Herodotus and the Foreign Revisited: Re-viewing a Great Book
Abstract
The Histories of Herodotus are one of the greatest works of extant ancient Greek Literature, well worth revisiting, constantly. Herodotus was himself 'foreign' - or at any rate he had a father (Lyxes) and an uncle (Panyassis, an epic poet) with non-Greek names, and he seems to have been unusually interested in as well as unusually connected with the world of 'barbarians'. His work, he tells us, was intended as a celebration and commemorating of the 'great and wondrous deeds' accomplished by Greeks and non-Greeks alike. Indeed, he even applied his 'barbarian thesis' to the Greek world itself, both by showing how Sparta was in significant ways 'barbarian' as well as Greek, and by attributing a significant part of his explanation of the outcome of the Graeco-Persian Wars to a vision of 'Greekness'. Alongside his ethnographic project ran a moral-philosophical vein of thinking - humanistic, pacifistic, and rationalist but also tolerantly religious. All this was in the service of explanation - above all an explanation of why Greeks and Persians had fought each other, and of why (some) Greeks had won. The late great Nicole Loraux once wrote of Herodotus's main successor Thucydides that he 'is not a colleague'. Nor is Herodotus a historian 'just like us'. But he is - or should be - 'one of us', today and es aiei.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου