Episode 44: Joel Schlosser on how Herodotus can help us today (and other lessons from the ancient Greek historian)

I have started reading a new set of old excerpted classics, this one gathering writers’ bits and baubles into generally geographic volumes: Greece, Rome, the British Isles, etc. I also write about them. (I write about another set here.)

The first selection in the first volume comes from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. (You can read my thoughts here.) 

Much sharper than my own thoughts, however, are the thoughts of political theorist and Bryn Mawr professor Joel Schlosser, writer of Herodotus in the Anthropocene (The University of Chicago Press, 2020). Schlosser explores exactly what I felt reading Herodotus and what I hope anyone exploring the ancients today wants: something relevant to them now. 

In our chat, Joel answers burning questions I had about Herodotus, his own personal experience discovering the ancient historian, and, most important, what we can learn right now about how we think about the world and our place in it. 

Herodotus tried to figure out how the ancient Egyptians dug canals, built great buildings, and won and lost wars. And, most of all, why his Greek world was the way it was after the great battles between Persians and Greeks. Be just as curious as Herodotus! Listen ... 

P.S. If you’re taken by Schlosser’s observations, buy his book and enjoy, also, a few of his blog posts from the past few years as he worked on it: 

• “While I imagined myself in conversation with Herodotus, wondering what he’d make of the anarchists’ message of radical equality – was it an update of Herodotean isêgoria, the equal voice he viewed as central to Athens’ flourishing? – I gazed upon the Acropolis with humbled amazement.” (link) 
• “Herodotus writes for an audience. He wants us to lose ourselves in the story and then to its comedy.” (link) 
• “Herodotus talks of the phoenix, which immolates itself only to be reborn from its ashes, as well as crocodiles and the special burials Egyptians give to their victims.” (link) 
• “Herodotus exemplified a form of inquiry that was broad-minded and imaginative in ways Thucydides simply wasn’t.” (link)