Travels with Herodotus (6 page)

Only in India did I realize that my unfamiliarity with English was meaningless—insofar as only the elite spoke it here. Less than 2 percent of the population! The rest spoke one of the dozens of other languages. In this sense, my not knowing English helped me feel closer, more akin to the ordinary folk in the cities or the peasants in the villages I passed. We were in the same boat—I and half a billion of India’s inhabitants!

While this thought gave me comfort, it also troubled me—why, I wondered, am I embarrassed that I don’t know English but not that I don’t know Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, or any of the many other languages spoken in this country? The argument of accessibility was irrelevant: the study of English was at the time as rare a thing as that of Hindi or Bengali. So was this Eurocentrism on my part? Did I believe a European language to be more important than those languages of this country in which I was then a guest? Deeming English superior was an offense to the dignity of Hindus, for whom the relationship to their native languages was a delicate and important matter. They were prepared to give up their lives in the defense of their language, to burn on a pyre. This fervor and resolve stemmed from the fact that identity here is determined by the language one speaks. A Bengali, for example, is someone whose mother tongue is Bengali. Language is one’s identity card, one’s face and soul, even.
Which is why conflicts about something else entirely—about social and religious issues, for instance—can assume the form of language wars.

Searching for books on India, I would ask if there was anything about Herodotus. Herodotus had started to interest me—I took a downright fancy to him, in fact. I was grateful for his being by my side in India during moments of uncertainty and confusion, for helping me with his book. Judging by how he wrote, he seemed a man kindly disposed toward others and curious about the world. Someone who always had many questions and was ready to wander thousands of kilometers to find an answer to any one of them.

When I immersed myself in various sources, however, I learned that we know little about Herodotus’s life, and that even the few facts we do have are not entirely reliable. For in contrast to Rabindranath Tagore—or, for instance, his contemporary Marcel Proust, both of whom meticulously parsed every detail of their childhoods—Herodotus, like the other great men of this epoch—Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles—tells us next to nothing about his. Was it not customary? Was childhood considered irrelevant? Herodotus says only that he came from Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus lies above a calm bay shaped like an amphitheater, in a beautiful part of the world, where the western shore of Asia meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is a land of sun, warmth, and light, of olive trees and vineyards. One instinctively feels that someone born here must naturally have a good heart, an open mind, a healthy body, a consistently cheerful disposition.

Biographers tend to agree that Herodotus was born between 490 and 480
B.C.E.
, perhaps in 485. These are greatly important years in the history of world culture. Around 480
B.C.E.
, Buddha departs for the other world; a year later, in the Lu principality, Confucius
dies; Plato will be born fifty years later. Asia is the center of the world; even insofar as the Greeks are concerned, the most creative members of their society—the Ionians—also live in Asia. There is no Europe yet; it exists as myth only, in the name of a beautiful girl, Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, whom Zeus, transformed into a white bull, will carry off to Crete to have his way with her.

The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty. Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population—the Carians. His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian. It was his mother who most probably was Greek. Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed. Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity. We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers—citizens of the world. It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in it.

What sort of child is Herodotus? Does he smile at everyone and willingly extend his hand, or does he sulk and hide in the folds of his mother’s garments? Is he an eternal crybaby and whiner, giving his tormented mother at times to sigh: Gods, why did I give birth to such a child! Or is he cheerful, spreading joy all around? Is he obedient and polite, or does he torture everyone with questions: Where does the sun come from? Why is it so high up that no one can reach it? Why does it hide beneath the sea? Isn’t it afraid of drowning?

And in school? With whom does he share a bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid,
a girl? Did he learn quickly to write on the clay tablet? Is he often late? Does he squirm during lessons? Does he slip others the answers? Is he a tattletale?

And toys? What did a little Greek living two and a half thousand years ago play with? A scooter carved out of wood? Did he build sand castles at the edge of the sea? Climb trees? Make himself clay birds, fish, and horses, which we can study today in museums?

Which aspects of his childhood will he remember for the rest of his life? For little Rabi, the most exalted moment was the morning prayer at his father’s side. For little Marcel, it was waiting in a dark room for his mother to come and hug him good night. Which experience did little Herodotus anticipate in this way?

What did his father do? Halicarnassus was a small port town lying on the trade route between Asia, the Near East, and Greece proper. Phoenician merchant ships from Sicily and Italy stopped here, as did Greek ships from Piraeus and Argos, and Egyptian ones from Libya and the Nile delta. Might Herodotus’s father have been a merchant himself? Perhaps it was he who kindled in his son a curiosity about the world. Did he disappear from home for weeks and months at a time, leaving his wife, questioned by her child, to answer that “Father is in …”? And here one can imagine a list of place-names from which he drew one lesson—that somewhere, far away, there exists an omnipotent world which could take his father away from him forever, but also (thank the gods!) can bring him back again. Is that how the temptation to get to know this world was born? The temptation and the resolve?

From the few facts that have reached us, we know that little Herodotus had an uncle whose last name was Panyassis, and that he was the author of various poems and epics. Did this uncle perhaps take him on walks, instruct him in the beauties of poetry, the arcana of rhetoric, the art of storytelling? Because
The Histories
is
the product of natural talent but also an example of writerly craft, of technical mastery.

