Herodotus and the Greco-Persian Wars

Extract

Why do people go to war? Readers of herodotus who seek to uncover the cause of the Greco-Persian wars often find themselves baffled or confused, since he refuses to ascribe responsibility to any one factor or privilege one explanation over another. In this respect, he continues a tradition famously inaugurated by Homer, who takes an oblique stance on the cause of the Trojan War by commencing his Iliad in the tenth year of the conflict with the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon. Writing after Herodotus, Thucydides also makes a particular war his subject but refrains from offering simple or uniform reasons; admittedly, he says that the power of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Sparta are responsible for the Peloponnesian War, but he arrives at this inference by way of an extraordinary introduction that encompasses factors as diverse as migration, piracy, and geology. For his part, Herodotus ostensibly singles out Croesus, the king of Lydia, as the first to undertake “criminal acts of aggression against the Greeks” (5; bk. 1, ch. 5), but the implication of the Histories and its many details is that no one person or thing can be held responsible for war and no one cause leads to it. If the origins of conflict cannot be reduced to a single person or thing or cause, that may be why so many individuals in Herodotus are unable to justify the need for war or account for its regularity.