Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
geographical limits were reached, morale as well as rewards declined within the ranks of
the soldiery. A less centralized state might have led to a more secure empire, rather than
one at the mercy of geography. In the naval realm, too, absolutism exaggerated the tyranny
of location, with Ottoman sea power mostly clustered in the Black and Mediterranean seas
close to home, with only “transient” success achieved against the Portuguese in the Indian
Ocean.
39
Hodgson, like his colleague in the Chicago history department McNeill, is less an aca-
demic in the contemporary sense than an old-world intellectual aided by the rigor of tire-
less, scientifically minded inquiry, an outgrowth perhaps of his particular Quaker intensity.
That is, even in the depths of his exploration of minutiae, he sees the grand sweep. His
main stage is the ancient Greek Oikoumene, which also, as it happens, forms much of the
material for McNeill's world history, and as we've said, much of the background for Hero-
dotus's fifth-century
B.C
.
Histories
. It may be no accident that this is precisely the world
which occupies current news headlines: that region between the eastern Mediterranean and
the Iranian-Afghan plateau. For the Oikoumene is where the Eurasian and African land-
masses converge, with many outlets to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf,
making it ultra-strategic, as well as a stew of migration patterns and consequently clashing
ethnic and sectarian groups. Herodotus's
Histories
captures this unceasing turbulence.
Herodotus is at the heart of my argument for the relevance of McNeill and Hodgson in
the twenty-first century. For this Greek, who was born a Persian subject sometime between
490 and 484
B.C
. in Halicarnassus, in southwestern Asia Minor, maintains in his narrat-
ive about the origins and execution of the war between the Greeks and the Persians the
perfect balance between geography and the decisions of men. He advances the
partial
de-
terminism we all need. For he shows us a world where the relief map hovers in the back-
ground—Greece and Persia and their respective
barbarian
penumbrae in the Near East and
North Africa—even as individual passions are acted out with devastating political results.
Herodotus stands for the sensibility we need to recover in order to be less surprised by the
world to come.
“Custom is king of all,” Herodotus observes, quoting Pindar. Herodotus tells of the Egyp-
tians, who shaved their eyebrows in mourning for a beloved cat, of Libyan tribesmen who
wore their hair long on one side and shorn on the other, and smeared their bodies with ver-
milion. There are the Massagetae, a people who lived east of the Caspian Sea, in what is
now Turkmenistan, among whom, when a man grows old, “his relatives come together and
kill him, and sheep and goats along with him, and stew all the meat together and have a
banquet of it.” First there is only the landscape, the historical experience of a people on it,
and the manners and ideas that arise out of that experience. Herodotus is a preserver of the
memory of civilizations and their geographies, the myths, fables, and even lies that they
