Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T00:43:32.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The syntax of historiē: How Herodotus writes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2007

Carolyn Dewald
Affiliation:
Bard College, New York
John Marincola
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Get access

Summary

He invested his style with all the qualities that his predecessors had failed to acquire.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Thuc. 5

Herodotus is an unaccountable phenomenon in the history of literature.

J. D. Denniston, Greek Prose Style

Herodotus' Histories is a work of startling originality; there are no preexisting categories that capture the work's multifaceted nature. It can be read as historiography (tragic and epic, universal and local), ethnography, geography, oracular warning, and much more. To see the work in terms of any of these genres to the exclusion of others would be an arbitrary reduction of the whole to one of its component parts. And to see it as an 'early' instance of any of them would create a retrojection of modern assumptions that would exclude much of the living text's multifaceted reality. What would be lost is the context for which it was originally designed. Herodotus may write for posterity, but he practises historiē - his own unique kind of investigation into the world he inhabits - on his own terms.

What applies to the context of Herodotus' ambitious project of historiē is no less true of its style. Herodotus' own term for his discourse is logos. Epic and prosaic, colloquial and elevated, oral and literate, Herodotus' discourse defies categorisation just as much as content does. Indeed, to make a distinction between the context and its 'style', or between Herodotus' investigations and their linguistic articulation, is misleading. Historiē, the quest for the 'cause' of the conflict between Greeks and barbarians, is achieved in and through the logos that Herodotus presents to us.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×