Herodotus and the Human Quest for Justice

“Herodotus, as we can begin to see, is a theorist of human action—and a theorist of justice. Justice, according to Herodotus, is the chief force of human action.”

Herodotus of Halicarnassus is the most famous historian of antiquity. He is also the patron saint of journalist-historians, that rare breed of men and women of the pen who relate exciting tales from afar in a prose digestible and energetic to read. Is there a theme that unites the seemingly disparate and elongated work of The Histories? What drives The Histories onward? Herodotus certainly did not have a conception of History as we moderns tend to have, but Herodotus’ Histories does have a major theme underlying its composition—the contest between justice and injustice, or, properly, between tisis and hybris, and how this governs human action.

It is false to suggest that Herodotus is the historian of social justice. But it is true to say that Herodotus gives a lot of consideration to the problem of justice and how the desire for justice governs human action. As Donald Lateiner wrote long ago, “Herodotus’ extension of tisis from a merely ethical principle to an encompassing law of nature is now widely recognized.”

At face value, The Histories is the account of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, which ended in the defeat of the supposedly monstrous and barbarous Persian Empire at the hand of a collection of rough Greek city-states who even had conspirators in their midst (a sad fact that the city-states that allied with the Persians would never be allowed to forget). Yet a deeper reading of The Histories shows an intensely philosophical and inquisitive man that is sometimes lost in the long digressions on ethnography and cultural practices of diverse peoples. Herodotus was, and remains, however, a deep thinker of the highest caliber despite popular—if not otherwise ignorant— ridicule of him as a mythmaker and liar.