Keynes is the only major economist who spent a substantial part of his life embedded (in all the meanings of that term) in a community of artists and creative writers. The most important of these for Keynes were members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group: the artists Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington; the novelists E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and David Garnett; the critics Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Desmond McCarthy; and others. To disentangle the impact of Bloomsbury on Keynes from other influences is difficult. Many have worked on the question, notably the biographers of Keynes, Harrod (1951), Moggridge (1992) and Skidelsky (1983, 1992 and 2000), who have examined the complex personal interactions. Others, such as Williams (1980), Annan (2002) and Mini (1991), have pictured Bloomsbury as an intellectual community with deep roots in British cultural history. They have documented, for example, how Keynes's close involvement with the artists Grant and Bell, and his great respect for Roger Fry, help to explain his extraordinary commitment to such institutions as the London Artists Association, the Contemporary Art Society, the Cambridge Arts Theatre and the Arts Council. But was Keynes's professional life as well as his personal life affected by Bloomsbury?

INTRODUCTION

Keynes is most famous as an economist, but he was involved with probability from the very beginning of his research career, and in fact his first piece of academic research was in the philosophy of probability. Keynes's interest in probability began as an undergraduate. He started his degree in 1902, and in 1903 he was initiated into Cambridge's secret society of elite intellectuals, known as the Apostles. A paper that he read to this society in January 1904 contains his first discussion of the philosophy of probability (Skidelsky 1983: 152). In those days, the PhD degree did not exist in Cambridge, and bright graduate students were expected to submit dissertations in the hope of obtaining college Fellowships. In 1907, Keynes submitted a dissertation on probability for the prize competition at King's College Cambridge, but surprisingly he was unsuccessful. The college awarded Fellowships instead to two gentlemen by the names of Dobbs and Page. In 1909, however, Keynes did win a Fellowship at King's with a revised version of his dissertation on probability. Incidentally, Alan Turing, the computer pioneer, won a Fellowship to King's with a dissertation on probability on his first attempt in 1935. Keynes was on the committee which awarded Fellowships that year.

When Herodotus came to write his history sometime in the mid-fifth century, the medium of prose was a relatively new phenomenon: it was poetry that had dominated discourse for centuries, and had done so in a variety of genres: narrative and didactic epic, personal and choral lyric, hymns, drinking songs, oracles, and epinician odes in praise of victorious athletes. The poet in the archaic world was not usually an isolated 'artistic' figure, but instead often intimately involved in the life of his city, and he used poetry to teach and persuade, among other things. That the poet was primarily a teacher was assumed in the intellectual revolution of the sixth century, when writers such as Heraclitus and Xenophanes began to question and criticise Greek traditions by focussing especially on Homer and Hesiod - sometimes even using poetry in their own attacks. And if the biographical tradition is true, Herodotus may have known intimately about historical poetry from his uncle Panyassis who wrote a long verse epic on the foundations of Ionian cities.

In the preface to his Histories, Herodotus promises to describe the great and wonderful deeds and monuments displayed both by Greeks and by non- Greeks as well as to explain why they fought against each other. He proceeds at once to what he claims is a Persian account of the origin of their disputes. The account attributed to the Persians turns out to be a sort of mythographic pastiche describing how enmity arose first when a Greek woman, Io, was seized by Phoenicians, and then from the seizure of three other women (Europa, Medea, and Helen). This Persian account of the origin of hostilities between Greeks and barbarians includes, among other notable features, the first ethnographic observation in Herodotus' Histories (1.4.4):

According to these Persians, clashes of cultural attitudes lie at the heart of the hostility between different nations. This observation is the first hint that a study of foreign customs will play its part in Herodotus' attempt to explain why Greeks and barbarians fought each other. But as Herodotus' work progresses, it becomes clear that his inquiry into foreign lands and peoples does far more than just underpin his explanation of the cultural conflicts that culminate in the great Persian invasions of Greece. Herodotus' inquiry into other lands and customs proves to be as centrcentral to his project as his inquiry into the wars fought by Greeks and non-Greeks.

