Scholarly responses to this most challenging speech fall into diverse categories:

1. Socles' speech is ‘incredibly inapt to the occasion’.

2. Herodotus is just using the occasion to tell stories.

3. The speech is a mélange of opposing political traditions: Athenian democratic, Corinthian anti-tyrant, Cypselid anti-Bacchiad and Panhellenic, the latter propagated by Delphi.

4. It exhibits the narrative leisureliness of inserted stories in Homer.

5. It is one of the main statements of Herodotus the tyrant-hater, or – more sophisticatedly – one of the main items in Herodotus’ tyrannical template/typology/model.

6. As contextualized, it serves more to prompt reflections about contemporary and recent history than to explain the historical situation of 504.

7. Its moralizing is unintelligent, because what really motivates states is self-interest, as largely applies to Sparta here, and the reinstatement of tyranny at Athens on this occasion would ultimately have entailed less destruction than the toleration of Athenian democracy.

8. Its emotive rhetoric aims to scare the audience into agreement.

9. The apparent inappropriateness of some of the material is only apparent and the oblique storytelling approach matches a tricky diplomatic situation.

Some of these views are diametrically opposed. Others differ only in degree. Some convict Herodotus of incompetence, others of literary opportunism. Some emphasize the oral Herodotus, others the written. Some see the speech as detached from its context, others as fully contextualized. Some are free-standing, others combinable.