A Dollar a Pound

While we were packing for our recent move, the agent from the moving company came to the house for an estimate. He very kindly and modestly told us not to pay his company so much; he said that the move was going to cost us a dollar per pound, and that we should get rid of some things. We had already packed and stored about seventy boxes: nothing to do about those. But for all the rest still in the house, we kept repeating our new mantra – “A dollar a pound, a dollar a pound” – and tried to give away or throw away as much as we packed.

You would think it would have been a difficult decision, but it just came to my mind all settled one evening: I needed to get rid of the Britannica Great Books. As hugely important as they had been to me for the last thirty years, as much as I had learned from them, as much as they helped me fulfill my nearly lifelong determination to receive a liberal, classical education, I didn’t really need them anymore. Most of the works I would never read again. The ones I will reenjoy are all available on the internet. (Adler’s idea in creating the set, after all, was to get a cheap copy of copyright-free classic works into the home, a job now performed by Project Gutenberg, archive.org, etc.) And my old eyes don’t do so well anymore with the original set’s tiny print. I really only needed the books (1) that might have formatting issues online (e.g. Euclid) and (2) in which I had made copious notes (e.g. Aquinas). I ended up keeping eight of the fifty-four volumes; the goal of shedding as much as I packed was more than met.

Then I opened up this year’s reading list and saw that one of the first assignments was completing my reread of The Histories of Herodotus, and that’s one of the volumes I had given up. I remembered enjoying it again just a few years ago but forgot that I had split the task up into two years. I had no problem finding a very inexpensive digital copy of the book, and I cranked the font size up on my Kindle as much as I wanted. But the maps! That book was so hard to read the first time because I had to keep consulting the maps several times on every page. “Boeotia: is that the island northeast of Attica? No, that’s Euboea. And does the road from Susa to Sardis really go through Cappadocia?” But the maps on the Kindle version are virtually impossible to read. *sigh* Maybe I should have kept nine volumes. But “a dollar a pound”!

Despite the problems of keeping up with his geographical references, Herodotus is one of the easiest and fun reads in all of ancient literature. Of course, it’s mainly about a giant, bloody war, but the sidestories and backstories he tells along the way are wonderfully entertaining: the wealth of Croesus, the embalming methods of the Egyptians, the divine rescue of Delphi by landslides on Mt. Parnassus, Xerxes whipping the waters of the Hellespont (i.e. the Dardanelles).

But don’t get me wrong: the main story is gripping, too. Darius the Mede tries to bully the surrounding nations into subjugation to his empire, and is insulted when Athens says, “Nuts!” He sends what seems like a large force over, but the Greeks, led by Athens, defeat it at Marathon. (Herodotus, who got his information by interviewing many eyewitnesses, does not mention a runner covering 26-plus miles to deliver the news, so there’s an argument to be made for once that what isn’t in the ancient book is probably a myth.) His successor Xerxes, determined to put Athens in its place once and for all, sends two million soldiers (accompanied by as many support staff and camp followers) to finish the job. They build a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont and take several days to cross it. The army dries up several rivers along the way just quenching thirst. But then the Spartans (who wisely decide to join the defensive allies) meet the Persians at Thermopylae, thus giving their name as a legacy to countless high-school football teams. And then Themistocles comes up with a clever plan to defeat the Persian navy at Salamis. And then the last 300,000 Persians are soundly defeated at Plataea. The “free” Greeks’ distribution of liberty in 479 BC was even less than that of the Americans in 1776. But it still feels like the good guys win at the end of The Histories, so the read is ultimately as happily satisfying as, say, a novel by Austen.

I love this book! By time for the Book Awards at the end of 2024, will I have read some Pulitzer-winning history that outdoes it? Or will Herodotus simply suffer eleven months of fading memories while the more recent histories remain fresh in my mind in December? You and I both have to wait 343 days to find out.

By the way, we estimate that we threw away or gave away about 600 pounds of stuff over the last month of packing, and, sure enough, the ultimate weight of our load came in 600 pounds under the agent’s estimate. You know how much we saved!