Simon Hornblower ed. Greek Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). BMCR 7.1 (1995) 41-50 (original) (raw)
False stories, counterfeit reports, and distorted information have always flourished in the conditions of war, like weeds that proliferate on manured soil. Frequently, the falsified accounts are produced by circles of authority from one or the other side of the conflict, for the purposes of propaganda. Herodotus, in the introduction to his work (1.1-5), attributes to the "learned scholars of Persia" a string of tales about rapes of mythical heroines, which supposedly led the Greeks to initiate the Trojan War; in turn, the aggressiveness of the Greeks and the destruction of Troy provided the cause of the Persians' attacks against Greece, in retaliation for the collective wrong inflicted by the Greeks on Asia. This mythical aetiology of the Graeco-Persian conflict is woven wholesale out of Greek mythical and intellectual material. On the other hand, it represents a clearly pro-Persian ideological stance, since it serves as a justification of Darius' and Xerxes' invasions of Greece, and incorporates tenets of traditional Iranian sagacity. Most probably, the tale was produced by a team of Greek collaborationists who worked in the service of Persian propaganda. They composed the story, on the basis of their familiar mythological and intellectual material, in order to justify the Persian invasion in the eyes of Greek audiences. The story reached Herodotus' ears as the official Persian version and was hence attributed to the learned Persian elite. Herodotus, of course, did not believe in this Graeco-Persian forgery, but sought the roots of the Persian Wars in the political events of the documentable past, beginning with Croesus' attacks against the Greek cities. Another section of the Herodotean work, the story of Helen in Egypt (2.113-120) also betrays the historian’s scepticism about the mythical aetiology of the Trojan War. Through narrative irony and logical non-sequiturs, this narrative conveys a cryptic message: wars do not break out merely because of a woman’s rape; wars are always waged for reasons different from the pretexts that are openly declared by the opponents. This tacit precept also interacts with the introduction of the Herodotean work and throws a shadow of irony on the Persian scholars’ mythographical discourse on the Graeco-Persian conflict. The tales of women’s rapes and counter-rapes are fabrications, narrative fictions which serve to cover up ideological propaganda and darker historical motives, such as greed and the imperialistic drive of power. With these narrative excursuses on the causes of war, Herodotus expresses in a graphic manner the same theoretical position which Thucydides will later formulate in analytic terms, by distinguishing between the ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις of the war and the ἐς τὸ φανερὸν λεγόμεναι αἰτίαι.