Clio in the Car of History, by Carlo Franzoni, Washington 1819

 

Introduction (7 May 2022)

Rabbi Ben Scolnic’s relentless quest for gaining a deeper understanding of the world’s temporality and its ambiguities led him back to Athens. While searching for inspiration in the National Museum of Archaeology, he nearly failed to notice that he was about to make a ground-breaking discovery.

In the remotest corner of the museum depot, he came across a wooden torso of a sculpture, barely recognizable as a lightly dressed female. Once probably a beauty queen, this lady had not aged well (apart from losing her head). Her rough fabric, stains and bruises had left her abandoned in one of those over-cramped shelves, covered under a thick layer of dust. Ben, impatient as usual, briskly shoved this piece of junk aside to reach for the box behind. He accidentally cracked the lengthy object she was holding. What had seemed to be a staff turned out to be a container of a book scroll (Greek kibotos, Latin capsa), and literally so: it did contain a scroll, not a book codex, as the early modern sculpture atop of this website, but like the one that Clio holds in the Trier Muse Mosaic:  

Clio with Capsa, 4th century CE, Trier

Adrenalin kicked in: was Ben holding Clio in his arms, the Muse of History? Ironically, she was lost deep down in the dungeon of oblivion over which the most noble museum of Western civilization emerges. But what book was she holding? Ben could hardly decipher the first letters in the dim light: Eta, Rho, Omikron – He gasped. Was he about to read the Mother of Historical Accounts by the Father of History: Herodotus?

Ben was overwhelmed by memories and emotions, in a moment of trance he envisioned himself as a school boy reciting the first lines of Herodotus’ work:

Ἡροδότου Θουρίου ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.

Herodotus of Thourioi (some manuscripts have Halicarnassus)’s historical account (lit. research presentation) is this, so that things done by men not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Greeks, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.

Herodotus hailed from Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in south-western Turkey) and grew up after the ill-fated campaign of the Persian king Xerxes into Greece (482–479 BCE). The Athenians took the lead in defeating the invading army, founded a powerful naval empire and developed their home city into an international trade hub. More important for us, the city also became the international center of art, science and philosophy – to electrify the world with ever new ideas. Herodotus lived, researched and taught in Athens for many years, where he met with the greatest thinkers and statesmen of his time: Pericles, the face of Athenian democracy, Anaxagoras, the great natural scientist; Aspasia, the first-known female philosopher; Protagoras, the first public teacher of rhetoric, but also the one who introduced political science, psychology and pedagogical theory to the Greeks, hence, a forerunner of Socrates as a restless seeker of truth. Herodotus was offered a new home with a comfortable estate in Thurioi in southern Italy where he resettled in 444/43 BCE and lived until his death early in the 420s BCE.

The next moment that Ben remembers he was sitting upstairs in the well-illuminated library, deciphering the letters on the papyrus scroll. The second word (syntheke ‘agreement’), albeit meaningful, was a disappointment, since it differed from the Histories. But the more he went on reading, the clearer it became to him that he had discovered the unthinkable: the hitherto unknown Dialogues of Herodotus and Protagoras, as secretly taken note of by the latter. As will become clear from reading Part 1, the conversations were set somewhere in Herodotus’ latest home in Thourioi in the 430s BCE, with Protagoras visiting from Athens. The first lines of these notes read as follows:

HERODOTUS

‘The agreement that I made with Herodotus was that I would not make a record of our conversation, and that this would enable him to converse in the open and honest way I sought. I have made this record for myself; I will hold to our agreement. But I am writing this and will keep it, and may look at this again, for I suspect it will be a memorable dialogue for me. I wish that there was a bird that could sing all the words back to me. I am sure that I have already forgotten parts of the discussion.’

The Secret Dialogues of Protagoras and Herodotus
A Quest for Memory, Meaning, and Truth

Discovered, Deciphered and Translated by Rabbi Benjamin Edidin Scolnic (Hamden, CT)
Published with Editorial Notes
by Altay Coskun (Waterloo, ON)

 

Parts 25-28: Cyrus and Tomyris

When reflecting on one of the greatest king and greatest queens, Herodotus and Protagoras begin to seize the essence of history …