Hybridity in Herodotus

A World in Motion

Even the title of Herodotus’s work indicates both the fact of an interconnected political world and the confounding of traditional political identities (Wolin 1993, 475). The history that Herodotus proposes to tell is by implication a common, cross-cultural one; his book is not titled the Athenian History or the Greek History or even the Greek and Persian History. He denotes it as the exposition of his research concerning both Greeks and non-Greeks (Herodotus 1987, 33 [1.1]). From the beginning, Herodotus implies the existence of a political story that connects peoples who had long imagined themselves—and may still imagine themselves—to be distinct. In The History, everything is potentially interconnected, and there is a constant return to the theme of global interrelatedness (Dewald 2008, xxvii). The events that have defined political life across the known world, Herodotus intimates, are all part of the same whole, subject to the same history. To understand politics and even culture in any one of these particular places, it is necessary to look beyond its borders and understand the ways in which even ostensibly disparate people actually have a role in each others’ fates. Herodotus sees the world as a place dominated by the motion of cultures as they intersect and overlap (Thompson 1996).

Simultaneously, Herodotus frames his work by emphasizing motion over time, with a proclamation about political variability: “Those that were great in earlier times most have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.” He says, “I know that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place” (35 [1.5]). He emphasizes that political regimes change over time and often change dramatically. This is most apparent at the level of relative regime size and prominence, but those apparent changes bespeak more fundamental changes in the character and makeup of political societies. For Herodotus, “in a vast length of time”—over long stretches and in brief, definitive moments—“anything may happen!” (359 [5.9]). He foregrounds the omnipresence of change and temporal motion in his narrative. In fact, Herodotus says that he writes his History so that “time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being”; it is necessary to record the past precisely because human life and politics do not exist in a static context (33 [1.1]). Therefore, if at any point, people believe that politics might be settled or fixed on permanent grounds (or theorized in a way that is abstracted from time and motion), they betray a temporal provincialism (Kapuściński 2007, 271; Ward 2008).

People and cultures move across geographic space, and all peoples and cultures move through time. The world of The History is fluid in both the physical and chronological sense, a view that highlights the concepts that we now encompass in the word “hybridity.”

An Interconnected World

Central to Herodotus’s approach is his elaboration of the fantastic range of ways in which seemingly distinct political entities may in fact be interconnected. Most obviously, political societies may become interconnected via explicit and official engagement. The alliance formations in The History are almost too numerous to mention; Herodotus focuses in particular on the alliances formed by and among xenoi (ξϵi~νοι), the politically sanctioned relationship of “guest-friendship” (51 [1.44]; 507 [7.116]). And there are points in the text where Herodotus details various alliances for pages on end, usually alliances made in the service of war. On many grounds, he shows, war catalyzes cross-cultural exchange and interaction. War often acts to connect distant peoples, as is surely the case in the Greco-Persian wars, both in the relatively constructive relationships formed by diplomacy and in the antagonistic engagements of the battlefield. (Even antagonistic cross-cultural engagement is a form of cross-cultural engagement; hostile border crossings are still a kind of border crossing.) Herodotus signals as much from the first page of The History, when he gives the Persian chroniclers’ account of the origins of the war; the fact that the Greeks and the Persians have fought a war means that they are bound up in each others’ stories and memories, and have interconnected fates. He lays particular emphasis on the multidimensionality of war and the ways in which war may unify that which at first seems to be distinct (Bartky 2002, 453).

But interconnectedness can also emerge in at least nine other, less politically explicit ways. First, cross-border trade connects societies. Herodotus discusses, among other things, the ways in which the cinnamon trade connects the Greeks to the Phoenicians and the Indians; the wine trade connects the Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Syrians; the grain trade connects the Ukranian Scythians to all of Europe; and the tin and amber trades connect the Greeks to lands that are beyond the scope of his own research. In fact, a band of Phoenician traders, who “set about long voyages” and “put into other lands,” are the first actors in The History; it seems that their actions may have set the Greco-Persian wars into motion (259 [3.111]; 213 [3.6]; 286 [4.17]; 260 [3.115]; 33 [1.1]). Second, religion and religious rituals often involve border crossings, such as in the transfer of the Hyperborean holy offerings, which travel from present-day Siberia across Scythia, over the Adriatic to Dodona, down the Melian Gulf to Euboea, from city to city as far as Carystus, then to Tenos, and finally to Delos. Herodotus indicates that the temple at Delphi was built in a coordinated cross-cultural effort led by the Amphictyons, the Delphians, and the Egyptians—and that moreover most of the so-called Greek gods came from Egypt in the first place (291 [4.33]; 209 [2.180]; 132–33 [2.4]).

