In contextualizing the work of the earliest Greek prose writers, Simon Goldhill notes that during the archaic period, “what’s authoritative, what matters, is performed and recorded in verse” as “the medium for intellectually and socially privileged exchange.” As a result, the invention of prose involves a “contest of authority” with divinely inspired poetry.Footnote ¹ Giulia Donelli concludes her analysis of Herodotean intertextuality with epic and elegiac verses that juxtapose truth and plausible fictions by asserting that “no matter whether through appropriation or rejection, implicitly or explicitly, poetic authority had still to be negotiated by early prose writers.”Footnote ² This competitive interaction between early Greek prose and the poetic tradition manifests itself with special clarity in the opening sentence of Herodotus’ Histories. In announcing his intention to preserve the kleos of remarkable past deeds, Herodotus appropriates the long-standing mission of the poetic tradition, while his focus on military conflict between Greeks and Persian barbaroi evokes Homer’s treatment of the Trojan War in the Iliad, a towering cultural touchstone. At the same time, other features, including an initial declaration of strictly human authorship and a climactic focus on causality, set the Histories apart from their poetic precedents and reflect issues paralleled in the prose works of other fifth-century intellectuals. I will analyze this opening sentence in greater detail in Chapter 2, but consider it an ideal starting point as a programmatic statement of Herodotus’ important and complex relationship with the Greek poetic tradition – a tradition that until the development of literary prose was the medium for transmitting and preserving knowledge of the past,Footnote ³ whether the remote Panhellenic past of much epic poetry or the local history attested in elegiac and iambic poets, which embraced both mythical foundation stories and more recent historical events.

The aim of this book is to explore Herodotus’ creative interaction with the poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy, thus filling a gap in Herodotean scholarship recognized some years ago by John Marincola.Footnote ⁴ I intend to demonstrate how the poetic tradition informs Herodotus’ presentation of his inquiry (ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις) in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while pointedly rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features is broad, including subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure on both small and large scales; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, voice, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to present time; the relationship between human and superhuman forces in the world, and the role played by each in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus, who creates the conventions of his narrative as he composes it, may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or often some combination of the two.

Although there has been no previous book-length treatment of this topic in its entirety, much has been written since antiquity about Herodotus’ relationship to particular poets, poems, and poetic genres. The bulk of this scholarship has explored Herodotus’ interaction with the most obvious model for his narrative, Homeric epic – especially the Iliadic account of the battle for Troy. While (ps.-) Longinus declines to explain in precisely what ways Herodotus is “most Homeric” (Ὁμηρικώτατος, Subl. 13.3), modern scholarship has taken up the task with gusto and from a variety of theoretical perspectives, as recently demonstrated by a volume of essays interrogatively entitled, Herodotus: The Most Homeric Historian?Footnote ⁵ While the Iliad has been the primary focus of such scholarship, Herodotus also presents himself in his prologue as a latter-day Odysseus, traversing the “cities of men” with a keen awareness of the transience of human prosperity – a mythical prototype for Herodotean inquiry and the first of many narratorial alter egos (yet another Homeric phenomenon) in the Histories.Footnote ⁶ Advances in the study of narratology and intertextuality have helped a new generation of scholars to appreciate the sophistication with which Herodotus not merely adopts but adapts Homeric resources to a new context in service of prose historiē. The relationship between Hesiodic poetry and Herodotus has received comparatively little scholarly attention, but raises significant issues having to do with the meaning of truth in epic and the Histories, and the contrast between epic and Herodotean perspectives on the heroic past.

