Herodotus and the Embarrassments of Universal History in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This essay surveys the reception of Herodotus’s Histories from the later eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, showing how the increasingly vigorous critique of his first four “oriental” books made the continued practice of older forms of universal history embarrassing. Drawing a line between Herodotus’s opening and later books did not begin in the German states, but the distinction was fully developed there in the 1820s in the wake of a major debate over Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen. Creuzer’s work relied heavily on information in Herodotus’s first books to demonstrate its claims about the migration of ideas and symbols from ancient India and Egypt to Greece. The result of this debate, I argue, was not only to label Creuzerian universal histories speculative and reactionary but also to turn Herodotus—who in the eighteenth century had been treated as an essential, if ever problematic, interlocutor—into a naive and untrustworthy child. Those who wanted to be counted as “scientific” scholars were taught to avoid him, or simply to read his Histories as a heroic story of Greece’s defeat of the “slavish” Orient. Thucydides was to be preferred as the model for objective, “mature” historical writing. It is rare that we consider carefully the contributions of ancient historiography to our profession’s methods and norms. This essay, thus, seeks to break new ground by demonstrating just how critical this field has been in the making of what we regard today as modern historical scholarship.