Herodotus and Thucydides

In his 1999 book, Robert Luginbill called hope and fear “the two basic psychological states affecting historical activity… omnipresent in [Thucydides’] work,” each exerting “a significant impact upon nearly every decision Thucydides reports” (Luginbill 1999, 65). Luginbill rightly linked the complex of hope-affects with Athenian, and fear-affects with Spartan, ‘national characters’. National identity is, in other words, an identity defined by affective configurations, and overdetermined in the thematically opposed characters of the text’s two protagonists.

According to Herodotus, the early Lydian king Meles carried around the walls of Sardis a lion born to him by his concubine (1.84.3). This anecdote has long puzzled scholars. Herodotus reports that following the declaration of Telmessian seers that “if the lion was carried around the wall, Sardis would be impregnable,” Meles carried this lion all around Sardis’ walls except for one spot—the very spot at which, in the reign of the Lydian king Croesus, Cyrus’ Persian soldiers would manage to scale the walls and so to capture Sardis.

The Cretan king Minos spearheads Thucydides’ account of the origins and development of Greek thalassocracy in the Archaeology (Thuc. 1.4). A compelling first exemplar, Minos’ naval power has been oftentimes construed as a prototype for the Athenian thalassocracy. For instance, conquest, colonization and increment in revenues are characteristics that both Minos’ rule over the Aegean and the Athenian expedition to Sicily share (Kallet-Marx).

The Lindian Chronicle—an inscription found in 1904 during excavations at Rhodian Lindos (Blinkenberg, 1912: 317-20)—has received recent attention primarily for the list of votive dedications it alleges that the sanctuary of Athena Lindia once displayed. Higbie (2003: 243) and Shaya (2005: 434-5), for example, suggest that this inscription’s extant list of 37 votives, spanning the mythological through the Hellenistic eras, glorifies a selective version of the past in response to Roman hegemony in 99 BCE.

Among ancient historical works, Herodotus’ Histories stand out in the unusually large amount of space dedicated to discussions of animals. Whereas only 42 animal references occur in Thucydides, Herodotus furnishes readers with a massive 804 references to at least 111 different animal terms (Smith 1992). These many references primarily fall into one of two categories: an archaic register wherein Herodotus thinks with animals and a late fifth-century register, the topic of this paper, wherein Herodotus thinks about animals.

Why did the Persian Empire invade Greece in 480 BCE? The sole ancient narrative we possess of the Persian decision-making process, Herodotus 7.1-18, emphasizes the decisive importance of a disturbing series of dreams that convinces Xerxes that God has willed the invasion (7.12-18). Yet despite the prominence Herodotus gives this event amid a host of other causes, modern historians consider the dream episode irrelevant to a historical understanding the invasion’s origins (Briant 2012: 526). Scholars of Greek historiography (e.g.