Greek Historiography

The beginning of Herodotus 2 is marked by a lively account of a linguistic experiment involving two children raised among goats, a goatherd, and an Egyptian king inquiring after the origin of mankind. Psammetichus asks the goatherd to report the first word that the children utter, and when it turns out that this word is bekos, a Phrygian for ‘bread’, the Egyptians reluctantly cede that the Phrygians are the race from which all others have descended.

This paper explores Strabo’s descriptions of Athens and Rome in the context of Strabo’s kolossourgia (Str. Geog. 1.1.23) and demonstrates that Strabo manipulates the cultural memories associated with these places in order to control, and in some ways to limit, their prominence within his broader geographical scheme.

This paper argues for the integration of the story of Rhampsinitus and the thief (Hist. 2.121) with the rest of the Histories in light of two major Herodotean themes: the changeability of fortune and the unstable boundary between opposites. The story, in which a king and a thief emerge from a contest of wits with near equal status, has traditionally been seen as an amusing set-piece with little relevance to Herodotus’s later, more serious history writing (e.g. Macan 1895, West 2007).

Xenophon’s Cyropaedia concludes with the abrupt decline of Cyrus the Great’s empire. I argue that this decline is the result of a series of misunderstandings of Cyrus’ well-intentioned policy of merit-based rewards. Cyrus attempts to instill virtue in his followers but, in reality, he merely instills a desire for royal favor.

What binds communities together? What legitimates conceptions of law and justice? This paper considers how the Anabasis can help us untangle Xenophon’s views on these questions by placing the text in dialogue with sophistic debates on the emergence of political community and normativity.

The Battle of Plataea was arguably the most important Spartan victory in the Classical period. Yet in Herodotus’s telling of Plataea, Sparta remains in the background, retreating, hesitating, and even initially abandoning their fellow Greeks to a Persian invasion. Instead, the narrative mostly follows the Athenians, whose role in the battle was minor at best.

The trial of the Athenian generals after the Battle of Arginusae presents a number of difficulties, due in part to the complexity of the events themselves and especially to their seemingly contradictory representation in our two surviving narrative sources for the period, Xenophon (Hell. 1.7) and Diodorus (13.101–103). Since the time of Grote, scholars have abandoned Xenophon’s account in favor of Diodorus’, a move which has found its way it into many current narratives of the period (e.g. Hornblower 2002; Rhodes 2006; Kagan 1987; Hamel 2015).

The scholia to Herodotus remain neglected (as discussed by Eleanor Dickey, 2007: 53-54), despite a general resurgence of interest in scholia (witness D. J. Mastronarde’s 2017 studies on the scholia to Euripides and the English translation of the scholia to the Iliad forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). The Herodotean scholia are comprised primarily, though not exclusively, of glosses (as noted by David Asheri, 1991: 241 and A. B. Lloyd, 1993: 211).

Thucydides worked in a time in which ideas of symmetry, balance, and appropriate proportion were fundamental in fields as diverse as mathematics, architecture and sculpture. Related notions about proportional power may also have influence the development of political equality for male citizens (Vegetti 1983), and are certainly found in representations of the ideal polis (Tanner 2000, 200), including imagery of equal power-relationships on tombs for the war dead (Arrington 2011 and 2015, Muth 2008, e.g. 546).

In Book 3 of Thucydides’ History, Thucydides uses Cleon’s speech in the Mytilenean debate to covertly introduce his belief that Athens’ democratic government was unable to effectively govern its empire. Cleon compares Athens’ political system with that of Mytilene, and implies that Mytilene is better organized. This characterization is shocking because Mytilene’s oligarchic government has revolted against Athenian hegemony, and even more shocking because it comes from Cleon, a leader in the Athenian democracy who is advocating that the Mytileneans be horribly punished.