Third, communication networks, like the Persian messenger system that can be held back by “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night,” allow ideas to move quickly across borders. Fourth, marriage may forge cross-border connections, as when men from all over the known world vie to marry Cleisthenes’ daughter, Agariste. Fifth, and less benignly, kidnapping is often a border-crossing exercise; the first major action taken in The History is a kidnapping, and Herodotus mentions many instances of it, including the ancient Theban abduction of two Egyptian priestesses, one of whom was then given to the Libyans and the other to the Greeks. Sixth, conditions of famine can force previously distinct cultures into contact, as when a food shortage forces the residents of Crete to leave their island and disperse (592 [8.98]; 459 [6.127]; 156–57 [2.58]; 530 [7.171]). Seventh, physical movement of all sorts over time will change customs and conventions, and Herodotus is careful to note that the Hellenic peoples have, over the course of time, moved all over the place (56 [1.56]; 581–82 [8.73]). Eighth, people who are exiled from one society often wind up serving as cross-cultural interpreters; for instance, Xerxes’s right-hand man, Demaratus, who gives the Persian ruler plentiful advice about how to engage the Spartans, is himself a Spartan exile (502 [7.102]). And finally, theoria—the activity of those who cross borders to seek knowledge—itself brings cultures into conversation with one another (47–52 [1.29–1.32]). The range and extent of ways in which ostensibly separate cultures are in fact bound up with one another are, in The History, astounding.

Even more astounding is the way Herodotus emphasizes throughout the text that each of these forms of interconnectedness is a source of hybridity. Above all, Herodotus emphasizes that all these border-crossing activities render the conventional distinction between “Greeks and barbarians” unhelpful at best (Munson 2001, 76; Thomas 2002, 134). This undermining of commonly held ideas was not always popular with his fellows; it led Herodotus to be criticized, most notably by Plutarch, as a “barbarian-lover” (φιλοβάρβαρος; Flory 1987, 83; Plutarch 1965). But, in general, his teaching leads to the conclusion that political, cultural, or ethnic identity is not permanent, a matter of nature or essence; even what most take to mark enduring distinctions among polities—differences in regime form—Herodotus treats as ephemeral (Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 121). And it suggests that in a world of inevitable political interconnectedness, a more complex and ambiguous approach—a hybrid approach—to understanding political identity and membership is required.

Examples that draw out this argument are manifold in The History. For instance, Herodotus shows that the common practice of official guest-friendship confounds traditional boundaries between societies. After the Persian leader Xerxes declares the Acanthians to be his guest-friends, he gives the Acanthian architect Artachaees a majestic funeral (507 [7.116–7.117]). Traditionally, in both Acanthian and Persian practice, funerals were tied tightly to community membership, and so Xerxes’s action seems to grant the Acanthian architect a kind of posthumous Persian membership (Whitley 1995, 46; Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 74). In a different episode of the complicating nature of guest-friendship, Herodotus discusses how the Athenians, who had maintained a guest-friendship with the Milesians, are devastated when the land of their guest-friends is captured in war:

The Athenians showed how bitterly they felt for the capture of Miletus in many other ways and, in particular, when Phrynicus produced his play The Capture of Miletus, the whole audience at the theater burst into tears and fined Phrynicus a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a calamity that was their very own; they also forbade any future production of the play. (416–17 [6.21])

This behavior echoes the behavior of the Milesians who, when their own guest-friends the Sybarites lost their city, shaved their heads and had “great public lamentation” (416–17 [6.21]). Such guest-friendships, in other words, may blur the line between self and other in what at first seems to be a self/other relationship. In fact, the very concept of “otherness” in the relationship seems to drop out in this moment, with the Athenians regarding the fate of the Milesians as “their very own”—a language usage that breaks down a rigid conception of political identity.

But nothing serves a hybridizing function more than war. We get in Herodotus myriad examples of the way war confuses cultural and political boundaries: enemies learn to adopt each others’ fighting styles, city-states decide to shift their political alliances and customs based on whichever superpower wins a fight, men from one society are offered citizenship in other societies based on their bravery in battle, members of one city-state persuade a foreigner to become their king for the same reason, and political boundaries are redrawn after battles (499 [4.91–4.93]; 526–27 [7.164]; 582 [8.73]; 628 [9.33]; 658 [9.106]; 452 [6.108]). To be more specific, one of the great themes of The History is the way in which the war—with all its cross-cultural encounters and borrowings—transforms the Persians (Redfield 1985). Even as the Persians conquer other places, they are changed by their conquering, and changed by the encounter with those they conquer. All such war-induced transformations obscure easy political categorizations, as they reveal a world in which political customs and allegiances are readily shifted (even, paradoxically, as political communities are fighting to defend their separate sovereignties).