While still a young man—and it seems for the first and only time in his life—Herodotus gets embroiled in politics, thanks to his father and uncle, who take part in the revolt against the tyrant of Halicarnassus, Lygdamis. The tyrant succeeds in suppressing the rebellion. The mutineers take refuge on Samos, a mountainous island two days of rowing to the northwest. Herodotus spends years here, and perhaps it is from here that he sets forth around the world. If he reappears now and then in Halicarnassus, it is only briefly. What would he do that for? To see his mother? We do not know. One can probably assume that he did not return here again.

It is the middle of the fifth century
B.C.E.
; Herodotus arrives in Athens. The ship reaches the Athenian port of Piraeus; it is eight kilometers from here to the Acropolis, a distance traversed on horseback or, as was often the case, on foot. Athens is then a world metropolis, the most important city on the planet. Herodotus is provincial, a non-Athenian, and thus something of a foreigner, and while such individuals are treated better than slaves, they are not treated as well as native Athenians. Athenian society was highly sensitive to race, with a strongly developed sense of superiority, exclusivity, arrogance even.

But it appears that Herodotus adapts quickly to his new city. The thirty-something-year-old man is open, friendly, a hail-fellow-well-met. He gives lectures, appears for meetings, author evenings—he probably makes his living that way. He establishes important contacts—with Socrates, Sophocles, Pericles. This isn’t that difficult. Athens, with a population of one hundred thousand, isn’t large in those days, and is tightly, even chaotically built up.
Two places only stand out and distinguish themselves: the center of religious cults, the Acropolis, and the center of meetings, events, commerce, politics, and social life—the Agora. People gather here from the early morning. The square of the Agora is always crowded, full of life. We would surely find Herodotus here as well. But he does not stay in the city for long. At approximately the time of his arrival, Athenian authorities pass a draconian law, according to which only those both of whose parents were born in Attica, the region immediately surrounding Athens, are entitled to political rights. Herodotus is unable to obtain Athenian citizenship. He sets off once again, and finally settles permanently in southern Italy, in the Greek colony of Thurii.

Opinion differs as to what happens later. Some believe that he did not budge from there again. Others claim that he later visited Greece once more, that he was sighted in Athens. Even Macedonia is mentioned. But in point of fact nothing is certain. He dies at age sixty, perhaps—but where? Under what circumstances? Did he spend his last years in Thurii, sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree and writing his book? Or maybe he could no longer see well enough and dictated it to a scribe? Did he have notes or was he able to rely on memory alone? People in those days had great powers of recall. He could well have remembered the stories of Croesus and Babylon, of Darius and the Scythians, of Persians, Thermopylae, and Salamis. And so many of the other tales that constitute
The Histories
.

Or perhaps Herodotus dies on board a ship sailing somewhere across the Mediterranean? Or perhaps he is walking along a road and sits down on a stone to rest, never to get up again? Herodotus vanishes, leaves us twenty-five centuries ago in a year that is impossible to pinpoint precisely and in a place we do not know.

•   •   •

The newspaper office.

Field trips.

Assemblies. Meetings. Conversations.

In my free moments I sit amidst dictionaries (a proper English one has finally been published) and various books about India (the imposing work of Jawaharlal Nehru,
The Discovery of India
, has just come out, the great autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, and the beautiful
Panchatantra, or the Wisdom of India, Five Books
. After Stalin’s death, censorship had eased and books that for years had been kept under lock and key started to appear).

With each new title I read, I felt as if I were undertaking a new journey to India, recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings, of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip—in an iconographic journey such as this, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance.

So here I am, becoming increasingly engrossed in India’s extraor-dinariness and riches, thinking that with time this country will become my thematic homeland, when one day in the fall of 1957 our omniscient secretary, Krysia Korta, called me out of my office at the newspaper and, looking mysterious, agitated, whispered to me:

“You’re going to China.”

Autumn 1957

I
reached China on foot. Well, I flew to Hong Kong via Amsterdam and Tokyo. In Hong Kong, a local train took me to a small station in an open field—where, I had been told, I would be able to cross into China. In reality, however, when I stepped down onto the platform, it was only to be approached by a conductor and a policeman, who gestured toward a bridge on the far horizon. “China!” the policeman said.

He was a Chinese man in a British police uniform. He walked with me a ways along the asphalt road, then wished me a good journey and turned back for the station. I continued on alone, carrying my suitcase in one hand and a bag full of books in the other. The sun beat down mercilessly, the air was hot and heavy, flies buzzed aggressively.

The bridge was short, with a diagonal metal grating, and below it flowed a half dried-up river. Further on stood a tall gate covered in flowers, with signs in Chinese and on top a coat of arms—a red shield and five yellow stars, four small and one large. Guards stood near the gate. They carefully inspected my passport, wrote the relevant data down in a big ledger, and told me to keep walking—toward a train which was visible perhaps half a kilometer away.
I walked on in the heat, with great effort, perspiring, amidst swarms of flies.

The train was empty. The cars resembled those on the train from Hong Kong—seats arranged in rows, no separate compartments. Finally, we were on our way. The landscape we traversed was sunny and green, the air coming in through the windows felt warm and humid and smelled of the tropics. It all reminded me of India, the India from the area around Madras and Pondicherry. Through these subcontinental analogies, I began to feel at home. I was among landscapes I knew and liked. The train stopped frequently and more and more people got on at the little stations. They were dressed alike, the men in dark blue denim jackets buttoned up to their chins, the women in flowery dresses identically cut. They sat straight-backed, silent, facing forward.