Herodotus in Northfield

 

The house I rented in Northfield for my second stint teaching at Carleton felt like a treehouse. Built above the attached garage of their renovated farmhouse, the apartment overlooked an expansive garden encircled by maples and oaks. The owners, a retired history professor and his wife, lived there during the summer to save on air conditioning. It was January when I arrived and this perk seemed immensely distant. Instead the many windows framed webs of branches, crystal tracing their riverine forms like bread crumbs. A solitary fir shot a perpendicular into the gray Minnesota sky, drooped beneath its dull coat of snow.

I adjusted quickly and when the spring melt came, I took my Herodotus outside. A back deck overlooked the garden behind the garage. Its café chairs wobbled but the wrought-iron table held steady, even when loaded with the weight of my volumes of English translation, Greek text, Greek-English lexicon, and legal pads of notes. I was always taking notes, sliding my hand along the ruled pages, edging off the perforated top with a careful tear before flipping it to continue. I numbered each page in the top right corner with a circle and dated the entry on the left margin. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to write my own commentary on Herodotus.

Returning to my alma mater and the town of cows, colleges, and contentment was idyllic. The students looked and acted like my friends. When I arrived in 2008, some of them were only five years my junior. I wore ties that year to distinguish myself, but I still was often mistaken for an undergraduate. When I returned two years later, PhD in hand, I left my top shirt button open. The new suffix to my name felt like gravity enough, even if the furrow just above the bridge of my nose had barely deepened. My students seemed to love being taught by a fellow Carl, one familiar with their traditions and with stories to prove it. Tales of my youthful foolishness leavened the playfulness of our intellectual exchanges.

College felt like an oasis from the unforgiving, unkind world around us. Earlier that year, President Obama had ordered the so-called surge in Afghanistan. The war had begun before I myself graduated from college; it had soon become the quagmire that many rightly feared. All of this was in my mind when I returned to campus. I had watched the Twin Towers collapse from the screen of an enormous television in the Campus Center; I had sent anxious messages to my father in DC from the library computer lab; I had felt the grief and sorrow and fear break, wave after wave, over all of us. 

One of the storylines that emerged during the early years of the war in Afghanistan was about the need to understand the culture of the peoples America was “liberating.” You couldn’t export democracy, the argument went, without knowing much about the destination. The United States hired anthropologists to advise their nation building. Arabic language programs opened across many campuses. Some of this was crude strategy, a matter of obtaining tools for violent conquest. But some of it also turned attention and interest toward otherwise understudied and misunderstood peoples and worlds. On this final count, Herodotus came to play a small role in the conversation, a role that led to a much, much larger influence on my life.

In 2007, Robert Kaplan published an essay called “A Historian for Our Time” in the Atlantic. He argued that rather than Thucydides, the usual choice of historical authority for matters of war and peace, Herodotus was historian for this political moment. With his “realist” view of power and interest as key drivers of all international conflict, Thucydides had served as touchstone for generations of grand strategists. Herodotus, by contrast, was neglected and often derided as a mere storyteller. Now, Kaplan argued, we were seeing the limitations of counting infantry, ships, and war material; we needed deeper inquiries into the cultures, customs, and traditions of places like Afghanistan. Herodotus exemplified a form of inquiry that was broad-minded and imaginative in ways Thucydides simply wasn’t. He wanted to know where people got their water, what gods they prayed to, what stories they told while sipping wine around a smoldering fire. Wars weren’t just about strategic interests; they were also about particular people and the ways of life they wished to preserve. Herodotus did not offer false promises of control built on the advice of self-proclaimed experts either; he showed the messiness of all knowledge, how perspective is ineliminable, and provisional conclusions the only honest ones.

I read Kaplan’s piece when it appeared and recalled my own wonderful experience with Herodotus a few years before. When the Political Science department at Carleton approached me about teaching a course called “Justice Among Nations,” a course that usually featured Thucydides as the foundation of thinking about international relations, I saw my chance to investigate Kaplan’s provocative suggestion. Why not counter Thucydides with Herodotus? What could thinking about politics with Herodotus avail?

The choice could not have been more fortuitous. In the first few weeks of the course, the famous “McChrystal Powerpoint Slide” was leaked; it exemplified the ridiculousness of trying to exhaust the complexity of the situation it purported to explain. This was a Thucydidean attempt at parsimony, yet it obviously failed to make sense of what it represented. 

The slide and the political epistemology it represented contrasted powerfully with Herodotus, who told stories rather than offered theories, placing these stories in other stories and never claiming to offer a definitive account of anything. The stakes of approaching the world from a Herodotean rather than a Thucydidean perspective became immediately clear. 

I had drawn a delectable mixture of students to the course. International Relations majors were intent on developing their global theories. Classicists were allured by the chance to read deeply from the two great historians of Greek antiquity. Political philosophers sought wisdom about the good life amid the battles and trophy lists. Political scientists were curious about what thinking about politics 2500 years ago might yield for the present. We struggled and shouted, threw up our hands and crossed our arms. We talked about oracles and the gods, tactics and coalitional forces, storytelling and realism. Like bloodhounds we tracked the question of usefulness – How does this help us understand the present? – but also paused to wonder and even celebrate the moments of strange, arresting beauty and insight – the devastating scene of the Athenians’ annihilation in the quarries on Sicily or Xerxes’ tears while he surveyed his massive array of forces crossing to the Greek mainland. It was the best course I ever taught.

For the final writing project, I asked students to write about the usefulness of Thucydides and Herodotus. Why read them – if at all – in the twenty-first century? The answers ranged from resigned rejection to whole-hearted embrace. We’d be better off studying the history of Afghanistan, some argued; but the distance gained by history, others riposted, illuminates our own limited perspective and prejudices. As the maples and oaks burst into leaf around me, I read and reread these essays with mounting pleasure. Herodotus provoked a conversation where before none existed. He called into question the usual reliance on realism; his explicit and self-conscious storytelling demonstrated how realism itself was a story, a story about what mattered and why but one story among others. Kaplan may have motivated my course, but now my students showed me its fruitfulness. Herodotus brought wonder to once closed frontiers of international politics. My travels with him continued.