If explicit political engagements across cultures confuse the boundaries of the political world, less-explicit interconnections across cultures render things even more uncertain. Herodotus not only shows how trade crosses boundaries but also calls the fixity of those boundaries into question. He mentions, for instance, the red-headed and blue-eyed Geloni, originally Greek traders who, settling among the Budini, developed over time a distinct language that is partly Scythian and partly Greek (319–20 [4.108]). The existence of the Geloni by itself casts doubt on the Greek/barbarian distinction, as the Geloni are both Greek and barbarian, at least in linguistic terms. And linguistic terms matter a lot, since as is well known, the Greek idea of otherness expressed in the word barbaros (βάρβαρος) was based on the way non-Greek speakers sounded to the Greeks when they talked (Elliott 1986, 45). The half-Greek, half-barbarian language of the Geloni, then, calls into question the wisdom of the term barbarian itself. More generally, traders as a category confound a language-based notion of political identity. Herodotus discusses certain societies of traders whose members are able to speak fluently in at least seven different languages (288 [4.24]).

Cross-cultural religious engagements are also hybridizing. For the Greeks, this unsettling might have been particularly unnerving, as their gods were inseparable from their political self-understanding (Dickinson 1905). That fact may explain why Herodotus devotes so much energy in the second book of The History to proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the names of many if not most of the Greek gods are in fact Egyptian in origin. He focuses in particular on the identity of Heracles, telling the Greeks that they inherited the god Heracles from the Egyptians. ¹ This particular cultural borrowing forces a not insignificant reconception of Greek political identity. The same is true of religious rituals. Herodotus notes how many ostensibly Greek religious rituals are in fact practiced in other places he visits; for instance, the Egyptians, like the Greeks, make a phallic procession to Dionysus (152–53 [2.49]). That the Greek religious rituals are not theirs alone raises questions about how much sharing a religion can be seen as concomitant with sharing a political identity.

Moreover, the interconnectedness that comes from human movement over time—whether that movement is undertaken as a matter of necessity or choice—makes it harder to articulate definitive measures of political membership and identity. For instance, Herodotus mentions that “the Pelasgians came to settle with the Athenians in their land when the Athenians themselves were already counted as Greeks.” As a result, “the Pelasgians too came to be regarded as Greeks.” Although the two groups were originally considered as separate, time collapsed the distinction between them. Perhaps most memorably, Herodotus reveals that certain Phoenicians over time “made for Athens” and eventually became citizens, bringing with them not only “various matters of learning” but also “very notably, the alphabet,” which Herodotus emphasizes “had not been known to the Greeks before” (154 [2.51]; 379 [5.58]). For evident reasons, the notion that the Greeks got even their words via a long-term process of cultural migration and immigration deflates certain ethnocentric precepts about Greek political identity specifically and the nature of political identity more generally.

To take a final example, marriage and sex across political boundaries provide the most bodily case for taking a hybrid view of politics. Throughout The History, Herodotus points out those political heroes within cultures whose biological parentage crosses political boundaries. He mentions that there is some dispute about the ancestry of the Greek hero Perseus—Greek stories indicate that his mother was from an Egyptian family, and Persian stories maintain that both of his parents were Assyrian—but either way, Perseus is not all Greek by blood. He also points out that Hamilcar, the Carthaginian monarch, had a Syracusan mother. And not just heroes, but entire populations may be cross-cultural in origin as well. The Sauromantians, Herodotus says, are the descendants of a group of Scythian men who had children with Amazonian women and formed their own society. And he notes that the people who are in his time called “Babylonian” are in fact the issue of Babylonian men and fifty thousand women from neighboring cities, who came to help repopulate Babylon after the city was besieged (428–29 [6.53–6.54]; 527 [7.166]; 322 [4.114]; 278 [3.160]). In Herodotus’s writing, blood undoes the lie that such a thing as fixed political boundaries exist, as all these mixtures of blood undo the conceit that political membership is tied to ancestry or biology (Munson 2005, 15).

