EclecticLip

(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)

I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently.  It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago.  Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.

Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”.  This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world).  To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him.  Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 

Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.*  But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels.  The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries.  And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels.  Ah, the miracle of mistranslation! 

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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend.  If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area.  (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)