Herodotus and the Birth of Written History: Roderick Beaton (447 BCE)
Roderick Beaton, author of The Greeks: A Global History
This week we are going back to witness the birth of history as a written discipline.
Our guide on this long journey into the ancient world has spent his life studying and teaching Greek language and culture, but it was when he retired from academia that Professor Roderick Beaton found the time to write the book he had been dreaming about since he first visited Greece as a teenager. The Greeks, A Global History is a masterful, sweeping journey through 3500 years of history that tells the stories of Greek people, their language and their culture.
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In this episode, Roderick takes us back to the year 447BCE and the moment when Herodotus of Halicarnassus, newly arrived in Athens, sat down and began to write his Histories and in doing so, laid the foundations of the discipline of History itself. The word historie comes from the Greek word in the Ionian dialect Herodotus would have spoken for enquiry. By the time Herodotus got there, Athens was already home to a thriving literary culture with plays by the likes of Aeschylus enthralling audiences. The Greek language was establishing itself as a powerful cultural instrument, at the same time as other features of that culture like architecture, politics and navigation were also developing in new and exciting ways.
The main subject of Herodotus’ Histories was the Persian Wars, fought in the 480s and 90s, as Greek city states struggled to repel Persian invasions – something they eventually achieved, against all odds, at the battle of Salamis in 480BCE. The damage inflicted by the Persians to the city of Athens provided the opportunity for a dramatic rebuilding scheme that was begun in 447BCE.The centrepiece was the Parthenon, the magnificent temple to Athena that still astonishes visitors to Athens today and are international emblems of ancient Greek civilisation.
Click here to order Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks: A Global History from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show Notes
Scene One: 447 BCE. Herodotus of Halicarnassus arrives in Athens and begins writing his monumental Histories.
Scene Two: 447 BCE. Pericles, the many-times elected statesman of the Athenian democracy, persuades his fellow-citizens to embark on a huge and controversial building programme on the Acropolis of Athens.
Scene Three: Outside the small town of Coronea, an Athenian expeditionary force is defeated by the city’s neighbours, the Boeotians. The defeat marks the beginning of division of the ancient Greek world into blocs led by Athens and Sparta, and is the harbinger of the Peloponnesian War in which the Greek city-states fought themselves to exhaustion and stalemate.
Memento: One of the rolled scrolls on which Herodotus wrote his Histories.
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Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Roderick Beaton
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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About Roderick Beaton
Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Cambridge, before specialising in Modern Greek studies. For thirty years until his retirement, he held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, and is now Emeritus.
Roderick is the author of several books of non-fiction, one novel, and several translations of fiction and poetry, all of them connected to Greece and the Greek-speaking world. He is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, and his books have been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Cundill History Prize.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC), and Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic.
From 2019 to 2021 he served as a member of the Committee “GREECE 2021”, charged by the Greek government with overseeing events commemorating the 200 th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution in 1821, and from September to December 2021 as A.G. Leventis Visiting Professor in Greek at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book, The Greeks: A Global History, was published by Faber in November 2021.
Featured images
Taken from George Finlay’s The History of the Greek Revolution, vol. I, 1861.
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