Happiness and a King’s Ransom
Herodotus Teaches Us Not To Count Our Chickens
Learning about the history of the western tradition’s ancient civilizations is not easy. One immediate difficulty is that few written texts exist. And even if texts survive, we must remember that — in the pre-printing-press era — they exist because someone hand-copied them, and that over the centuries they have been copied many times, by many scribes. Each iteration may , and probably does, deviate from the ‘original’ in many ways.
What’s more, as many have pointed out, even if there is a text, it is always a particular text, written from a particular viewpoint, by someone who has been shaped by a particular tradition. Since it may well be impossible to divorce historical writings from the author’s implicit biases, we can probably never know, what — if anything — actually happened. We want to accept historical writing as factual, as likely; but we must always remember that there is no disinterested position; every writer of history is shaped by some set of circumstance, some tradition, that colors and informs what is written. Some of the factors that shape a historian’s writings, some cultural determinants, are still approachable and conceptually available to twenty-first century readers; some are not: the chain of experience has been broken, because over the centuries, some things that…