Any reader who approaches Herodotus' great book with the conventional assumptions of what a modern, Western, post-Thucydidean narrative history is or ought to be - that is, expecting a generally austere concentration on political and military affairs, perhaps citing the texts of treaties, adducing inscriptional evidence, and so on - is likely to be disconcerted, if also delighted, by the way the text unfolds itself. One does not immediately see what is coming. The prospectus-paragraph sets out the project clearly enough. Two parallel clauses, the second of which reinforces, varies and amplifies the first, declare the author's aim as being 'to prevent the memory of human actions being obliterated by the passage of time, and to ensure that great and wonderful achievements, whether carried out by Greeks or by foreigners, are not denied their proper celebration'. It goes on immediately to define a more precise focus: 'to investigate why they (the Greeks and foreigners) went to war with each other' (praef.).

And indeed by the beginning of chapter 6 (say, in our terms, a couple of pages), Herodotus fingers the man who he is 'personally convinced' set the long series of hostilities in motion: Croesus the king of Lydia. Croesus was the first ruler to levy tribute from the Greek settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor; he was also, we go on to discover in the course of the first book, the man who made the fateful mistake of attempting an eastward expansion of his kingdom and suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Persians, thus bringing Greeks and Persians face to face for the first time and setting the scene for the wars that would follow.

As Alan Griffiths has commented, 'humour is altogether a funny business'. What one culture finds funny, another might well find appalling; humour in every culture, however, blends a tacit recognition of conventional, expected standards of behaviour and narrative logic, coupled with a transient, unexpected (and sometimes illicit) pleasure at their momentary transgression. It is safe to say that Herodotus, the father of history, knows how to tell a good story, and his stories frequently strike the suggestible reader as funny. I will make several claims here: first, that humour is one aspect of Herodotus' text that makes credible his assertion that the logoi he tells are not his own invention; moreover, that the humour of the Histories is tied closely to the theme of transgressive violence and danger. Finally, the recurring and various connections between humour and danger in Herodotus point to one of the most fundamental assumptions of historiography: the importance but also the difficulty of ascertaining what is real in to anthrōpinon, the realm of the human.

Many different kinds of thematic resonance come into play in the story that both Herodotus and Sophocles use about the woman who wanted to save a brother rather than her husband or son (3.119). Our argument starts with the observation that one of the most important of these resonances, both to Herodotus the historian and to Sophocles the dramatist, lies in the realm of metanarrative. Both Herodotus and Sophocles are skilled in the artful use of logos themselves, and they use the story of the woman who wanted her brother saved as a logos about the power of logos, reflecting on some of the complexities of speech as an act of communication.

A logos in Greek can be a word, a story, or an argument; the logos or story we have chosen to focus on here is both an anecdote and an argument shared by Herodotus and Sophocles. It seems quite possible that the logos of the woman who chose to save her brother rather than a husband or son was brought into play by both Herodotus and Sophocles to depict the tendency of logos itself to be manipulated in unusual ways by unusual people, but also to lead to results that subvert the speakers' initial expectations. Herodotus and Sophocles work in different genres, and exploit the possibilities of the anecdote quite differently, but in their different uses of the story, each of them reflects ironically on some of the ambiguities inherent in the intellectual turmoil prevalent in mid-fifth-century Greece about the nature and power of language.

Herodotus

In general, ancient historiography consists of extended narratives in the third person, with the author only rarely intruding in the first person. Herodotus' Histories, at the very dawn of ancient historiography, represent a conspicuous exception. The presence of Herodotus the narrator1 in his text is stressed almost continuously by the occurrence of statements in the first person. They range from the rather nondescript kind, such as 'Those of the barbarians who returned [from a raid against Delphi] said - as I have been told - that they had seen other divine signs besides these' (8.38), or 'I cannot write down exactly which of the Ionians were cowardly or brave in that naval battle' (6.14.1), to extremely specific ones, such as 'This is what I heard from the priests in Thebes' (2.55.1). At times, the Herodotean narrator intrudes in his text to express a judgement, and more often to formulate an opinion. Most of the time, however, he raises his voice, as in the examples above, to refer to the process of gathering information, with its successes and failures.

Especially to readers accustomed to modern historiography, it does not seem strange that a historian should spend time talking about his activity as a researcher. After all, one of the first things a history student is trained to do is precisely to buttress his or her every statement, in so far as it goes above absolute banality, with a reference, usually telling where the corresponding information comes from. However, seen against the background of common practice in ancient historiography, Herodotus' presence in his text is highly peculiar. Other ancient historians rarely dealt with the question of how they gathered information, usually confining it to preliminary statements at the beginning of their works.

