Glen Gordon wrote:
> cas:
> >I think Herodotus imagined the west end of the Caucasus as being
more
> >like Greece and not as mountainous and wooded as it was/is. To him,
> >the east end may as well as been on the far side of the moon as far
> >as his knowledge of the geography went.
>
> I'm curious. How does ascertain Herodotus' knowledge? What
> is the basis for the view that Herodotus knew as much about
> this area as we do now about the moon Titan?
I'm not sure what Glen is asking, but I bite.
I have read Herodotus several times over, and if exact incidents fade,
I only have to open a page to be suddenly reminded.
He's the father of history -- and of journalism. He gives us
sober-minded NY Times stuff combined with tatty NY Post
sensationalism. Herodotus like a good story, and enjoyed telling it.
Like any ancient work, you read with discernment, comparing what he
says with what we can correlate with other works, with archaeology,
historical-comparative linguistics, ethnology, etc. Herodotus is very
often very remarkably correct -- even some of the stuff that was
poo-pooed in times past has now been demonstrated to be good reporting
(e.g., his Amazons).
His geographic knowledge of the Black Sea region is fuzzy but *good*.
He grossly overstates the size of the Sea of Azov, but hey, he
actually knew about it. He know about the Caspian -- and that it was
landlocked, but curiously, seems ignorant of the Volga. He knows about
the Caucasus, and understands these are major mountains, but then
Herodotus never really saw BIG mountains (the Taurus certainly, but
never the Alps or the Caucusus). If he underestimated their size, it's
understandable.
His knowledge extends less well to east of the Caspian, relating how
Cyrus the Great lost his head. He does not know of Aral, but seems to
know of the Araxes and Jaxartes (the Syr whatchmacallits). He really
does know about India, but this is really over the edge of his world
view: he has almost no information beyond the fact it was there;
attempts have been made to relate his entertaining tale of gold-mining
ants to a word for a kind of marmoset that passed thru one too many
langauges for Herodotus to get it.
Herodotus is equally fuzzy about the North and West. He puts the
headwaters of the Danube in the Pyrenees. But he clearly knows that
the lower Danube, then called the Ister, and the upper Danube were one
river.
He knows about harsh northern winters, and in fact makes a little joke
of it (his tale of feathers from heaven). Dimly, he might even be
aware of the midnight sun/short days of the far north. He may or may
not be aware of the Baltic.
He makes some gross mistakes in estimating sizes and distances, but
then, he was seat-of-the-pants estimating from his own experience,
giving distances in 'days', telling us directly how he converted these
to distances. The problems here are legendary, but the fact he does
try to give us measures of distance is in itself heroic of him. Here,
his mistakes are sometimes as informative as when he gives us
dead-accurate information.
He takes many of his informants at face value, reporting mythological
items as if they were historic events. For this, he cannot be held
responsible; he was a product of his day, and actually believed this
kind of stuff.
For IE studies, Herodotus gives us the first snapshot of the Steppe --
Scythians chasing Cimmerians chasing Scythians, Sauromatian amazons,
cannibals, etc. Much of this, so far as I've read, has all been pretty
much confirmed by archaeology, or at least, not disconfirmed.
The best way to judge Herodotus is compare his version of the tale
carved on the Bihistun monument to the offical tex. Herodotus' has
some substantive differences in details -- which indicates H. got it
from a different source (perhaps a better one) -- but it nonetheless
largely corresponds to the 'official' version. H. makes mistakes, but
he's *reporting* what he's heard/read.