Yet The Way of Herodotus may be most compelling as it explores just how little we may have changed in the last 2,500 years and at least one effort to bring about change.
In the very first sentence of The Histories, Herodotus sets out his purposes, which include "especially to show why the two peoples fought each other." Those "two peoples" were the Greeks — the West — and the Persians — the East. As Marozzi points out, while Herodotus was writing during the Peloponnesian Wars as they overshadowed the world, beginning in 2003 the war in Iraq "was doing the same thing." It also presented "cultural confrontation and the clash of civilisations, democracy versus dictatorship, West versus East, religion, greed, hubris and its consequences." All in all, it had "an unmistakably Herodotean echo."
Marozzi gains firsthand experience with those echoes as he travels to post-Saddam Baghdad to help a British security company set up a civil affairs program. Yet his main goal and attraction is not Baghdad but Babylon, the site of civilizations that predated Herodotus by some 1,300 years but which even he could not resist.
One unmistakable subtext of The Way of Herodotus is that ancient history is not necessarily irrelevant in today's world. Ethnic and geographic animosity still exist even if, like Iraq, it is cloaked in different purposes and reasons. Showing the potential for change, though, is an effort in an area where ethic enmity has been a constant for some time — the Balkans. Marozzi visits the head of a project that is trying to create a less ethnocentric and more balanced approach to history that more openly explores the differences and conflicts between and among peoples. With multinational involvement, the Greece-based Joint History Project created four new secondary school history workbooks that provide multiple perspectives on issues that have divided the Balkans. It is a long-term effort to make history a mechanism for critical thought rather than a nationalistic tool that may encourage ethnic hatred.
For the travel enthusiast and even the casual fan of history, the views of culture, society and history The Way of Herodotus provides outweigh the various diversions that tend not to lead much of anywhere. Additionally, given Marozzi's praise for Herodotus' storytelling, his writing style makes this an entertaining exploration of a long-dead Greek and the role of history in contemporary life and conflicts. Sadly, though, 300 will probably remain the main source of most Americans' exposure to Herodotus.
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