Especially in a world where cross-border connections are evident, Herodotus thinks that political knowledge depends on the understanding that political identity is a matter of convention—and so, like all conventions, is not fixed. To emphasize this teaching, he stresses the arbitrariness of dividing the world into “separate” continents and bodies of water:

I cannot guess why, since the earth is all one, there should be three names set on it, all indicating descent from women, or why, for boundaries, the Egyptian Nile is given as one and the Colchian river Phasis as another—though there are those who speak for the Maeetian river Tanais and the Cimmerian Ferries. Nor can I find out the names of those who established these boundaries of whence they got these names of descent. (297 [4.45])

Herodotus draws attention to the fact that Asia “ends only by a kind of convention, at the Gulf of Arabia,” before it becomes Libya. And he says, almost jokingly, that if there is any justification for dividing the world into continents, the current divisions are not the best ones:

I can show that the Greeks and the Ionians themselves cannot count when they say that the whole earth is in three divisions, Europe, Asia, and Libya. For then they should have counted in a fourth, the Delta in Egypt, since it is neither in Asia nor Libya. (297 [4.45]; 293 [4.39]; 137 [2.16])

Consequently, even the geographical distinctions that one might take to represent a kind of natural basis for separate political identities at any given moment are themselves conventional, potentially changeable, and fluid. (The mere existence of the Scythians proves this further, as they are nomads who are not tied to any particular place; Hartog 1988, 61.) In the end, Herodotus tells us, the political borders we see in the world are always a matter of convention, the kind of convention that arises out of human storytelling: “I believe that all of Egypt is this country which is lived in by the Egyptians, just as Cilicia is what is lived in by the Cilicians and Assyria by the Assyrians,” he says (137–38 [2.17]). Greece is Greece, in other words, because people say it is. In Herodotus’s work, Greek identity is not a matter of essence. Rather, “Greekness” is a fluid and hybrid category with many ambiguities (Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 140; Thomas 2001).

The Critique of “Greekness”

In light of all of this description and analysis, the commonplace Athenian understanding of political identity seems incredibly naïve, if not downright foolish. Herodotus demonstrates what that commonplace understanding looks like near the end of The History, when the Athenians seek to demonstrate their loyalty to the Spartans, who are worried that the Athenians might capitulate to the Persian onslaught. There is no need to worry, the Athenians say, because

there is our common Greekness: we are one in blood and one in language; those shrines of the gods belong to us all in common, and the sacrifices in common, and there are our habits, bred of a common upbringing. It would be indecent that the Athenians should prove traitors to all these. (611 [8.144])

Of course, by this point in the book, Herodotus subtly but scrupulously has made it clear that neither blood, nor language, nor religious shrines, nor shared religious rituals, nor habits—that is, nothing in the Athenian list—guarantees shared political identity or sense of membership. As if to underscore the Athenian naïveté, Herodotus mentions that they tell this not just to the Spartans but also to Alexander of Macedon, who is descended from Greeks but working as Persian ambassador—the embodiment, that is, of the fluidity and complexity of political identity. Furthermore, the scene illustrates what is evidently Herodotus’s broader concern: that if the Athenians in particular or Greeks more generally persist in the fiction that political identity is simple or fixed, they will lack not just wisdom in the abstract sense but also political prudence and judgment. The weakness of their argument signals a broader political weakness among the Athenians.

In The History, Herodotus seeks to correct the inadequate understanding that the Greeks have of themselves and others (Munson 2001, 273). The Greeks surely would be better off, Herodotus thinks, if they cultivated the awareness that political membership is not something that can be settled—taken for granted as a matter of blood or ancestry or habit or shared religion—but is a complex matter of convention and construction. They would be better off still if they would acknowledge the extent to which their own culture is hybrid, shaped, and improved, and even defined by what were at first “foreign” things (Munson 2005, 10). The so-called “barbarians” have in fact given Greeks their language, their gods, their habits, and even their blood; everything that Greeks admire about their Greekness in fact comes from outside the boundaries of what they deem to be Greece (Forsdyke 2006, 231).

Herodotus shows how the Greek understanding of political identity in speech is wholly out of line with what distinguishes Greek political identity in practice. Because in practice, what helps to distinguish Greek political identity has been the Greek receptivity to foreign wisdom and a long-term embrace of hybridization. This is true in the general sense—in terms of language, religion, and so on. But it is particularly evident in the action of the Greco-Persian wars: Herodotus shows that what makes the Greeks able to stave off the Persian threat is their willingness to seek wisdom outside their own customs, and their willingness to cross boundaries in both the figurative and literal senses. For instance, the fact that the Athenians literally step outside their city and march to Marathon to fight the Persians gives them the tactical advantage of surprise in that battle, a maneuver they repeat with success when the Athenians abandon their city to take to the triremes. That definitive move—a move outside traditional borders—ultimately smashes the Persian navy. More symbolically, Herodotus offers the case of Heracles: in the Persian Wars, the figure of Heracles served as a crucial rallying figure for the Greek soldiers (Thompson 1996, 106–107). Not only do the Greek warriors draw inspiration from the figure of Heracles in an abstract sense but also the Athenian soldiers literally take refuge in various sanctuaries of Heracles, the god (455 [6.116]). Herodotus would have the Greeks realize the significance of the fact that what preserves and sustains them is the image of a god who originally came from Egypt. That the Greeks at one time welcomed foreign gods into their pantheon serves, in the long run, as a source of protection to them.