To cite an especially instructive instance of epic intertextuality, Herodotus’ most explicit and extended engagement with the Homeric text, his revision of the canonical account of the Trojan War in the Iliad (2.112–20), exemplifies his nuanced use of poetic precedent. On the one hand, by insisting that Helen was in Egypt rather than Troy for the duration of the war, Herodotus rejects the Homeric narrative as a distortion of the truth – distortion necessitated by the generic requirements of epic poetry as praise poetry. On the other hand, Herodotus implicitly recruits Homer as an investigative ally by claiming that he knew the true version of the conflict and left corroborating evidence in his text for those of his audience members (including Herodotus) who were discerning enough to detect it. Subsequently, however, Herodotus also uses textual evidence from the Iliad to support his own argument from probability contesting the Homeric assumption of Helen’s presence in Troy. Herodotus’ ethnographic manipulation of the xenia theme,Footnote ⁷ whether we regard this as a distinctly Homeric or broadly epic feature of the myth, is also notable: by making king Proteus and the Egyptian people staunch practitioners of guest-friendship, Herodotus refutes the pernicious contemporary Hellenic stereotype of the Egyptians as savage killers of foreign visitors to their country. Finally and most cunningly, Herodotus frames this Homeric material in a narrative constructed to demonstrate the success of his own investigative methods, on display in Proteus’ interrogation of Paris and the interrogation of Menelaus by primeval Egyptian priests. While this passage represents a uniquely explicit encounter with a uniquely influential predecessor, the sophistication of its engagement with the Iliad is symptomatic of Herodotus’ reception of the poetic tradition.

Beyond epic, affinities of subject matter, dramatic emplotment, and Weltanschauung between the Histories and Attic tragedy have also elicited scholarly interest – interest that was piqued by the publication in 1950 of the fragmentary remains of a tragedy telling the story of Gyges and Candaules, also told by Herodotus at the beginning of his Lydian logos (1.8–12). The extant lines of the play underscore similarities of plotting and language so striking that direct influence of one text upon the other was widely assumed, but the direction of that influence was disputed: some scholars advocated an archaic date for the play (and envisioned it as an unacknowledged source for Herodotus), others a Hellenistic date (and envisioned the dramatic Herodotean rendition as inspiring a fully theatrical reception). Although there is insufficient evidence to support Bruno Snell’s hypothesis that Herodotus could have based his Lydian logos upon a tragic trilogy, there is widespread recognition of the tragic flavor of the Lydian logosFootnote ⁸ and many other episodes of the Histories, however it is to be explained – an issue complicated by the roots that both Herodotean narrative and Attic tragedy have in Homeric epic. Equally controversial is the explanation for common features shared by Aeschylus’ Persae and the Herodotean portrayal of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, especially the characterization of the king and the causal factors that informed his decision to attack. Those at one pole of the interpretative spectrum recognize Aeschylus’ play as a crucial intertext for Herodotus’ understanding of the meaning of the Persian defeat; those at the other find little evidence for Aeschylean impact beyond the mere likelihood that Herodotus was familiar with the play.Footnote ⁹

Although less prominent in the scholarly literature than the reception of epic and tragic verse in the Histories, the relationship between Herodotus and lyric poetry (broadly construed to include iambic and elegiac as well as melic poetry) has also proved to be a topic of considerable interest. To begin with epinician poetry, recent comparison of Croesus’ last-minute rescue from immolation during the fall of Sardis, described by both Herodotus (1.86–7) and Bacchylides (Ode 3), has focused less on aesthetics than on Hellenic sociopolitical issues, reflecting different perspectives on the role of the aristocracy in the archaic Greek polis.Footnote ¹⁰ Gregory Nagy has incorporated this political perspective into an ambitious but controversial assimilation of Pindar and Herodotus as poetic and prose practitioners of ainos, understood as an instrument of coded social criticism that warns against the potential of tyranny.Footnote ¹¹ Another revealing manifestation of the relationship between Pindar and Herodotus lies in their often divergent treatments of the colonization of Cyrene in Northern Africa by the Therans, conditioned by various factors including performance circumstances, generic requirements, audience expectations, and choice of sources.Footnote ¹²

