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charameiMy boss knows someone who is writing an AS-Level (= 17-year-olds, for you non-Brits) Ancient History textbook on Sparta. She asked me to proofread it. I said yes. I was expecting to learn something, not... THIS. *flails*
1. Oversimplification, sometimes to the point of being outright wrong. This one I can handle. It is AS, after all.
2. She completely skims all of the problematic elements of Herodotus' so-called 'History' and tries to tell these poor kids that he's really quite reliable, actually. Of course he is! The fact that most of his information came from people in pubs and he exaggerates to make the battles sound better, makes stuff up when he doesn't know the truth (see: the infamous hippopotamus description), and is by his own admission just trying to tell a ripping good story means nothing! Nothing, I say!
Look, you don't have to go to university levels here, but my God, Herodotus is so not reliable.
3. But what's got me uncontrollably nerdraging is that I've just caught her blatantly misinterpreting a really simple source.
This looked fishy to me, so I looked it up on Perseus:
Maybe I'm the idiot here, but I read that as Herodotus saying 'Lycurgus was a real person. The Pythia thought he was godlike. He did all of these things, and then the Spartans made him a hero-cult when he died'. Not 'he clearly didn't exist because they worship him as a god'. This is more than oversimplification: it's distortion. Pure distortion. She either skim-read the text, or she just decided to make it say whateverthefuck she wanted because, hey, 17-year-olds don't read the sources anyway, right?
(A third option, if I try to be charitable for a moment, is that she's such a poor writer - you should see my tracked changes - that she meant to say 'historians think that, as he had a hero-cult, he probably wasn't real [in much the same way as, say, Homer probably wasn't real]' or 'historians think that, while there may have been a real Lycurgus, his history is so mythologised as to make no difference' but has cut out, like, five intermediary steps and come out with something blatantly untrue. Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, and all that. It's still bloody awful history.)
I don't even think she has an agenda, that's what's really making me cross. If she did have one I could understand her shoddy treatment of the sources, but from what I've read I think she's just a poor writer and a worse academic. According to her acknowledgements page, she's a poor academic who works at a college.
1. Oversimplification, sometimes to the point of being outright wrong. This one I can handle. It is AS, after all.
2. She completely skims all of the problematic elements of Herodotus' so-called 'History' and tries to tell these poor kids that he's really quite reliable, actually. Of course he is! The fact that most of his information came from people in pubs and he exaggerates to make the battles sound better, makes stuff up when he doesn't know the truth (see: the infamous hippopotamus description), and is by his own admission just trying to tell a ripping good story means nothing! Nothing, I say!
Look, you don't have to go to university levels here, but my God, Herodotus is so not reliable.
3. But what's got me uncontrollably nerdraging is that I've just caught her blatantly misinterpreting a really simple source.
Herodotus doubted that Lycurgus was a real historical individual (1.65) as by the fifth century he had been awarded a temple and cult at Sparta.
- Introduction to Ancient Greece
This looked fishy to me, so I looked it up on Perseus:
1.65 [2] Before this they [the Spartans] had been the worst-governed of nearly all the Hellenes and had had no dealings with strangers, but they changed to good government in this way: Lycurgus, a man of reputation among the Spartans, went to the oracle at Delphi. As soon as he entered the hall, the priestess said in hexameter: [3] “You have come to my rich temple, Lycurgus,
A man dear to Zeus and to all who have Olympian homes.
I am in doubt whether to pronounce you man or god,
But I think rather you are a god, Lycurgus.” [4] Some say that the Pythia also declared to him the constitution that now exists at Sparta, but the Lacedaemonians themselves say that Lycurgus brought it from Crete when he was guardian of his nephew Leobetes, the Spartan king. [5] Once he became guardian, he changed all the laws and took care that no one transgressed the new ones. Lycurgus afterwards established their affairs of war: the sworn divisions, the bands of thirty, the common meals; also the ephors and the council of elders.
1.66 [1] Thus they changed their bad laws to good ones, and when Lycurgus died they built him a temple and now worship him greatly.
- Herodotus, Histories 1.65-66
Maybe I'm the idiot here, but I read that as Herodotus saying 'Lycurgus was a real person. The Pythia thought he was godlike. He did all of these things, and then the Spartans made him a hero-cult when he died'. Not 'he clearly didn't exist because they worship him as a god'. This is more than oversimplification: it's distortion. Pure distortion. She either skim-read the text, or she just decided to make it say whateverthefuck she wanted because, hey, 17-year-olds don't read the sources anyway, right?
(A third option, if I try to be charitable for a moment, is that she's such a poor writer - you should see my tracked changes - that she meant to say 'historians think that, as he had a hero-cult, he probably wasn't real [in much the same way as, say, Homer probably wasn't real]' or 'historians think that, while there may have been a real Lycurgus, his history is so mythologised as to make no difference' but has cut out, like, five intermediary steps and come out with something blatantly untrue. Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, and all that. It's still bloody awful history.)
I don't even think she has an agenda, that's what's really making me cross. If she did have one I could understand her shoddy treatment of the sources, but from what I've read I think she's just a poor writer and a worse academic. According to her acknowledgements page, she's a poor academic who works at a college.
