s of what happened with analysis of what the accounts mean and what they illustrate about each culture. He establishes his credentials as an impartial resource with the early-stage stories of woman-stealing undertaken by both Greeks (Ionians) and Persians. However, he conflates such stories with the legend of the Trojan War, explaining that the Greeks took the stealing of one woman, Helen, quite seriously indeed and occasioned their most significant military adventure. He cites the Persian analysis of the Trojan War as that Greeks were the aggressors and were responsible for establishing the enmity between East and West. To the West, the East was considered forever exotic, forever alien.
Herodotus' account of the enmity between East and West from the Greek perspective mixes literary sources, including poetry and drama, with facts and oral reports that he gathered on many travels to the sites he discusses. That has given Herodotus a spotty reputation as a reliable historical resource. Citing his manipulation of such myths as Atys and the Boar from a story of an agricultural god into the story of the favorite son of a Lydian king, Burn says that Herodotus "never shows any sense of the profound difference between what is told and what happened" (1982, p. 25).
Another standpoint from which Herodotus has been criticized is the Orientalism critique, most forcefully articulated by Edward Said in texts bearing that title. For example, Said characterizes Herodotus' account of Egypt, which includes information about the pyramids and the culture's embalming practices, as judgmental inasmuch as he considered it "a dead civilization" governed by "a culture of death, whose apparent ideology of conquest . . . was related to an ideology of the afterlife" (Said, 1994, p. 123). In other words, Egypt and the rest of the East are irretrievably alien and "other" by Western lights--interesting and exotic but nothing like "home."
A different view of ...