History of Greece, Volume 05 (of 12) — A Closer Reading

The Weight of Herodotus: Xerxes and the Hellespont

Grote devotes considerable space to Xerxes’ preparations, drawing heavily on Herodotus. He recounts the bridging of the Hellespont, the storm that destroyed the first bridge, and Xerxes’ notorious punishment of the sea—ordering the Hellespont to be whipped and fettered. Rather than dismiss this as legend, Grote argues there is “no sufficient reason for disbelieving its reality,” grounding his defense in the consistency of Xerxes’ character as portrayed by Herodotus. He also lingers on the canal cut through Mount Athos, noting the “superior intelligence of the Phenicians” in its execution and the impression made on Greeks by the use of the lash over workmen. These details are not mere color; Grote uses them to illustrate the scale of Persian power and the cultural shock it produced, while simultaneously interrogating the reliability of his source.

Thucydides’ Silence and the Lost Decade

When Grote turns to the period after the Persian Wars, he confronts a different problem: Thucydides’ narrative of the Pentecontaetia is deliberately selective. Thucydides himself calls it a “throwing off” of his narrative, and Grote notes that he recites only three incidents for the ten years after 477 BCE—Eion, Skyros, and Karystus. Grote warns against treating these as the full history, pointing out that Herodotus accidentally preserves evidence of “Persian commanders and garrisons everywhere in Thrace and the Hellespont” that were gradually reduced. The case of Maskamês, who held Doriskus through Xerxes’ reign, shows that many Persian posts remained. Grote infers that the first years of Athenian hegemony must have been “full of busy and successful hostility,” but he is careful to mark this as inference, not fact. His handling of this gap reveals his historiographical caution: he refuses to fabricate events but insists on the probability of unrecorded warfare.

Narrative Pace and the Problem of Selection

Throughout the volume, Grote’s pace shifts markedly between source-rich and source-poor periods. When following Herodotus, the narrative slows to accommodate digressions on Persian customs, dreams, and divine commands—Xerxes’ change of heart after Artabanus’ advice, the repeated dreams that compel him to invade. Grote treats these as integral to the “religious conception of the sequences of history” shared by Persians and Greeks, not as mere superstition. But when he reaches the decades after 477 BCE, the pace accelerates; he must rely on inference and the few secure events. This uneven rhythm is not a flaw but a deliberate reflection of the evidence. Grote’s prose becomes denser, more argumentative, as he defends his reconstructions against rival historians. The reader experiences the historian’s own labor: the effort to build a coherent narrative from fragments, and the honesty to admit when the trail goes cold.

Grote’s fifth volume rewards readers who attend to his footnotes and asides, where the real historical argument often resides. He is less concerned with dramatic storytelling than with establishing what can be said with confidence—and what must remain uncertain. For those interested in how nineteenth-century historians constructed ancient history, this volume offers a case study in source criticism, narrative economy, and the ethics of inference. Approach it not as a chronicle but as a conversation with the evidence.

Reading Grote’s fifth volume, I kept thinking how strange it is that we hold onto small details—Xerxes lashing the sea—while Thucydides quietly skips them. It felt familiar, like remembering a friend’s version of a story. Later, I found that same quiet patience in A Smaller History of Greece: from the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest — Edition Insights, a gentler retelling that somehow carries the same weight. It lingers.