The Father of Lies, LIED???

[circumspice]

Hey Min! This article mirrors much of what you said about Greeks' opinion of non-Greeks.

https://www.livescience.com/herodotus-l ... attle.html

[Minimalist]

In "The Histories," Herodotus states that the Carthaginians used mercenaries when they attacked Himera, but neither he nor Diodorus Siculus mention foreign mercenaries on the Greek side. There might be a reason for this: Greek pride.

Carthage was not Rome. They habitually used mercenary troops under Carthaginian commanders and it contributed heavily to their ultimate defeat in the First and Second Punic Wars, although this was later. By the 5th century BCE there were Greek colonies all over southern Italy, Asia Minor and parts of the Balkans. War always attracted people who wanted a chance to do some looting.

I don't accuse Herodotus of "lying." He was credulous and accepted the stories told to him by locals as factual. For instance, the notion that 100,000 slaves built the Giza pyramid. In modern parlance, he was re-tweeting FAKE NEWS!

[circumspice]

I've read some of Herodotus' histories. I noticed that he was very aware that he had a critical audience. So he went to ridiculous extremes to qualify what he wrote, concerning whether it was something he personally observed vs something that he was told. For example, historians considered that he lied about the events that took place during the funeral of an important Sythian chieftan because it was considered so barbaric as to be a lie told to emphasize the barbarity of the Sythians. Then, a Sythian burial mound was found that was so close to how Herodotus described the Sythian funeral that some historians & archaeologists believe that it may belong to the same Sythian chieftan's funeral that Herodotus purportedly observed. I read his history of Egypt & it's BORING as hell. It's a long summation of his travels in Egypt, told in excrutiating detail. He tells you how many days he sailed up or down the Nile to visit various sights. He tells you exactly what he personally observed & what he was told by others.

I think that when Merer's log book is fully translated, it'll be even more boring since it's basically an administrative document, reporting his activities so that he could be paid.

[Minimalist]

He tells you exactly what he personally observed & what he was told by others.

And that's fine, except what he personally observed was in the 5th century BC and his comments about the pyramids were 2,000 years after they were built. The locals always have good yarns for the tourists!

[Simon21]

Not sure why this is such a revelation. All ancient armies used mercenaries, depending on how this is defined. Many modern armies do the same - Gurkhas, Fijians etc even the US. One would expect the Greek states to, they are not going to turn down help.

Whether mercenaries were responsible for Carthage losing the Punic wars is not altogether clear. They fought extremely hard and gave Rome a run for its money. Better than the Macedonians or the Seleucids did. The area where they fell down badly was in their fleet, manned by citizens who were defeated by the Greeks of Southern Italy under the command of Rome.

I don't remember Herodotus actually stating the "Greeks did not use mercenaries" so the issue of lying seems to be pushing it.

[Minimalist]

Speaking of Herodotus.

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.pr ... b13aa19c7b

Who Were the Etruscans? DNA Study Solves Origin Mystery

Once believed to have migrated to central Italy from Anatolia, analysis of Etruscan genomes shows a shared ancestry with their archenemies

The DNA of the ancient Etruscans – which were around half of the sample – turned out to be closely related to that of other local Italic populations, including their Roman archenemies, says Professor Cosimo Posth, an archaeogeneticist at Tubingen. This contradicts a longstanding theory, first proposed by Herodotus, the 5th-century-B.C.E. Greek writer considered the “father of history,” that the Etruscans were actually Greeks who had migrated to Italy from western Anatolia.

Herodotus lied

If we go by Herodotus, at some point at the end of the Bronze Age, the kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia faced a major famine. The local king decided to send away a major part of the population, who eventually founded a new coalition of city states in central Italy under his son Tyrrhenus (who also gave his name to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the portion of the Mediterranean along Italy’s western coast).

Herodotus’ theory of a Greek-Anatolian origin has some merits. Besides the use of the Greek alphabet, Etruscan art displays some oriental influences, with human figures being depicted with almond-shaped eyes and braided hair. But the Etruscans were a cultured and well-travelled people who may have picked up those influences by contact. Other ancient scholars, like the first-century-B.C.E. historian Dionysus of Halicarnassus, propended for a local origin of this civilization. After all, Herodotus may have been the father of history but was notoriously unreliable, to the point that, already in antiquity, some of his more critical colleagues dubbed him “father of lies.”