Herodotus underscores the intellectual and strategic importance of the Greek receptivity to foreign customs by emphasizing that the Egyptians—who are conquered by the Persians—are insular and inward-looking. He says that the Egyptians, who “follow their fathers’ customs and take no others to themselves at all,” have become politically vulnerable in the increasingly interconnected world. The Egyptians fall to the Persians in part because they are culturally insular to the point of self-preoccupation; they are taken by surprise by the Persian attack and fall quickly. In many of their battles, in fact, Herodotus explicitly attributes Egyptian defeat to a blindness to foreign customs; for instance, the Egyptian loss in Cyrene occurs because, he says, they “had, prior to this, no experience of the Greeks”—no knowledge, even, of their fighting styles and maneuvers. Their lack of knowledge of foreign things dooms them; “they were destroyed in such numbers that only a few came back to Egypt.”

Herodotus circles around the same point in his account of the Scythian horses, whose masters have kept them so insulated from the rest of the world that they have never seen mules, or heard mules braying. When the Scythians fight the Persians, who bring mules with them into battle, the braying of the Persian mules frightens the Scythian horses so much that they refuse to respond to their owners’ commands (340 [4.159]; 308 [4.78]; 327 [4.129]). The failure of the Scythian horses in battle can be understood as a small warning about the limitations of insular education or training in an interconnected world. In such a world, political advantage almost inevitably goes to those who seek to absorb wisdom from the whole range of human political experience. And considering the whole range of human political experience is impossible without looking to foreign places and trying to educate with foreign ways and customs in mind.

It may even be that the Persians’ demise—their loss to the Greeks—owes to their closed-mindedness. Specifically, Herodotus argues that Cyrus’s disdain for Greek things, articulated most clearly in a dismissal of the customs of the Greek marketplace, underlies his underestimation of the Greeks. That crude kind of cultural hubris weakens the Persians, who at one time derived their strength from a willingness to learn from and respect foreign cultures (Romm 1998, 103–105). Herodotus emphasizes that the Persians in general seem to have embraced foreign customs—including learning pederasty, an important part of their culture, from the Greeks—but that as soon as they lose their sense of hybridity and their openness to foreign customs, they doom themselves (97 [1.135]). It may be, too, as Norma Thompson (1996, 107) contends, that the Persians were never all that open to foreign wisdom, that they adopted foreign ways only superficially, as part of the pursuit of empire—and that such superficiality is no replacement for a spirit of true cross-cultural inquiry, which is not imperial in nature. Either way, the conclusion is clear: when, in an interconnected world, the Persians insist on a fixed idea of their own identity predicated on a de facto opposition to hybridization, they start running into trouble. Without question, Herodotus means this as an instructive lesson for the Greeks, and other peoples who would hear him.

In a world where the notion of hybridity gets at the truth of things, political practice requires a spirit of cross-cultural inquiry and openness to the revision of custom. Only those societies that admit of foreign wisdom will be strong enough and flexible enough—having gained a perspective that appreciates the hybridity of human life—to be able to negotiate in political circumstances and situations that are inevitably cross-cultural (T. S. Brown 1954, 842). “He is the best of men,” as Herodotus reports that the wise councilor Artabanus said, “who, when he is laying his plans, dreads and reflects on everything that can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of the action” (487 [7.49]). Herodotus means to not only suggest that there is a strategic advantage to seeing wisdom outside of one’s own customs but he also shows that the advantage runs deeper than that. By inquiring into customs both familiar and foreign, one might be able to discover human commonality beneath the masks of convention and develop a more thoroughgoing sense of justice (Benardete 2009, 13, 26). Throughout The History, justice is correlated with the willingness to step outside of ancestral convention and the willingness to consider multiple ways of being in the world: to practice a certain kind of impiety (Rubin 1997, 34).

