From Halicarnassus to Thouria: the intra-Hellenic travels of Herodotus
Answer by Paul Cartledge
There are sceptics who have questioned whether Herodotus was much more than an armchair traveller, at least so far as his trips to Egypt in Africa and to Babylon in Asia are concerned (I have explored elsewhere the question of Herodotus’ likely travel itinerary). Little or no scepticism has been applied, I think rightly, to the historian’s own explicit attestations of or implied references to his travels within the bounds of his own Greek-speaking world. Born in Halicarnassus at the outer western fringes of the Persian Empire, probably somewhere around 484 BCE, he died – we know not where – probably somewhere around 425, having by then acquired the citizenship of the relatively new (since c. 445) foundation of Thouria (also Thourioi) in southern Italy. There is no independent contemporary verification of his Doric-speaking birthplace, but a reference at 4.99 in his Histories seems to be addressed to a western Greek, south Italian audience.
Throughout his vast work he names just three individual sources, among the multiplicity of persons one is entitled to assume that he will have met and talked with on his travels – always assuming (as I do) that he really did travel where he gives every impression of having done. One of those three named individual sources is Archias of Sparta, whom he says he met not just ‘in Sparta’ but specifically in his residential district of Pitanê (as Herodotus spelled it in the Ionic dialect he adopted for his work throughout; in Spartan Doric it was Pitanâ) (3.55). For much of Herodotus’ adult lifetime, putatively 465-425, Sparta was at war, mostly with Athens, but between 445 and 431 there was a window of peace, and it’s during those 14 years that I assume Herodotus paid his Spartan visit.
Sparta had close connections, political and religious, with Delphi. Herodotus, a man of strong religious interests especially in oracles, cannot but have visited Delphi in Phokis, and probably more than once, describing as he did some of the magnificent gifts bestowed on the shrine (e.g. 1.50-51). Not far from Phokis in central Greece was Boeotia, and it was from Orchomenus in Boeotia that there hailed another of Herodotus’ named informants, Thersandros (9.16), who related to him a tale of a feast thrown in 479 in Thebes, then an ally of Persia, at which he had been a guest. Orchomenus and Thebes were notoriously rivals as well as fellow Boeotians, so presumably it was not in Thebes that Herodotus met Thersandros. That he visited Thebes is, however, a certainty, if we take him at his word – ‘I myself have seen’ – when he describes viewing inscribed tripods in a Theban shrine (5.59-61; cf. 1.52).
A vivid description of the Peneios river valley in Thessaly (7.129) suggests personal observation (autopsy), and I have no difficulty myself imagining Herodotus visiting at least all the major battlefields he describes in mainland Greece – Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea – and that of Mycale on the coast of Asia too. For just offshore from Mycale to the west lay the island of Samos, on which Herodotus is so well informed both visually (describing three built ‘wonders’, 3.60) and linguistically (he can discern a peculiarly Samian variant of the Ionic dialect, 1.142.4) that we can well credit the much later evidence which speaks of him fleeing from a political fracas in Halicarnassus to take up residence as an exile on Samos.
But the Greek city apparently closest to his heart as well as his head was Athens. The story that the city of the Athenians rewarded him with a vast bounty for speaking so favourably of their role in the Graeco-Persian Wars can’t be verified, but that he did go out of his way to laud the Athenians is beyond question. Though well aware that such an opinion would be most unpopular, he nevertheless confidently averred that it was the Athenians of all the defending Greeks who most deserved the accolade of being ‘the saviours of Hellas [Greece]’ (7.139), and it was into the mouths of anonymous Athenian spokesmen that he placed a consciously rousing definition of what ‘being Greek’ truly meant (8.144). Since it was in Herodotus’ lifetime that Athens first became what Plato much later called ‘the City Hall of Wisdom’ of all Hellas (Protagoras 337d), it is unthinkable that he did not visit it – and not only visit but spend much time there, with friends and acquaintances who very plausibly included Sophocles.
If you wanted to explore this topic further, see:
Jessica M. Romney ‘Herodotean Geography (4.36-45): A Persian Oikoumenē’, Greek, Roman & Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 862-881, at 862-3 n. 1 [further reading].
C. Baron ed. The Herodotus Encyclopaedia, 3 vols (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) [c. 2,500 entries from 180 contributors in 16 countries]
Herodotus Helpline 