We often forget ourselves in this modern age, and one can’t help but feel that the amnesia is by design. For better or worse, the digital revolution has turned attention into a challenge and a commodity. Because of social media’s predominance, brain rot and doomscrolling are now part of everyday vernacular. Moreover, AI has raised serious questions about the nature of human consciousness, and distress about disinformation and polarization in the political sphere is rampant. Given these woes, Emily Katz Anhalt’s latest book, Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times, hopes to remind us what it is to be human by enlisting an unlikely ally: the fifth-century BC historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus.
Herodotus was the father of history—or at least Cicero once granted him that title, and the name has stuck ever since. But more than Herodotus the historian, Anhalt aims to revive Herodotus the storyteller as a salve for our partisan ailments. And to that end, her book is less a tedious and exacting scholarly analysis of Herodotus and more a grand tour of Herodotus’s world, one that is punctuated with references to modern political issues from nuclear armament and gun violence to social media and minority rights. Along the way, Anhalt offers a kaleidoscope of classic stories from the Histories: Gyges’s overthrow of King Candaules, Arion’s miraculous salvation by a dolphin, Solon’s discourse on happiness with the wealthy Croesus, Peisistratus’s rise to tyrannical power in Athens, Themistocles’s trickery at the battle of Salamis, and much more.
The narrative thread or moral lesson that Anhalt finds in each of these stories is the centrality of human agency and the need for individuals to take responsibility for their actions, past, present, and future. But confronting our own choices also requires us to confront the notion of choice itself rather than shift the sorrows of the world off onto the “divine” or some form of unalterable chance. By underscoring the importance of human action throughout these stories, and by inviting us as readers to make judgments about those stories, Anhalt sees Herodotus as dethroning the tyranny of excuses in order to place the human being back at the center of our political considerations.
Anhalt’s book is especially strong when she explains how Herodotus writes and what his aims are. Herodotus has a deceptively simple writing style, and his own methodological comments are scattered throughout the Histories. Anhalt masterfully lays out how Herodotus invites his readers to join in his inquiries rather than simply take his conclusions as certain. For Herodotus, then, history “entails not the constraints of uncritical belief but the freedom of rational investigation and evidence-based ethical judgement.” It requires a constant give and take and a willingness to assess and reassess all opinions and all available evidence. Herodotus, Anhalt argues, saw history as more than just a useful tool for self-examination. It is “humanity’s best chance for survival.”
Anhalt regularly touches on the way in which Herodotus prods us to be better than we are. The ancient historian, she argues, “reminds us that reductive, polarized thinking pits us against one another—at the precise moment when our very survival depends on our ability to face facts, cooperate, and innovate together.” Here is a book that begs to be read and debated in a group or with a few friends rather than alone. Unity, community, and personal interaction are recurring themes throughout the work, most especially as bulwarks to tyrannical rule and a doorway to self-reflection and personal improvement.
Of special concern to Anhalt are “authoritarian falsehoods” of all stripes, be they political fabrications or the weeds of Internet anonymity. But more than that, Anhalt worries about the way in which those falsehoods undermine democratic practices by alienating us from one another and from genuine knowledge about ourselves. In her view, Herodotus’s Histories and the marvelous tales that it preserves provide something of a solution. Since “democratic institutions offer only part of the solution to the problem of good government,” Anhalt explains that “our stories must do the rest,” since the stories we tell necessarily influence “our goals and aspirations and the ways that we treat one another.”
A sober realism, not idealism, must guide our politics—and Herodotus helps to remind us as much.
In short, political life might be able to limp along with good procedures and institutions alone, but Anhalt maintains that it can never thrive without right habits, dispositions, and devotions. Here is where Herodotus the storyteller—a collector of fables, myths, and historical traditions—becomes invaluable. If we are going to rise to meet the problems of today, then we need to find good stories to inform and nourish our character—stories like those found in the Histories. “Now as then,” she explains, “Herodotus’s various stories” cultivate “his readers’ ability to distinguish fact from fiction,” and thereby train us to subject our most cherished commitments and deepest longings to scrutiny.