In Herodotus’s mind, if there has been a source of advantage in Greek culture, it lies in the Greek practice of investigating—and endeavoring to learn from—foreign people and customs. The Greeks do not win the war merely because of their military preparedness but because they have a moral purpose, a sense of justice driving them, that derives in large part from their habits of inquiry into other cultures; they are able to see and articulate the nature of the Persian threat, both as a practical and principled matter (Lateiner 1989, 183). But the stories that the Greeks tell about themselves, the stories that emphasize the myth of racial and political purity, do not reflect that truth. The Greeks’ major failure is to continue to insist on a fixed notion of political identity in speech—to talk about the markers of political identity as if they are clear-cut and unchanging—even as the Greek political identity in practice has long been something more fluid and complex. And the Greek mythos of racial and political purity is dangerous in the long run (Rollo 1937, 135). It is dangerous because, as Herodotus stresses, over time a polity may evolve in reference to the stories it tells about itself (Thompson 1996, 1). The Greeks’ failure to articulate in speech the truth of their own complex and fluid political origins will, over time, transform Greek practice and, in Herodotus’s eyes, may cause them to lose their footing—their moral orientation—in the interconnected world. It is critical for the Greeks to be able to speak about the Greek identity in all its hybrid dimensions if they are to preserve those dimensions, and all the values they represent, in practice.

The Case for Diversity

But critically, Herodotus does not think that embracing hybridity, or engaging thoughtfully with foreign things, should be regarded as part of a long-term project of doing away with political borders altogether. Although Herodotus wants to encourage his fellow Greeks to be able to talk about the ways in which they are unified or connected across borders, he also insists that it is important to maintain the human diversity that is evidenced in customs and laws—and preserved by borders, even though those borders may be arbitrary (Ward 2008, 169). For one thing, Herodotus believes that diversity in customs and conventions is inevitable, a reflection of the multiplicity and particularity that is part of human nature and circumstance (Balot 2001, 107). So, for instance, the Greeks and the Egyptians have different customs surrounding the harvest of food because their environmental circumstances and seasons are different. Moreover, Herodotus believes that it is natural that people prefer the idea of having their “own” customs; he says that “if there were a proposition put before mankind, according to which each should, after examination, choose the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly think its own customs the best” (228 [3.38]). That is less because people are attached to what is given in their lives and more because people like the idea of making, and having made, their own choices. As well they should: from the beginning to the end of The History, Herodotus signals that the ability to choose is what all humans ought to be thinking about, as choice among ways of ruling and living is the most distinct of human capacities (Haubold 2007, 233). Diversity in human customs is evidence of the human capacity for choosing among different ways of being in the world; diversity in custom and convention and law is a reflection of what distinguishes the human animal from other creatures. ² A world that has a multiplicity of customs and legal codes is a world in which human beings are flourishing at what makes them most human: making choices about rules and conventions. And for that diversity to find expression in practice, political borders must exist, though they be conventional and crossable.

Moreover, no single society or regime form has a monopoly on admirable customs and conventions, and no single legal code has a monopoly on justness, a fact Herodotus underscores by praising individual customs and laws in virtually every society he discusses. It is also the case that many praiseworthy customs are incompatible with each other; for instance, the marriage auctions of Babylon, which Herodotus praises as their “very wisest” custom, are incompatible with allowing women “their free-will choice of any man,” a practice that Herodotus also praises as “most magnificent” (122 [1.199]; 457 [6.122]). Just as there is a plurality of good forms in fighting, there is a variety of good forms in custom more generally (Macan 1908). The multiplicity of customs and conventions in the world allows for a great range of praiseworthy practices to emerge and take hold, as Herodotus emphasizes that wisdom is never located all in one place, and many wise things are mutually contradictory. Awareness of that fact helps to generate humility about one’s own customs and conventions, a reflective thoughtfulness as opposed to an unreflective pride. It also provides a sense of the scope and variety of choices available to people and communities—and having an awareness of the variety of ways of ruling and being ruled in the world helps to promote human flourishing. Herodotus celebrates human diversity because the fact of human diversity exposes the underlying human unity that lies in agency and the ability to choose (Marozzi 2008, 7).

Centrally, Herodotus believed that the conservation of human diversity helped to promote the survival of political freedom. In large part, that is because the diversity of rules and conventions, sustained in large part by borders, represents a dispersal of power. That dispersal of power, of course, slows the progress of any singular tyrannical ambition. It is telling that throughout The History, Herodotus associates the desire for unity—for abolishing political borders altogether—with the impulse to tyranny. For instance, Xerxes desires to unify the world under the Persian crown and in so doing many different customs of different peoples (Ward 2008, 65). Xerxes, in other words, sees interconnectedness across borders as a means to the unification of power. But that vision of unified power is inseparable from a vision of enslavement—as imagining a world with a single set of rules would take away the capacity of communities to make rules for themselves. In other words, Xerxes’s vision of a unified world is a world in which there is great power but little freedom.

