An expert guided tour of history’s birthplace

Retracing the steps of some epic journey has become one of contemporary travel writing’s creaky conceits.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s great “Democracy in America” by now has provided the narrative armature for a small library of books exploring our national character and social arrangements. Paul Theroux, who decisively altered the character of modern travel writing by elevating the author’s inner geography to equal status with his destinations, even has begun to recapitulate his own journeys. (Actually, that does make a kind of sense.)

The English journalist and travel writer Justin Marozzi, however, has found a way to wholly freshen this hoary device, and the result -- “The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History” -- is one of the year’s best and most engaging travel books.

On the face of it, Marozzi’s strategy is a simple one, but it makes all the difference. Marozzi takes that most elegant of classic Greek writers, Herodotus, and not only does he make his “The Histories” a road map, but its author becomes his muse. It’s a daring move, because the quality of the original prose is almost legendarily formidable. Marozzi’s own lively sentences are polished enough, but the real inspiration he takes from the classic original is the daring digression. It is a fact universally acknowledged by all but the most pedantic that the discursive element is what gives life its savor; marginalia frequently is more interesting than the central text. It’s the digression into the fascinating and the unexpected (wherever it takes you) that makes travel worthwhile and not a relentlessly disciplined progress toward the fixed destination.

Spirited disciple

When Marozzi, an iconoclastic Cambridge-trained reader of history, realized that’s what delighted him about Herodotus, it freed him to follow in the great man’s steps on a journey at once alive to history and yet wholly engaged with the contemporary nations -- Greece, Egypt, Iraq and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean -- through which he travels.

Marozzi makes clear his rather contagious enthusiasm for “the father of history,” who set out to inquire into the causes and context of the great conflict between the Greek and Persian civilizations, with this elegant opening sequence:

“This is how it begins:

“ ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds -- some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians -- may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other.’

“There it is. The birth of history in a paragraph. With these few words, written in the fifth century BC, Herodotus first formulates humankind’s burning interest in the past, an obsession that has remained with us ever since.”

To Marozzi, “The Histories” is a “masterpiece on the grandest scale. . . . Writing with a novelist’s flair for pace and suspense, Herodotus builds up this spectacular confrontation [between Greeks and Persians] over the course of almost 400 pages. The fearful tumult of the Persian Wars wells up like a wave and comes crashing down upon his narrative only in the final third of the book. . . . This is no conventional history as we understand the word today. It is an epic about war and empire, the frailty of the human condition, fortune’s ebb and flow, freedom versus tyranny, history with a piercing moral message. . . . It explores the human motives of greed and lust and overweening pride without ever sounding dull or worthy. Tolerance rings out clearly on every page.”

The author goes on to defend Herodotus from his greatest of classical detractors, Plutarch, who savaged his Ionic rival as “the father of lies.” Marozzi goes a bit too far when he dismisses Thucydides as an “earnest windbag,” since, for all his parts, Herodotus is the lesser political analyst. Marozzi does make a convincing case for his man as the superior stylist, though, relying on such classical critics as Lucian (who was captivated by “the beauty” of Herodotus’ “diction, the careful arrangement of his words”); the fastidious Cicero, who judged his style “polished”; and Quintilian, who found him “sweet, pure and flowing.”

To Marozzi, Herodotus isn’t just the world’s ur-historian but also its first foreign correspondent, investigative journalist and travel writer. Here, quite obviously, is an author in the grip of that most dangerous of things -- an enthusiasm. In this case, however, the impulse is so sweet-tempered and convincing that the reader can safely go along for the emotional, as well as the narrative, ride.

It’s a trip well worth making because the proof of Marozzi’s pudding is in the application of the Herodotean spirit to his own journey, which elevates “The Way of Herodotus” into first-rate travel writing.

Marozzi, 38, is not simply the author of an excellent account of a trip by camel across the Sahara and a justly admired biography of the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane; he is also a veteran newspaper and magazine journalist who has worked as a correspondent for the Financial Times and the Economist and now is a contributing editor to the Spectator. He has a command of the languages that make possible first-person interviews and conversations with people in the countries he visits.

History’s echoes

Thus, when Marozzi reaches Saddam Hussein’s “reconstructed Babylon” -- the ineffable Herodotus somehow missed the hanging gardens when he visited -- he surveys the city with a journalist’s practiced eye and finds “Disney for a despot.” He translates the inscription on one of the “restored” palaces: “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar to glorify Iraq.”

As the author sees it, “Dictators are no slouches when it comes to history.Saddam had what one psychologist called a ‘Nebuchadnezzar Imperial Complex.’ Symptoms of this rare historical condition included posing for portraits standing in a copy of Nebuchadnezzar’s war chariot and even appearing alongside Nebuchadnezzar in the sky over Baghdad as part of a night-time laser show. In 1979, Saddam was quoted as saying, ‘Nebuchadnezzar stirs in me everything relating to pre-Islamic ancient history. And what is most important to me about Nebuchadnezzar is the link between the Arabs’ abilities and the liberation of Palestine. . .’ What he really meant was that the Arabs -- like his other historical hero Saladin -- should retake Jerusalem, and put the Jews to the sword.”

Marozzi has taken his admiration for history’s father and his own rather formidable skill as a journalist and made a book that does equal justice to the ancient and the contemporary.

Herodotus was his guide; fortunate readers will allow Marozzi to be theirs.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com