The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online Page A

over the past century–above all in Athens, by reformers like Solon and Cleisthenes–and frankly preferred the
ancien régime
. Having no real nationality themselves, they saw no objection to a mildly benevolent foreign domination.
    Halicarnassus (the modern Bodrum) was also under Persian domination when Herodotus was born there in 484 BC . At the age of about twenty, however, he opposed the tyranny of the Persian satrap Lygdamis and narrowly escaped a death sentence. Expelled from the empire, he settled in Samos, which was to remain his principal base until, in 444 BC , he was involved in the Athenian colonisation of Thurii in southern Italy. Throughout his life he seems to have been constantly on the move. He certainly spent some time in Athens–where he became a close friend of Sophocles–and travelled all over Greece and Asia Minor, the Lebanon and Palestine. Other journeys took him to Cyrene in Libya, to Babylon in Mesopotamia and up the Nile to Aswan in Upper Egypt. Wherever he went he asked questions, not only about history but about geography, mythology, social customs and anything else that occurred to him.
    His history–the first important European literary work to be written in prose–was mostly composed towards the end of his life and was divided after his death into nine books, each named after one of the Muses. Although written nearly two and a half millennia ago, it remains today quite astonishingly readable, enlivened as it is with countless digressions, anecdotes and snatches of curious information picked up on the author’s travels. The whole thing is infused with an irresistible sense of curiosity, of wonder, of sheer fascination with the beauty and diversity of the world around him. Herodotus is thus thoroughly, magnificently Greek. He embodies the Greek spirit as completely as the great tragedians of the fifth century, or even as Homer himself.
             
     
    We have all been brought up to see the fifth century BC in Athens as a Golden Age: an age which not only saw an unprecedented advance in the arts and sciences as well as in philosophy and political theory, but which in many cases attained in these same fields a level of perfection that has never since been surpassed. This, it need hardly be said, is a generalisation. We can see the beginnings of the phenomenon almost a hundred years earlier, and those responsible for it were by no means only Athenians. It was in Ionia that Thales of Miletus–who was considered by Aristotle to be the first natural philosopher–correctly predicted a solar eclipse as early as 585 BC , and that his colleague Anaximander produced the first map of the inhabited world. Half a century later on the island of Samos, Pythagoras produced his famous theorem about right-angled triangles. But it was in Athens that Peisistratus began the Temple of Olympian Zeus in 540 BC , by which time the art of black-figure pottery was at its height; and it was again in Athens that, after the end of the Persian War, all this creativity, versatility and brilliance seemed to come together in a single concentration of genius, bringing with it a huge wave of confidence and optimism. Man, it seemed, had freed himself from the primitive superstitions of former times; at last he was beginning to understand the universe about him, and to understand it was surely to control it. Simultaneously, he was discovering the basic truths of political philosophy, which taught him how to live in the society into which he had been born. With such a combination of power and knowledge he would not simply enjoy his Golden Age; he would make it go on forever.
    The presiding spirit over all this was Pericles. He dominated Athens from 461 BC , when he was thirty-four, until his death in 429 BC of plague, and everything he did or said was inspired by a passionate love for his native city. He did his best to adorn it in every way possible–by restoring the temples destroyed by the Persians and organising