The great temptation—and great danger—in an interconnected world, Herodotus understands, is the temptation to pursue unity to excess. As he tries to demonstrate, living in an interconnected world goes along with an awareness of the contingency of political borders. The awareness of that contingency leads some, like the Persians, to try to undo them altogether. They do that because interconnectedness seems to hold out the promise of realizing some greater unity in human political life. But seeking unity in political practice—at least, seeking unity to excess—is a dangerous and even self-defeating endeavor. It is dangerous because it increases the threat of political tyranny. It is self-defeating because, as Herodotus stresses, the most important human unity—the ability to choose, particularly among different forms of rule—is evidenced and reinforced not in singularity but in the multiplicity of human practice. To only seek unity in political practice is to ignore if not obliterate the plurality that is constitutive of human life. Trying to conquer the other or make it entirely one’s own is not the grounds for greatness; rather, it is the grounds for losing both the other and the self (Ward 2008, 170).

In other words, just because political borders are contingent in their details does not mean that political borders are not valuable in general. Political borders allow for the flourishing of communal diversity that helps both to reflect and preserve the human capacity for choosing among ways of ruling and being ruled. Although it seems paradoxical, human unity is best evidenced in human diversity. In an interconnected world, we must develop an understanding of political identity that is based on the recognition of political borders as both conventional and desirable. They are conventional because they are evidently contingent, subject to shifts and crossings and obliterations and transformations. Even so, they are desirable because they preserve a means by which human multiplicity may find expression in customs and laws, thereby reaffirming the central place of choice and freedom in human life. Borders also help to maintain freedom by helping to militate against the spread of tyranny, always a threat in politics. Herodotus shows that just as languages are contingent and conventional in their specifics yet necessary for human flourishing in general, there is no one “natural” or “fixed” human language; political borders are contingent and conventional in their specifics yet necessary for human flourishing in general. There is no “natural” or “fixed” political border, either. ³ Although they are imperfect and matters of convention, both languages and borders help to actualize human potential.

For Herodotus, acknowledging hybridity allows us to see the unity that underlies, and is ultimately inseparable from, human diversity. He teaches that having political borders is not incompatible with the acknowledgment of interconnectedness, nor is it incompatible with the pursuit of general truths. He exposes the fragility of those political visions that pursue unity at the expense of diversity, either through an unreflective globalism (like that of the Persians) or an unreflective tribalism (like that of Egyptian political practice and Greek political speech). Both Jihad and McWorld, Herodotus might say, present visions of human flourishing that are incomplete at best (Barber 1996). In the long term, political stability and flourishing, even in a world where we see the omnipresence of the hybrid, depend on the existence of bounded political entities. The best societies in conditions of interconnectedness—the societies that will prove most stable and capable of flourishing—will be those that embrace the internal freedom to consider new and foreign ways of doing things, a condition that underlies the freedom to change laws and customs. In Herodotus’s mind, that does not mean that the best societies in such a world will be democracies—he suggests at more than one point in The History, such as in his precept that “it is easier to fool many men than one,” that democracies may not be the most outward-looking or truth-seeking societies—and rather expects if not hopes that there will be a plurality of forms of rule (400 [5.97]). If he hopes that globally interconnected societies have something in common, he hopes it will be the willingness to visit and learn from each other’s customs—a willingness to explore that will not lead all societies to draw precisely the same conclusions or end up with precisely the same laws, but will rather lead them all to have a more accurate, and more extensive, understanding of what is possible in human life.

That lesson, after all, is one that Herodotus himself reinforces in The History, in his exhaustive descriptions of the peoples and practices of the places to which he traveled. His own work introduces and reinforces the sense that an exposure to the variety of habits and laws in the world is not merely an exercise in novelty, but more fundamentally an exercise in exposure to the fact of human freedom and choice. Herodotus marshals his own travel stories to encourage a kind of political thoughtfulness about the human capacity to choose, a thoughtfulness that comes from the careful and conscientious consideration of foreign things.

Conclusion

Our globally interconnected world, where we increasingly recognize the politics of the hybrid, would not have been unfamiliar to Herodotus. To the contrary: the question of how to think about political borders and forms in a globe where borders are constantly being crossed is central in his writing. He sees hybridity everywhere he looks in the ancient world, and his book bears witness that hybridity is an enduring feature of political life.