In the realm of non-melic poetry, the publication in 1992 of the so-called (and still-called) “new” Simonides, elegiac fragments including an account of the Battle of Plataea, seemed to confirm the previous speculation of Ewen Bowie that longer elegiac poems performed in public settings might contain historical narrative.Footnote ¹³ Comparison with Herodotus’ more detailed description of the battle has proved both irresistible and theoretically vexing, given the common practice of restoring Simonidean lacunae on the basis of the Histories: the reconstructed text is then bound to resemble Herodotus, but any argument based on such similarities is unavoidably circular. Nonetheless, the remains of Simonides’ poem do allow us to observe (as in the case of epinician odes) differences between praise poetry and Herodotean historiē, which dispenses blame as well as praise, and seeks to explain remarkable deeds in addition to preserving their kleos. Recent studies of another other non-melic poet, the Athenian politician Solon, suggest that Herodotus may have used prominent themes in his verse as the foundation for the programmatic counsel given to Croesus by the Herodotean character SolonFootnote ¹⁴ – counsel that attempts to explain on both divine and human levels why human prosperity is ever-changing, as Herodotus previously observed in his own narrative voice (1.5.4).

Outline of the Work

The first two chapters serve introductory functions. I begin by contextualizing Herodotus’ use of poetic material and techniques within the ancient debate concerning the relationship between poetry and history, their respective functions and merits. My subsequent survey of explicit authorial citations and assessments of Greek poetry in the Histories suggests that Herodotus is thoroughly steeped in the Hellenic “song culture,”Footnote ¹⁵ but suspicious of poetic fictions with regard to remote geographical and ethnographical data and temporally remote events. In Chapter 2 I analyze how Herodotus positions himself with regard to the poetic tradition in his prologue, where the Homeric epics occupy a prominent place fore and aft: Herodotus clearly evokes comparison with the Iliad in his incipit, while an allusion to Odyssey 1.3 at the end of the prologue underscores Herodotus’ Odyssean persona as a traveler in search of knowledge and a teller of tales with a nuanced understanding of the relationship between truth and fiction. In addition to these Homeric allusions, by introducing the Lydian king Croesus as the instigator of injustices against the Greeks of Asia Minor Herodotus also implicitly challenges the characterization of Croesus in epinician poetry, where he appears as a paradigm of pious generosity to be emulated by Hellenic aristocrats. Most broadly, Herodotus’ gnomic claim to know that human prosperity “never remains in the same place” contests the status of poetic sages, who were respected sources of gnomic wisdom and practical expertise during the archaic period.

The first of the book’s three main sections examines Herodotus’ engagement with the epic tradition, especially the Iliad and Odyssey (Chapters 3–9). Since antiquity scholars have recognized the presence in Herodotus of language, themes, and narrative techniques that are indebted to epic precedent. Recent scholarship has developed a deeper appreciation of the complex effects achieved by such intertextual gestures, which include both small-scale “citations” of specific Homeric phrases or verses and broader reworkings of Homeric scenes, narrative motifs, and themes. Both techniques serve to highlight significant historical events and narrative junctures, for example, the confrontation between Croesus and Cyrus at the fall of Sardis (1.86–7), which marks a milestone in the development of the Persian Empire; and the speech delivered by Soclees the Corinthian to the Spartans and their allies (5.92), which prevents the re-imposition of Peisistratid tyranny upon Athens, but also facilitates the long-term growth of Athenian democratic “tyranny” in its turn. The most sustained sequence of this intertextual technique occurs in Herodotus’ epic-length narrative of the Persian invasion of Greece in books 7 through 9, which references and refashions Homeric material from start (Xerxes’ decision to launch the invasion) to finish (his Zeus-like nod of approval for the mutilation of his brother Masistes’ innocent wife), especially in the great battle narratives. Depending upon context (and sometimes within the same context), the use of this technique produces various effects, which include heroic glorification of recent historical events; disparagement of historical events for failure to meet heroic standards; and troubling implications for the present and future experience of Herodotus’ contemporary audience, caught in the crossfire of postwar hostility between Athens and Sparta, erstwhile allies against Xerxes.

