Kilka przykładów metafizycznej przyczynowości konfliktów zbrojnych w Dziejach Herodota z Halikarnasu

Abstrakt

Human and divine spheres of activity continuously alternate each other within the pages of the Herodotean Histories – they take the shape of a constant struggle between the two “world ends”. This struggle materializes in the lot of particular characters like Croesus’ or Xerxes’ rise and fall, when the kings try in vain to stand up to supernatural powers, which have already prepared their own blueprint of the earthly history. Furthermore, it materializes in the figure of wise adviser, who becomes as if the embodiment of human attempts to free oneself from the dim dictatorship of the jealous deity. Finally, it is revealed in the very moment of making crucial decisions. Dreams and oracles, as they appeare, serve the role of specific devices in the hands of divine and also the most approachable way for human discovery of the fated future.

The consistent theology within Histories does not exist at all. Herodotus’ conviction (given expressis verbis or put in the mouth of his characters) about the existence of fate, ruling even the gods, about divine retribution – τίσις – or about the jealousy of the deities – φϑόνος, are ingrained into the religious thinking of Herodotus’ time. For he belonged, even by virtue of his pedigree, to the world of religious conservatism, comparable to that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or other Greek thinkers of the V^th-century Hellade.