Herodotus on Ukraine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 29-30:

THE FIRST HISTORIAN of Ukraine was Herodotus, the father of history himself. This honor is usually reserved for the histories of countries and peoples belonging to the Mediterranean world. Ukraine—a stretch of steppes, mountains, and forests north of the Black Sea, which was known to the Greeks as the Pontos euxeinos (Hospitable Sea, latinized by the Romans as Pontus euxinus)—was an important part of that world. Its importance was of a particular nature. The world of Herodotus was centered on the city-states of ancient Greece, extending to Egypt in the south and the Crimea and the Pontic steppes in the north. If Egypt was a land of ancient culture and philosophy to study and emulate, the territory of today’s Ukraine was a quintessential frontier where Greek civilization encountered its barbaric alter ego. It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world. That is where the West began to define itself and its other.

Herodotus, known in Greek as Herodotos, came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. In the fifth century BC, when he lived, wrote, and recited his Histories, his birthplace was part of the Persian Empire. Herodotus spent a good part of his life in Athens, lived in southern Italy, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, traveling to Egypt and Babylon among other places. An admirer of Athenian democracy, he wrote in Ionic Greek, but his interests were as global as they could be at the time. His Histories, later divided into nine books, dealt with the origins of the Greco-Persian wars that began in 499 and continued until the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus lived through a good part of that period and researched the subject for thirty years after the end of the wars in 449. He depicted the conflict as an epic struggle between freedom and slavery—the former represented by the Greeks, the latter by the Persians. Although his own political and ideological sympathies were engaged, he wanted to tell both sides of the story. In his own words, he set out “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and the Barbarians.”

Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.