HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS - The Revenge of Geography - page 43

lived by. He knows that the better a knack a political leader has for just what's out there ,
the less likely he is to make tragic mistakes. The Scythians lived on the far side of the Cim-
merian Bosporus, where it is so cold that to make mud in the winter they had to light a
fire. As Artabanus warns Darius, the Persian king, to no avail: Do not make war against the
Scythians—a swiftly mobile and nomadic people without cities or sown land, who offer no
focal point of attack for a large, well-equipped army. 40
Herodotus's signal strength is his powerful evocation of just what human beings are cap-
able of believing. It is a belief made tangible by the fact that the ancients, living without
science and technology, saw and heard differently—more vividly than we do. Landscape
and geography were real to them in ways we cannot imagine.
Take the story of Phidippides, a professional runner sent from Athens to Sparta as a her-
ald to plead for help against the Persians. Phidippides tells the Athenians that on Mount
Parthenium, en route to Sparta, he saw the god Pan, who bade him ask his countrymen:
“Why do you pay no heed to Pan, who is a good friend to the people of Athens, has been
many times serviceable to you, and will be so again?” The Athenians are convinced that
Phidippides has told the truth, and when their fortunes improved, they set up a shrine to
Pan under the Acropolis.
This is more than just a charming story; it may well be the truth as the Athenians related
it to Herodotus. The runner probably believed he saw Pan. He did see Pan . A vision of
the god was likely, given his fatigue, the pantheon inherent in his belief system, and the
wonder-filled fear of the physical elements that has since been lost to human beings. The
ancient world was “settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man,” Boris
Pasternak writes in Doctor Zhivago . “Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you
so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full
of gods.” 41 If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer ima-
gine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently de-
fending ourselves against—religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect
today's geopolitics. For while space across the planet has filled up, and the natural world is
not what it was, the new geography of slums and shantytowns and neither-nor landscapes
likewise manifest an equally intense psychological effect on human beings, in a different
way of course. And to understand this new geography, the premium it puts on space, and its
consequent psychic impact it helps to first appreciate the antique landscapes as described
by Herodotus. 42
The crux of Herodotus's Histories is the lure of that seething-with-culture archipelagic
landmass of Greece, lurking just to the west beyond the mountainous tablelands of Persia
and Asia Minor. Here is geographical determinism writ large, it would seem, for the
peoples of Asia to the east and Greece to the west have fought each other over the mil-
lennia, culminating in our own day with the tense relations between Greece and Turkey: a