“Before the rumour reached them, the Greeks were full of fear, not so much on their own account, as for their countrymen, and for Greece herself, lest she should be worsted in her struggle with Mardonius. But when the voice fell on them, their fear vanished, and they charged more vigorously and at a quicker pace.”
~ ‘The History’ (Book 9) by Herodotus (George Rawlinson transl. GB6 - p. 310)
It feels great to have finished book 9 of The History by Herodotus, almost like catching up on a multi-season TV series, and you feel like you need to go back and read some of your favorite parts. Herodotus started with the reasons for the east-west conflict and went on to give accounts of great empires and rulers, taking occasional detours to talk about geography, history and other contexts. The last book circles back to Cyrus, who was mentioned in the first book, and it ends with a quote from Cyrus. The quote itself made me think - “soft countries gave birth to soft men—there was no region which produced very delightful fruits, and at the same time men of a warlike spirit”. A version of this is circulated on social media even now, and every time I see it, it feels wrong and anachronistic. The resurgence of show of strength by focusing on physical attributes, by being rude to people, calling for war and killing, seems so irrational especially when we need more people to use their brains more effectively - have better reading and writing comprehension, understand the laws of physics, have the ability to focus to spends long stretches of time to solve complex problems, think out of the box and innovate, etc. The toughness has to be mental and not merely physical. This reminds me of an experiment Nir Eyal talks about in his latest book (Beyond Belief), where a scientist named Richter conducts experiments on rats to see whether they would drown. He observed that domesticated rats were better at surviving than wild rats.
We often assume that “tougher” individuals, the ones with more strength or grit, naturally persist longer. Yet Richter’s experiment suggested otherwise. The wild rats went under within minutes. The domesticated ones kept on fighting.