isn’t actually so far from viewing Herodotus – or his writing – as a religious authority of some sort. But that has to be put in context. Melanchthon and others looked for overtly Christian interpretations of almost all of the ancient Greek ‘classics’, and their interest in what Herodotus thought about the gods extended only to cherry-picking ideas which supported their own opinions and ignoring the rest. Of course, they treated ancient Hebrew literature of the Bible in precisely the same way. So perhaps we could say that here Herodotus did come close to becoming some kind of ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ authority – though even these Protestant humanists would certainly have insisted that he was in a completely different class to Christian Scripture.
Further Reading:
Assmann, A. 1996. ‘Translating gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability’, in S. Budick and W. Iser (eds), The Translatability of Cultures. Figurations of the Space Between. Stanford, 25-36.
Burkert, W. 1990. ‘Herodot als Historiker fremder Religionen’, in G. Nenci(ed.), Hérodote et les peuples non-grecs (Entretiens Hardt 35., Geneva, 1-32 (repr. in his Kleine Schriften VII: Tragica et Historica (ed. W. Rösler). Göttingen,140–16.
Ellis, B. A. 2015. ‘Herodotus magister vitae: or Herodotus and God in the Protestant Reformation’, in id. (ed.) God in History: Reading and Rewriting Herodotean Theology from Plutarch to the Renaissance, Histos Supplement 4. Newcastle upon Tyne, 171–245.
Ellis, B. A. 2021. ‘Religion, Herodotus’ views on’, in C. Baron (ed.) The Herodotus Encyclopedia (Malden, MA), 1228–1233.
von Lieven, A. 2013. ‘Translating Gods, Interpreting Gods. On the Mechanisms behind the Interpretatio Graeca of Egyptian Gods’, in I. Rutherford (ed.) Greco-Egyptian Interactions. Literature, Translation and Culture, 500 BCE – 300 CE. Oxford, 61-82.
Harrison, T. 2000. Divinity and History. The Religion of Herodotus. Oxford.
Scullion, S. 2006. ‘Herodotus and Greek Religion’, in C. Dewald and J. Marincola (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Cambridge, 192-208.
Schwab, A. 2020. Fremde Religionen in Herodots “Historien”. Religiöse Mehrdimensionalität bei Persern und Ägyptern. Stuttgart.
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