Jon D. Mikalson. Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Herodotus was a fifth century B.C.E. historian, and he wrote about fifth century wars between the Greeks and the Persians. Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars
is about Herodotus’ depiction of Greek religion. In this portrayal,
Greek religion had vows, tithes, hero cults, oracles about the future
that had to be interpreted, and gods who highly regarded their
sanctuaries, hated human hubris, and helped out the Greeks in order to
make certain battles into fairer fights. Moreover, according to
Mikalson, Greek religion valued common sense and reason rather than
faith. In terms of the scholarly landscape regarding religion and
Herodotus, Jon Mikalson disagrees with Thomas Harrison on the question
of whether Herodotus depicted the Greek gods as just. For Mikalson,
Herodotus does not do so but rather presents the gods as jealous for
their sanctuary, eager to exact revenge whenever it is defiled or
disrespected.
Mikalson refers to Herodotus’ characterization of Persian religion as
one that lacked statues, temples, and altars, and yet he points out
examples in Herodotus’ work of Persians practicing religion in a Greek
manner, and even respecting Greek oracles and sanctuaries.
Mikalson also addresses the question of Herodotus’ own religious
beliefs. Herodotus believed in the gods, and he even appeared to think
that the gods helped the Greeks in battle. While he was not always
clear about how the gods did so, often it appeared to be through
manipulation of nature: a fierce wind or trouble at sea could impact
what happened in a battle. Herodotus was rather skeptical, however, of
some of the miracle stories that he heard, even from those purporting to
be eyewitnesses.
The appendix to the book goes more deeply into Herodotus’ views about
religion. According to the appendix, Herodotus believed that there
were gods, but he thought that the names for those gods were imported
from Egyptian religion, and that Homer and Hesiod then constructed a
genealogy for the gods. In essence, Herodotus acknowledges a divine and
a human element to religion and the conceptualization of the divine.
According to Mikalson, Herodotus does not explain how Egyptians and
Greeks have different names for certain gods, if the Greeks imported the
names of their gods (or most of them) from the Egyptians. Still, I
found the appendix to be fascinating, on account of my own questions
about divine revelation and the Bible (i.e., what is human, and what is
divine?).
The first third part of the book was rather slow, since it was mainly
about vows and gods helping the Greeks in battle, and that did not
strike me as earth-shakingly new when it came to religion. I was
interested to learn, however, that the Greeks had tithes, and I wonder
how they compare and contrast with Israelite tithing. The book really
picked up when Mikalson discussed Herodotus’ depiction of Persian
religion and interaction with miracle stories, as well as the question
of whether the gods in Herodotus were just. The appendix, in my
opinion, was the best part of the book, since it addressed Herodotus’
own views about the divine in light of his conclusion as a historian
that Greek religion had conceptualizations of the divine that were human
in origin.