The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

particular Quaker intensity. That is, even in the depths of his exploration of
minutiae, he sees the grand sweep. His main stage is the ancient Greek
Oikoumene, which also, as it happens, forms much of the material for McNeill’s
world history, and as we’ve said, much of the background for Herodotus’s fifth-
century 
B.C
. 
Histories
. It may be no accident that this is precisely the world
which occupies current news headlines: that region between the eastern
Mediterranean and the Iranian-Afghan plateau. For the Oikoumene is where the
Eurasian and African landmasses converge, with many outlets to the Indian
Ocean via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, making it ultra-strategic, as well as a

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stew of migration patterns and consequently clashing ethnic and sectarian
groups. Herodotus’s 
Histories
captures this unceasing turbulence.
Herodotus is at the heart of my argument for the relevance of McNeill and
Hodgson in the twenty-first century. For this Greek, who was born a Persian
subject sometime between 490 and 484 
B.C
. in Halicarnassus, in southwestern
Asia Minor, maintains in his narrative about the origins and execution of the war
between the Greeks and the Persians the perfect balance between geography and
the decisions of men. He advances the 
partial
determinism we all need. For he
shows us a world where the relief map hovers in the background—Greece and
Persia and their respective 
barbarian
penumbrae in the Near East and North
Africa—even as individual passions are acted out with devastating political
results. Herodotus stands for the sensibility we need to recover in order to be less
surprised by the world to come.
“Custom is king of all,” Herodotus observes, quoting Pindar. Herodotus tells of
the Egyptians, who shaved their eyebrows in mourning for a beloved cat, of
Libyan tribesmen who wore their hair long on one side and shorn on the other,
and smeared their bodies with vermilion. There are the Massagetae, a people
who lived east of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Turkmenistan, among whom,
when a man grows old, “his relatives come together and kill him, and sheep and
goats along with him, and stew all the meat together and have a banquet of it.”
First there is only the landscape, the historical experience of a people on it, and
the manners and ideas that arise out of that experience. Herodotus is a preserver
of the memory of civilizations and their geographies, the myths, fables, and even
lies that they lived by. He knows that the better a knack a political leader has for
just what’s out there
, the less likely he is to make tragic mistakes. The Scythians
lived on the far side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, where it is so cold that to make
mud in the winter they had to light a fire. As Artabanus warns Darius, the
Persian king, to no avail: Do not make war against the Scythians—a swiftly
mobile and nomadic people without cities or sown land, who offer no focal point
of attack for a large, well-equipped army.
40
Herodotus’s signal strength is his powerful evocation of just what human
beings are capable of believing. It is a belief made tangible by the fact that the
ancients, living without science and technology, saw and heard differently—
more vividly than we do. Landscape and geography were real to them in ways
we cannot imagine.
Take the story of Phidippides, a professional runner sent from Athens to
Sparta as a herald to plead for help against the Persians. Phidippides tells the

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Athenians that on Mount Parthenium, en route to Sparta, he saw the god Pan,
who bade him ask his countrymen: “Why do you pay no heed to Pan, who is a
good friend to the people of Athens, has been many times serviceable to you,
and will be so again?” The Athenians are convinced that Phidippides has told the
truth, and when their fortunes improved, they set up a shrine to Pan under the
Acropolis.
This is more than just a charming story; it may well be the truth as the
Athenians related it to Herodotus. The runner probably believed he saw Pan.