Few historians, indeed few writers, of any era have been subjected to such widely divergent evaluations as Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Throughout antiquity we can detect two schools of thought about him, one seeing him as the 'father of history', the first person to put together an accurate account of the past and to infuse it with meaning by giving causes, consequences, and the intentions of the participants. But there was also a persistent strain of criticism that took Herodotus to task for his stories of the fabulous and the improbable, for the accuracy of his reports of non-Greek lands, and for his portrayal of a quarrelsome and disunited Greek force. Herodotus continued to be read, however, because of the beauty of his style, his obvious gifts as a narrator, and because enough people saw in him an appropriate predecessor for what they themselves were trying to achieve.

Like Herodotus' Histories, this Companion is a product of its time and place. The ways in which scholars view Herodotus today have arisen from dependence on, but also debate with, those who have preceded them. In this Introduction, we first survey briefly the various strains of Herodotean scholarship (with special emphasis on more recent trends), and then discuss the various contributions to this volume, trying to situate the work to be found here in the larger context of contemporary Herodotean studies.

In 546 BCE, when the Persians were laying siege to the Greek cities of Ionia following the defeat of Croesus, king of Lydia, the Spartans sent a single ship with a message for Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire (1.152-3). Cyrus was warned by a Spartan envoy not to harm any city of Greece, for the Spartans would not permit it. In reaction to this piece of effrontery, Cyrus asked other Greeks who were present: 'Who among men are the Lacedaemonians, and how many of them are there that they give such orders?' The modern reader of the text of Herodotus will have no trouble recognising the Spartans (here called Lacedaemonians), and might well know that there were not many of them, and that only 300 of them faced the Persians at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE. But he or she is far less likely to know much about the Persians, other than that there were a whole lot of them and that they failed to conquer Greece and were themselves, at a much later date (334-331 BCE), conquered by Alexander the Great.

It may come as a surprise then that the Histories of Herodotus is as much about Persia as about Greece, and that individual Persians are given just as much narrative space as individual Greeks. In fact the Persian kings Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes, as well as Xerxes' cousin Mardonius, figure even more largely in the narrative than the Athenian general Themistocles or the Spartan king Leonidas. On a larger scale, the whole structure of the Histories is built upon the birth, growth, and checking of the Persian empire. The Persians are the driving force of the history, and the advance of the narrative is inextricably linked to their efforts to expand their empire. It can hardly be a coincidence that both the first (1.1-4) and the last (9.122) narratives in this massive work are focalised through the eyes of the Persians.

Observations about the political practices of Greeks and non-Greeks such as the one in the epigraph above were once taken as indicative of Herodotus' interest in the odd or unusual features of societies, rather than the systematic analysis of politics. According to this view, Herodotus was a naïive storyteller who had no deep of understanding of (or interest in) politics. The prime example of Herodotus' alleged lack of understanding of politics is his statement that the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes was imitating his grandfather Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, when he enacted the tribal reforms which were central to the founding of the democracy at Athens (5.67.1). Rather than recording the details of Cleisthenes' groundbreaking reforms as modern historians might wish, Herodotus mentions only the creation of new tribal divisions and 'digresses' on a similar change in tribal names made by Cleisthenes' grandfather, tyrant of Sicyon. Victor Ehrenburg, commenting on this passage in 1950, states emphatically that Herodotus 'had no discriminating knowledge of political and constitutional issues'.

The last twenty years, however, have witnessed a reversal of this negative view of Herodotus' political understanding. Herodotus is now seen as deeply embedded in the intellectual milieu of the late fifth century, and consequently well-versed in the political debates of his time. Furthermore, Herodotus is now considered not simply a teller of tales about the marvellous, but rather a skilled narrator who, through careful construction of thematic and verbal patterns, expressed views on some of the most pressing political issues of his day. Finally, rather than being seen as inadequately discriminating in his accounts of political history when compared to the contemporary Athenian historian and shrewd political analyst, Thucydides, Herodotus is now credited with a much broader conception, and hence by current standards, much more satisfying view of politics than Thucydides.

