~450 BC

I’ve been reading the account that Herodotus wrote of the Persian Wars called, cleverly enough, “The Persian Wars.” Three hundred pages into the book, I am finding the title a little bit misleading. Loaded with genealogies that you have to fiddle around with on a spreadsheet to figure out, twisted stories about demented, incestuous Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and sundry and assorted other Asiatics, running around the Mediterranean, building stuff, digging up stuff, eating each other, on purpose or by accident or simply tricked into eating their children, marrying very near family members, stealing, drinking, raping, murdering, and once in a while going to war, it has changed my perceptions of mankind a little bit. Short of gunpowder, the printing press and dynamite it impresses me that we don’t get much credit for originality.

Hatred murder and sexual perversion have been around for as long as mankind and you know all of that stuff about Babylon…well we aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel here. One story just seems to sum most of it up pretty well. Cyrus’ son Cambyses ventured away from home with a Greek traitor for a guide to invade Egypt. An epileptic Persian who married his two sisters and then killed one of them at dinner because he didn’t like her lettuce analogy; Psychotic really is the only adequate adjective that comes to mind. He wound up getting supplanted by a look alike for his brother Smerdis whom Cambyses had sent his henchman to kill but this Smerdis fooled everybody including Cambyses and the real Smerdis' sister whom he married when Cambyses died...

Herodotus talks at length about the guys who lived around them (the Greeks) and I have been fascinated by his accounts of the Scythians who have to have been about the most savage race to inhabit the planet, scalping their victims and making coats of the scalps when they got enough. They made quivers with their right arm skins and left the fingers on, dangling down for good measure. They used skull caps of enemies for drinking vessels that they lined with leather on the outside and gold on the inside if they had the money. They cannibalized their loved ones at death and would pull out their skulls each year thereafter to have a drink around the table and remember them. They came from the land to the north of the Black Sea and well, these are the same guys that have brought us centuries of genocide today but in the old context they come off sounding like they come right out of a Frank Frazetta painting.

There is this account of capital punishment of false prophets among them that sounds like the original biker gangs at work. They took their criminal and tied him up, hands and feet and filled a wagon with brushwood hitched to a couple of oxen. They would thrust the victim into the wood and then set the whole affair alight. He understates the oxen’s hysterical state dragging a flaming wagon full of shrieking and howling visionaries in the process of becoming charcoal. So he says, “…And the oxen, being startled, are made to rush off with the wagon. It often happens that the oxen and the soothsayers are both consumed together, but sometimes the pole of the wagon is burnt through, and the oxen escape with a scorching.” I don’t know, these are somebody’s ancestors… This all reminds me of the Viking “Blood Eagle,” “Brain Ball” and the like.

At the same time Herodotus has these amazing insights that you just wonder how he got there with the information of the world of his time and I cannot help but wonder about him writing all of this stuff down. He would have had huge heaps of papyrus and tanks of ink and quills and perpetually dirty, ink stained fingers… The image is astounding to me somehow. I just cannot put the book down.

I am somewhat concerned because I found the book in Tucson in a used book store I used to frequent. It was old then and has deteriorated and I fear it won’t last much longer. I need to find a book binder, but reading is not high on the list of many folks around here. I looked to replace the book in Barnes and Noble in Albuquerque and got told that it is a book I could get “Back East where they sell like hotcakes but around here…no chance.” I was a little bit surprised. Admitted, it has no pictures but, oh well. Now, tattered and dogeared, I have put all of my marking and notes in this one so I want to do something with it. Guess what, I can’t find a book binder either. Now, that one may be more general since books seem to lose ground to computers and Blackberries more and more with each passing day. Sad comment on the state of our times.