Week Six: Plato and Herodotus

An interesting combination this week. Ted Gioia, the creator of my reading list, called it “Love and War,” but it felt like a lot more than that. And last week, I called it a hodgepodge, but I can admit I was wrong.

Plato’s Symposium is the third of Plato’s works on this list. After wrestling with Ethics in particular last week, I was happy to get back to my friend. Symposium is written as a dialogue among friends, recalled by one who wasn’t there, a little like the game of “Telephone” we’e all played. The friends’ topic? Love, specifically eros. Given that this is upper-class Ancient Greece, there is a significant discussion of love between men; honestly romantic love between men and women is practically ignored.

The reading plan only covered a few portion of Herodotus’ Histories, Books 1 and 6-8. For full disclosure, I did NOT complete the reading but stopped with Book 7. In my edition of Histories the assigned books were more than 350 pages and I simply ran out of time. If I had done all the reading this week I would have been around 430 pages! Given that I “signed up” for about 250 pages per week, I had to stop. Confession time over.

As always, I have so many, many thoughts about these works. For Symposium, I summarized each person’s eulogy as a way to get my hands around the text. A few ideas:

• Obviously Love held an important place in the lives of Greeks. This entire dialogue is centered around it, but it doesn’t look like love in many ways. I’m accustomed to thinking of love as wanting and being willing to work for the best of your beloved, and that being mutual. That desiring “for” someone else, rather than merely desiring them, was absent at least as far as I could see.

• There are a number of points made about Love as the dialogue progresses, and they definitely don’t agree. As always, you’re left to parse out the better and worse arguments.

• “You complete me” (yes, Jerry Maguire) makes an appearance! That attitude has been around a looooong time. Aristophanes tells a long and pretty funny tale about how human beings were at one time two-headed, eight-limbed creatures, but when Zeus got mad and split everyone in two. Now we go around looking for our other half.

• Does Love motivate us to honor? What kind of Love would do that? Or maybe Love is a moderating force? (I found that a weak argument.) Is its purpose beauty? Those are all offered as arguments, and all are rejected by Socrates.

• Socrates, via his mentor Diotima, argues that Love’s purpose is procreation. As someone who has actually been pregnant several times, I found Socrates’ discussion of pregnancy to be uncomfortable, to say the least.

• There is a ton of homoerotic talk, especially from Socrates and Alcibiades. It is just so strange to me that there is virtually no discussion of love between men and women, but tons between older and younger men. As usual, my bias shows, but it’s who I am.

On to Herodotus. He’s been on my radar since I read History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer about a year and a half ago, and seeing him on the reading list was part of my motivation to jump in. He did not disappoint. The sections that I read were the origin stories of Croesus and Cyrus, and Persia, and then the beginning of the Persian War. I ended with the Battle of Thermopylae, which is an amazing story in its own right. A few takeaways:

• Every military leader should read this book. I may actually send it to my son who is in the Navy! There are examples of excellent leadership, and cranky leadership, and dumb leadership. Herodotus is opinionated, funny, and incisive, if not always historically accurate. When Demaratos, the exiled Spartan king, advises Xerxes to use caution as he plans his war, he points out that men who are free will always be braver, better soldiers than men who are slaves. Xerxes brushes him off, but Demaratos then points out that Xerxes has no experience fighting with an army of free soldiers. It’s profound and brave, considering capricious Xerxes.

• Geography rules everything. The mountains, plains, islands and bays are vitally important to history. We ignore it at our peril. The ancient world was certainly ruled by it. And on that note, modern maps often relegate the eastern Mediterranean to the very edge of the map. How refreshing to see the Med as the center, with Europe, Turkey, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa on one map. We (I?) are so Western-focused that it’s easy to forget that the water goes a long, long way past western Greece. My edition of Histories was full of excellent maps and they went a long way in improving my experience of reading.

• Sometimes the whole world can turn on one jerk. The Greeks held Thermopylae, a tiny mountain road, until a servant decided to show the Persians the “back way” through a secret mountain pass. The Persians ambushed the Greeks from behind and that battle was lost. It took that one guy.

I could keep writing a long, long time, but it would get boring. I loved reading the Histories, but probably my favorite role of Herodotus was “anthropologist.” There were so many different cultures that clashed in that area and he was alert to all the differences: the matrilineal Lycians; the cannibalistic Scythians; the dual-monarchist Spartans. He digresses and chats and then gets back to the story.

If you are interested in reading this, I can’t recommend The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, edited by Robert Strassler, enough. It’s well-illustrated and -mapped and the translation (by Andrea Purvis) is eminently readable. The footnotes are just enough, without dominating your attention. This is how a history book should be.

As much as I loved the Histories, I did not love the music. Nonesuch Explorer Series music from Iran, Japan and Indonesia is not my jam. I couldn’t listen to much—it was simply too distracting. I tried.

After reading Histories, I understood why we were looking at Persian art. The link provided by Ted had some information, so that was fine. It’s the week before Christmas and I was traveling, so this was fine.

I want to do some reflecting on the project so far, but I can’t seem to slow down enough to do that! I already see that I would like to build in some rest weeks, but I’m not quite sure of how often to do that. I don’t want to make them line up with travel, necessarily, because if I only read for the project when I’m home I’ll never finish. (I’ve been to Alabama and Antigua this month, and still have to go to Atlanta and Wisconsin.) I may take a break after week 8 to collect my thought and catch my breath. Thoughts on that are appreciated.

I also want to post separately about my note-taking system. Discovering the “Antinet” that Scott Scheper promotes was a huge factor in taking this project on. I think the analog note taking is a game-changer for me, but I’m a little disorganized at this moment and need to take some time to catch up. I want to share more later. Do you have a note-taking system? How does it work for you?

Next week, Gilgamesh and the Dhammapada (link to my editions). I think it’s actually lighter fare than the last two weeks! Not very Christmas-y but that’s fine. The music is Stravinsky and Wagner, but let’s be honest. It’s Christmas and I have The Messiah on repeat. I’ll also be looking at ancient Mesopotamian art.

Merry Christmas and have a great week! As always, I would love to know what you think about these works, and I’d also like to hear about how you take notes on big projects.