Herodotus also adapts Homeric narrative techniques of broader scope to meet the needs of his polyvocalic historiē: the use of character speech, the creation of an overt narrator to arrange and assess the numerous sources of the Histories, and the manipulation of narrative time. Among types of Homeric speeches and speech complexes employed by Herodotus, advising scenes like those between Xerxes and Artabanus, Demaratus, and Artemisia demonstrate with special clarity the distinctive ethnographic concerns of the Histories, especially the relationship between Hellenic and Persian cultural ideals and practices. While the narrative voices of Homer and Herodotus are fundamentally divergent (the former’s covert, the latter’s ever-present), they share an interest in reconstructing the motives of their characters, and are amplified obliquely through the presence of self-reflexive narratorial alter egos. Homeric bards and Odysseus himself demonstrate the power and prestige of poetry, while Herodotean inquirers and advisors demonstrate the strengths – and occasionally limitations – of Herodotus’ own investigative methods. With regard to narrative time, both the Homeric epics and the Histories share an “anachronical”Footnote ¹⁶ structure, with a chronologically limited main story expanded by flashbacks (analepses) and flash-forwards (prolepses), articulated by either the author or his characters. The greater length and complexity of authorial analepses in the Histories enable Herodotus to communicate in necessary detail historical and ethnographic information that was previously unknown to his audience. The open-ended closure of the Histories, marked by an elaborate series of compositional rings, echoes the technique of both Homeric epics, but especially the Iliad: the theme of common ground between enemies (Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24) finds a disconcerting Herodotean counterpart in the progressive assimilation of the Athenians to their Persian foes. Herodotus plays similar variations on Homeric narrative rhythm in his staging of the Battle of Salamis, and on Homeric narrative frequency in the Persian crown council at the beginning of book 7, where the divergent memories of past events evoked by Mardonius, Xerxes, and Artabanus assume metahistorical significance, demonstrating both the possibility and the difficulty of applying the lessons of the past to present circumstances and future action.

The final chapters devoted to epic address conceptions of truth and falsehood and the construction of human history in Homer, Hesiod, and the Histories. The nature of truth is complex in both epic poetry and Herodotus; Odysseus’ so-called lying tales subtly interweave elements of fact and fiction, and the Hesiodic Muses characterize poetry as incorporating “plausible untruths” in addition to the truth (Theog. 27–8). While Herodotus chides poets for their fictions and reveals the truth when his sources enable him to, they often do not, and his programmatic commitment to preserving the memory of “marvelous deeds” (ἔργα … θωμαστά) allows the recounting of remarkable stories attributed to others that express symbolic rather than literal truth. Moreover, even stories for which Herodotus makes explicit truth claims (Helen’s detention in Egypt during the Trojan War, the narrative of Cyrus’ miraculous upbringing) appear to incorporate Herodotean invention and a conception of truth more mythical than historical. Last, while the Homeric and Hesiodic perception of the past manifests an awareness that the generations of men have changed for the worse with the passage of time, Herodotus’ perception of unstable human prosperity manifests itself in a recurrent historical cycle that typically pairs the downfall of one power with the rise of another – a scenario attested in the distant past at Troy and the recent past by the defeat of Xerxes, with unsettling intimations for the future of the Athenian Empire in Herodotus’ own day. By contrast with the epic vision of a magnificent deep past far removed from contemporary human experience, Herodotus places greater emphasis on the continuity between past and present and the causal factors that link one to the other.

In the second part of the book (Chapters 10–13) I address Herodotus’ engagement with Greek lyric poetry in the comprehensive sense of that term. Here I address four topics relevant to central aspects of Herodotus’ work: the relationship between the view of human prosperity articulated by the Herodotean Solon and the perspective expressed in the poetry composed by the historical Solon; the extent to which historical narratives in elegiac and iambic poetry, especially the so-called Plataea elegy of Simonides, anticipate or even influence Herodotean historical narrative; the relationship between specific accounts of historical events found in both epinician poetry and the Histories, especially the fall of Sardis and the founding of Cyrene; and the significance of general features shared by Herodotus and the epinician poets, especially Pindar: the presence of a prominent first-person narrator, the critical reception of previous traditions, and a commitment to “true” utterance when such is attainable (despite significant differences between the conceptions of “truth” in epinician song and Herodotean historiē).

