"From Scythian Ethnography to Aryan Christianity: Herodotean Revolutions on the Eve of the Russian Revolution", in T. Harrison and J. Skinner (eds.), Herodotus in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Article: HISTORIĒ BY HERODOTUS OF HALICARNASSUS – THEORETICAL ISSUES
Besides its historical values which imply a certain “accuracy” in presenting historical events and people, it is also possible to stipulate in Herodotus’ Histories these fragments which belong only to the domain of fiction, a genre literature whose basic substratum consists primarily in the description of the world seen through the eyes of the narrator-witness (histōr). In case of Histories, it is difficult to explicitly define how much of it is history and how much is literature. Nevertheless, it is certain that Histories are a special kind of storytelling, which, as shown by a closer analysis, is based on a personal and vicarious experience of the historian and his oral sources that cover several dozens of years of conflict between the East and the West, intertwined with historical, geographical and ethnological descriptions of Greek and barbaric tribes. In such a context the paper will focus on presenting a twofold nature of Herodotean discourse, revealing, on the one hand, the “rising” of the oral history from the sheer activity of dialoguing with people about the recent past, reconstructed on the basis of its formal and cognitive structure (Fludernik 1996), and, on the other hand, the technique of emplotment (White 1973) used by Herodotus to make the story reportable and tellable within the realm of an epic convention which was vivid and influenced the Archaic and Classical Greek literary texts of his times.
2019
The reception of Herodotus' Histories during in the long 19th century is a rich and understudied topic. This article highlights the way in which encounters with Herodotus formed a series of cross-cutting, interconnected layers (albeit to varying extents) rather than a series of discrete receptions. Instead of focussing solely on members of the classically-educated imperial elite, it attempts to incorporate the experiences of a broader range of society, including women, children and the poor, in a more wide-ranging discussion of engagement with the Histories in 19th-century British Society. In doing so it demonstrates not only the high level of interest in and engagement with Herodotus but also ways in which a shared awareness of the Halicarnassian's work helped constitute 'cultures of empire'.
HERODOTUS’ SCYTHIANS VIEWED FROM A CENTRAL ASIAN PERSPECTIVE: ITS HISTORICITY AND SIGNIFICANCE
The literary interpretation of Herodotus in classical scholarship has arguably abandoned the fixation with the historical veracity of Herodotus’ account that characterised earlier Herodotean scholarship. The critical analyses of Detlev Fehling and François Hartog on the historian’s Scythian logos (singled out for criticism) in different ways acted as catalysts for this development which heralded a generation of more sophisticated critique of the text as essentially a work of literature rather than history. Such an approach has had some positive results, especially in identifying the various levels of literary colouring that characterise the historian’s work. However, this article argues that the historical element simply cannot be removed from its former position of centrality in literary interpretation. It calls for a greater appreciation of the historicity of the Scythian logos by challenging the arguments through which Hartog and Fehling triggered the movement away from ‘history’ to ‘literature’. The article shows that a more intensive application of comparative, Central Asian historical and archaeological material in literary analysis, reveals that the logos as a whole is far more deeply immersed in the world of steppe nomadism than is often thought possible in classical scholarship.
Herodotus was born in a city with mixed Hellenic and Carian population, and grew up in a region (south-west Asia Minor) which was in constant and close contact with the great states of the Near East, such as Lydia and Achaemenid Persia. He was thus in a privileged position in terms of communication and exchange with the cultures of the ancient Orient. In this paper I propose to explore Herodotus’ authorial debt to the narrative and intellectual traditions of the East with regard to certain major, macroscopic compositional tendencies of his historical oeuvre. Three fundamental narrative structures, which condition the organization of Herodotus’ material and the layout of his work, seem to have been inspired by characteristic techniques and thematic patterns of Near-Eastern texts or lore. Firstly, Herodotus conceives and recounts world history according to the typical structure of West-Asiatic and Egyptian king lists and chronicles: these latter works enumerate a series of successive rulers and record basic biographical data, key historical incidents, and occasionally picturesque anecdotes about the reign of each one of them. Herodotus assimilates this pattern and uses it both on a small and on a grand scale in his narrative. The individual historical sections (logoi) concerning particular peoples (Lydians, Egyptians, Medians) are constructed in the manner of a chronicle; the narrator lists a sequence of kings and offers briefer or longer reports of historical events and anecdotal tales for every name of the list. The Herodotean oeuvre as a whole is built on the same chronographic principle; a succession of Achaemenid monarchs (Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes) forms the framework, which is filled in with extensive accounts of each king’s exploits, wars, and other ventures. Secondly, Herodotus appears to have taken over from Near-Eastern storytelling the concept of the frame narrative, i.e. the tales emboxed inside other tales like “Russian dolls”. This technique first appears in ancient Egyptian novellas and story collections of the second and first millennium BCE, and subsequently spread all over the eastern world up to Iran and India, conditioning the layout of the great oriental narrative compilations, from the Book of Sindbad to the Pañcatantra, the Kathāsaritsāgara and the Thousand and One Nights. Herodotus exploits this pattern already in the first and paradigmatic long novella of his work (the story of Solon and Croesus, 1.29-33) and then in various subsequent narrative sections (e.g. the account of the Spartans’ conference and Socles’ speech, 5.91-93). In all these cases, one of the characters of the main narrative tells a series of didactic stories in close sequence, in the manner familiar from ancient Egyptian story collections (Papyrus Westcar, Tales of Petese) and from the Book of Sindbad. Thirdly, Herodotus’ entire composition is punctuated by a long accumulation of failed military expeditions of Persian kings against various lands. The climax of this series is represented by the Persian wars, Darius’ and Xerxes’ unsuccessful campaigns against mainland Greece, which are recounted in the last books of the History. These accounts are inspired, of course, by momentous historical events. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the theme of the failed expedition was also endemic in the mythology of ancient Iran: Kai Kaus, a king of the legendary Kayanian dynasty, is the archetype of the rash and vainglorious monarch who oversteps his limits and attempts a sequence of foolhardy campaigns against formidable opponents, invariably ending up in defeat and disaster. This serial pattern of ancient Persian myth, if known to Herodotus, may have influenced his decision to structure his work as a gradation of failed military ventures undertaken by the Persian kings, from Cyrus’ fatal war against the Massagetae and Cambyses’ disastrous march to Ethiopia to Darius’ defeats in Scythia and Marathon and Xerxes’ debacle before the Greeks.