Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Herodotus's "Histories"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers Herodotus's Histories. It begins:

Homer, the epic poet who wrote the story of the Trojan War, lived some four hundred years before Herodotus, who wrote the history of the Persian War. Thucydides, who lived just a generation after Herodotus, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, a war, he insisted, that was the greatest war that had ever happened, a war that lasted twenty-seven years and ended with Athens defeated and its empire destroyed. The defeat of Athens, and the long decline that, some believe, still continues, gives some reason to think Thucydides was right, that the war between Athens and Sparta was the most important war that had taken place, but there never would not have been a war had Athens not become an empire which seemed to threaten the freedom, if not the very existence, of Sparta and its allies. And Athens would not have become an empire if the Athenians had not had the courage, and the foresight, to stand against the attempt of Xerxes and the Persians to make, as Xerxes promised, “a Persian empire that has the same limit as Zeus’s sky. For the sun will look upon no country that has a border with ours, but I shall make them all one country, once I have passed in my progress through all Europe.” Why this did not happen, how Xerxes and the Persians were defeated, is what Herodotus wants to understand.

Herodotus will tell the story of the war, and will tell it better than the story Homer told of Troy. He will investigate, and uncover, the real causes, and not, like Homer...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories.

--Marshal Zeringue