In these chapters the issues of performance context, the author’s audience, and audience expectations come to the fore. Lyric poetry, whether performed publicly at civic festivals and poetic competitions or privately at symposia, typically addresses the members of a single civic community, or a subset of those community members; epinician poetry, although composed to celebrate an individual victor, includes in its praise recognition of familial and civic achievements or traditions as well. By contrast, Herodotus addresses a broad Panhellenic audience and in the final, written version of his narrative at least faces no pressure from local audiences and no generic requirements but those he has established for himself in composing the Histories: unlike the epinician poet, Herodotus is free to blame as well as praise the characters in his narrative. Thomas Harrison rightly notes the lack of “straightforward” heroes in the Histories, since Herodotus focuses “on presenting mixed motives, on undercutting heroic characterizations.”Footnote ¹⁷

The final section of the book (Chapters 14–16) focuses on the relationship between Herodotus and Attic tragedy, a highly contentious topic for chronological reasons among others. Some scholars believe that tragedy exerted a profound influence upon Herodotus and his stories of fragile human prosperity, while others emphasize the common roots of tragedy and the Histories in Homeric epic. Although the influence of Aeschylus’ Persae on the Herodotean depiction of Xerxes’ campaign has been questioned, I believe that we can identify it with confidence as an important intertextual precedent for Herodotus, as both source and foil alike. For example, Herodotus’ detailed account of the Battle of Salamis shares broad features of tactics and outcome with the description of the fighting by Aeschylus’ Persian messenger, but lacks the latter’s idealizing Panhellenic glow. Here too historiē written for a broad Greek audience allows Herodotus greater freedom of critical expression than a playwright commemorating one of his community’s most cherished military victories.

Tragedy also informs the high drama that characterizes the Lydian logos and three of its constituent narratives. The entire logos hews to a tragic (especially Aeschylean) template in tracing the fall of a royal dynasty, triggered by human and superhuman agency, over the course of generations. The story of Gyges’ reluctant regicide, which contains the seeds of the Mermnad downfall, depicts the recurrent Aeschylean scenario of fateful decisions made under duress – but with a distinctive Herodotean political slant that underscores the vulnerabilities of Eastern monarchical power. The account of the accidental death of Croesus’ son Atys at the hands of the hapless Adrastus has numerous tragic features, both structural and thematic, but reaches a climax that incorporates reference to Herodotus’ own characteristic search for the superlative in human experience. Finally, the depiction of Croesus’ rescue from his burning pyre includes elements of tragic staging and vocabulary, as well as a defining feature of Herodotean historiē: a source citation attributing the king’s rescue to Lydian tradition, which the Pythia herself will confirm at the end of the logos.

Tragic features also familiarize and magnify (parts of) the narratives of the Persian kings Cyrus and Cambyses and the Greek tyrants Polycrates and Periander. The story of Cyrus’ upbringing and ascent to power has deep roots in folktale, but the punishment inflicted upon Harpagus for saving the boy’s life unmistakably echoes the tragic myth of the Atreusmahl. Moreover, the account of Cyrus’ final campaign against the Massagetae incorporates tragic diction and an allusion to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon that points up the difficulty of learning the proper lessons from past experience. The story of Cambyses’ troubled kingship turns tragic only with his end-of-life realization that he killed his own brother in error, because of a misinterpreted dream, and precipitated the seizure of Persian kingship by a Median impostor. Herodotus also stages the death of the Samian tyrant Polycrates in tragic fashion, as overdetermined and undeserved despite his own greed and rejection of counsel, including a cryptic supernatural communication delivered in his daughter’s dream. Last, the emplotment of familial conflict between the Corinthian tyrant Periander and his son Lycophron bears a striking resemblance to Sophoclean dramaturgy, especially in the repeated motif of a clash between siblings in their reaction to the death of one family member at the hands of another.

In my Conclusion I underscore the hybrid nature of Herodotus’ prose narrative, in which he employs the linguistic, thematic, and compositional resources of the poets to coopt and contest their cultural authority as he engages the emotions and intellect of a Panhellenic audience steeped in the song culture of archaic Greece.