Of course, Herodotus is interesting in ways beyond the mere recognition of hybridity; he is worthy of consideration for reasons beyond mere historical interest. His particular circumstance, situated as it was in the classical world, breaths fresh life into the contemporary discussion of hybridity. First, observing hybridity in the ancient world suggests that this is a phenomenon that transcends the contemporary focus on the role of evasive technologies and global capitalism. If the flavor of today’s hybridity has a distinctly economic bent—especially with regard to discussions on immigration, international trade, telecommunications, capital flows, labor movements, and so on—Herodotus suggests that there are bigger factors at work here. Just beneath the surface of economic practice resides a host of competing forces that exert themselves on identity at both the individual and societal levels. Indeed, for Herodotus hybridity is not primarily an outcome of economic practice, but stems from a diversity of human action—war, diplomacy, religious exchange, and so on. In short, then, Herodotus reaffirms what is distinctly political about hybridity as oppose to merely economic.

Second, and relatedly, that Herodotus predates the advent of modern technological revolutions suggests that hybridity is an enduring and permanent feature of human life. This is of particular importance for what was obvious to Herodotus has become mired in myth for many today. Indeed, contemporary commentators who wish to maintain hard distinctions among borders and beliefs rely on fanciful notions of cultural purity, of halcyon eras of pure sociocultural independence. Herodotus maintains that such was never the case even in times where communicative exchange was exceedingly more difficult.

If we listen to Herodotus’s contention of the permanence of hybridity, the nature of the discussion about hybridity in the present day must change. The question turns from whether a society will embrace hybridity to the more substantive question of what we make of this inevitable phenomenon. As chronicled above, in The History, Herodotus catalogs a variety of methods through which hybridity comes to life. If cultures invariably influence other cultures, we are left asking how this exchange will occur. War-making and imperialism might be the easiest of methods, as Herodotus points out, but these are hardly the best methods of cross-cultural exchange. Humans are curious creatures destined to explore and affect other humans with whom they come into contact. Herodotus’s catalog of the forms of hybridity offers the timely suggestion that substantive consideration is needed, then, over the means of hybridization. In effect, Herodotus recasts the terms of the conversation.

Third, Herodotus does more than explain a particular human occurrence. He gestures toward a normative claim that affirms the goodness and utility of hybridity—a claim that hopes to resolve the tension between the universal and the particular. Hybridity as understood by Herodotus affirms the rough-and-tumble of real-world politics. Hybridity abides the rapid, ever-changing course of politics and conceiving identities as hybrid provides societies with the flexibility and wherewithal to weather the harshness of political practice. Underlying the diversity of cultural practices lies a common truth of the human condition, a common susceptibility to the demands of politics. This susceptibility, as Herodotus makes clear, orients humans both to the particular—where identities are actually brought to life—and the universal—where the wide range of human diversity bears on these identities.

Notably, Herodotus insists that political forms, institutions, and actors cannot be understood without reference to the broader culture (and cultures) in which they operate. He takes a broad approach to understanding politics, an approach encompassing elements of human life—trade, storytelling, family, eating habits, and so on—that do not always appear political at first glance. In his account, political identity and membership develop only partly in reference to formal political borders and rules. So, Herodotus returns again and again to the idea that the stories that people tell each other about themselves are constitutive of identity—an argument that Wendy Brown (2004, 106–107) has associated with a recognition of the inherent hybridity of the political world.

It is telling that Herodotus argues that even in an interconnecting world, where the conventional nature of borders becomes more and more evident, there is still some need for bordered experience in human life. He seeks a kind of balance of power within society, where global interconnectedness finds a counterweight in smaller and more particular loyalties. In other words, his view of hybridity accords importance to boundedness as well as boundlessness to partial experiences as well as global commonalities. For Herodotus, particularity takes on universal significance because the astonishing range of particular behaviors and practices in the world help to define what it means to be human (Marincola 2004, 24). Particularity and diversity are both necessary and desirable elements of human experience. In The History, the human need for particular boundaries is portrayed natural, even if the specifics of those particular boundaries are not always so. Human beings have some need for limits and boundaries in their lives to be able to conceive of themselves as having some kind of actionable political agency.

Herodotus is ultimately concerned with the survival of political liberty—political freedom and choice—in an interconnected world, and he suggests that the great challenge of globalized or globalizing times is the preservation of political liberty. He views a world in which unity comes too much at the expense of diversity as a world in which political agency is compromised. Taking hybridity seriously, in the end, means thinking seriously about borders, about how, even though we should embrace their transgression, we might also regard them as the bulwarks of freedom.