Of all the profound questions that Anhalt draws out of Herodotus, none is perhaps more pressing than her contention that his stories teach us to seek out “the least bad form of government” rather than “the best form of government.” Thus, a sober realism, not idealism, must guide our politics—and Herodotus helps to remind us as much. And since, as Anhalt contends, Herodotus saw democracy as the least bad regime, she concludes that he must have been an unapologetic democrat who wrote the Histories to support “people power.” Notwithstanding Herodotus’s emphasis on “reality” and “empiricism,” Anhalt still sees the ideal as worth studying and pursuing:
Idealism always forges ahead of reality, and the gap between the actual and the ideal will never close if we give up on the ideals. To ignore or deny crucial distinctions between modern liberal democracies and brutal dictatorships (and terrorist organizations) is to serve the agenda of dictators, racists, misogynists, kleptocrats, and terrorists. The differences may be smaller than optimal and sometimes diminishing. But Herodotus’s portrait of Athenian tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds should inspire us not to abandon the ideal of universal human freedom.
Anhalt thereby acknowledges that the Athenian democracy had flaws, especially when judged by modern standards. Despite their love of freedom, the Athenians “continued to keep people in slavery, subjugate women, enslave conquered peoples, and force allied cities to pay tribute.” Despite all this, she still places Athens on a pedestal throughout her work. At one point, she suggests that democracy simply is the “best” kind of political authority, or at least the only regime capable of becoming the best, and she later goes so far as to suggest that “human excellence” just is “a product of democratic freedoms.” What’s more, every regime other than Athenian democracy, without discrimination or justification, is referred to as an autocracy throughout the book—including Sparta, even though Lacedaemon is one of the only regimes Herodotus says “flourished” because of “good order” and “good laws” (Histories, 1.65-66).
Anhalt is hardly alone in suggesting that Herodotus was a partisan of Athenian democracy. But I wonder, given Anhalt’s own hermeneutic approach, whether the Athenian devotion to popular government and the subsequent degradation of all other regimes is not itself one of those passionate commitments that Herodotus hopes his readers will subject to intense scrutiny. Likewise, I wonder if more of this sort of scrutiny might help to convert our own uninformed political opinions into a truly reflective kind of patriotism. Anhalt, for example, worries that ignoring the real differences between liberal democracies and dictatorships will undermine human excellence—but it’s worth asking whether ignoring the differences between ancient direct democracy and modern representative government doesn’t do the same.
Consider, for example, Anhalt’s recognition that the American republic combines “elements of monarchy (the executive or presidency), oligarchy (the Congress), and rule by the many (one vote per citizen).” If all monarchies and oligarchies are “autocratic” and “destructive” in the way that Anhalt treats them throughout the book, one might question why the Founding Fathers ever dared to mix democracy with two evil forms of rule in the first place. To the contrary, the very fact that the American republic combines elements of all three classical regimes suggests that they each have their virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, and claims to legitimacy and temptations to tyranny.
To understand the real differences between modern republicanism and ancient democracy requires an almost Tocquevillian—or, better yet, Herodotean—openness to other regimes. Herodotus models this kind of openness to political alternatives in the Histories when he praises Persian courage as no worse than Greek (Histories, 9.62-62) and when he notes that legitimate kingship—in contrast to tyranny (5.92-93)—offers real political benefits, such as decisive or energetic action (1.127) and a means of maintaining unity (5.3). Such nuance would seem to be essential for a book that aims, as the title suggests, to offer Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times. This, of course, is not to elevate authoritarianism over popular government, but to ask (just as Publius did in Federalist #9) whether the petty republics of Greece and Italy—just as capable of tyrannical actions in Herodotus as the other regimes (8.111 and 9.5-6, )—can be meaningfully categorized as the same kind of regime as today’s modern representative governments.
Nevertheless, Anhalt’s latest work is guaranteed to rekindle interest in Herodotus. Of special value is the way in which Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times underscores the importance of stories by providing tales drawn directly from Herodotus for the reader to judge and digest. Every chapter contains a well-translated, unadulterated chunk of Herodotus’s Histories embedded within Anhalt’s own analysis and explanation. What’s more, each chapter of Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times is self-contained and can be read without too much worry about what came before. The busy professional may not have time to slog through the whole of Herodotus’s prolix Histories, but Anhalt’s book provides an easy point of access to Herodotus and his wonderful world.