Herodotus set his story of the wars between Asia and Europe on the greatest of all possible stages, that of the entire earth. He understood, in a way that few Greeks of his day probably did, that the Persian empire was a national entity of unprecedented geographic scope and that the outcome of its wars against Greece had huge significance not just for human societies but for the earth as a whole. Thus his descriptions of distant lands, and even his biological and geographical inquiries, though often labelled 'digressions' by modern scholars and thus sidelined from the main narrative, are in fact very much a part of his artistic plan for his work. Persia was the first state in history that could plausibly assert the goal of making all lands one land, such that the sun would never shine on anything beyond its borders (7.8); indeed it succeeded, on two occasions, in uniting the continents of Europe and Asia by bridging the waters that stood between them - making all lands one in a geographic if not a political sense. This was world war in the truest sense: war threatening to change the world, including the world of nature.

Herodotus no doubt violated the expectations of his Spartan, Athenian, Theban, and Corinthian audiences. Reading his written text, they discovered that when he promised to 'travel through both small and large “cities of men” ' (1.5.3), he would have much to say about Lydia, Egypt, Persia, Scythia, and Libya, but not give their own cities a major part until Book 5, half-way through the Histories, and even then in a curiously fragmented and disjointed manner. Only with the sequence of grand battles against the Persians (7.131-9.113) do the Greek cities come to centre stage.

The structure of Herodotus' written history - and no doubt the topics of many of his oral performances - shifted the perspective of his audience from their own civic world and inter-city rivalries to a much broader view in space and time. Herodotus, after all, was in several ways an outsider. Born in Halicarnassus, a tributary state first of Persia, then of Athens, into a mixed Carian-Greek family, he left his city as an exile and travelled extensively in both Greek and non-Greek lands, until he settled in the new Athenian sponsored but panhellenic city of Thurii on the heel of Italy. A marginal figure, half Greek, half barbarian, he could view the events of mainland Greece with a curious but detached eye. As he composed his history c. 445- 428 BCE, Greece was convulsed by the rivalry, and finally the open war, of Sparta and Athens. This contemporary conflict furnished a sharp contrast to the united effort which had driven off the invader in 480-479, but a keen observer could see the roots of the later clash even in that heroic moment.

Logos is reason; logos is speech. There are of course good reasons why the same word captures what in English are distinct concepts. Internalised 'reasoning' is often figured in a way parallel to external conversation and debate; and if an idea or a projected course of action 'has logos', echei logon, it is 'reasonable' in that it is capable of being presented in convincing argument.

Yet in Herodotus these two 'senses' of logos - or, better, these two English ways of capturing different aspects of the concept - often stand in a problematic relation to one another. How 'reasonable' is a 'speech'? Speakers are struggling to make sense of events, to gauge what is happening - and also (not necessarily the same thing) to gauge what they should wisely say about those events. The text's readers and listeners are doing something similar, constantly measuring a speaker's words against the narrative which the text has given or will go on to give. And there is another reason too not to divorce speech from action, for in an important sense speeches are action. They play their part - often initiating, often responsive - in a chain of events; and they also build up a behavioural pattern of how deliberation works, often differently in different parts of the world or in different political systems. That is especially important in Herodotus, where the dynamics of logos operate in different ways in the autocratic courts of the East and in the diverse political systems of Greece, especially in the fragile alliance of states which confronts the invader.

The ancient biographical tradition tells us that Herodotus spent time in Athens, and he was accused by some later Greeks of undue partiality to the Athenians. He is described as especially a friend of Sophocles, who addressed to him, about 445-440 BCE, a poem of which a fragment survives. Certain passages in Sophocles' extant work are clearly related to passages in Herodotus, and it seems certain that it was the tragedian who drew on the historian, not the reverse.

It has been thought that it was his stay in Attica that made Herodotus into an historian, not a mere chronicler or antiquarian, and that the impact of tragedy was responsible for the moral interest of his work: 'Athens was his Damascus'. He appears to emerge suddenly from a much less developed and sophisticated tradition of historical writing. 'Herodotus is an unaccountable phenomenon in the history of literature', says the perceptive Denniston; 'he is in the direct line of succession to the logographers [early historical writers such as Hecataeus and Hellanicus]; but while they, apparently, had no technique at all, he had a technique at once effortless and adequate to any demands he chose to make upon it'. Nor is it simply a matter of style in the sense of arrangement of words, masterly as Herodotus is in that art, but of his conception and his scope.