Preface

Before the reader embarks on the second part of this book, a word of caution is in order. As pointed out earlier, Interactional Linguistics advocates a cross-linguistic approach to the study of language in social interaction. Yet when examining linguistic resources and their use in interaction, how can we be sure we are talking about the same resource across languages? To take an example, the term clause in English has no satisfactory equivalent in German. If we try to compare an English clause to a German Satz (“sentence”), we will find ourselves comparing two very unlike entities. Moreover, the characteristics of clauses vary significantly across languages: whereas in English, clauses can be either finite or non-finite (Quirk et al. 1985:1120), the Finnish lause (“clause”) is by definition finite (Hakulinen et al. 2004:827). Branching out even further to include other non-Indo-European languages, what we know as, for example, a “relative clause” in English – i.e., a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and is introduced by a relative pronoun linking it to its antecedent – does not exist in Japanese, since Japanese places modifying clauses directly before the word they modify as adjective-like attributive verbs without a relative pronoun: tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person” (Kuno 1973). The crux of the matter then is that categories developed for the description of one language do not necessarily transfer to other languages, much less to all other languages.

Language typologists have thought long and hard about this dilemma. Far from claiming that linguistic categories are universal, they would instead advocate comparing, for example, grammatical relations across languages in terms of comparative concepts: concepts that rely on very basic, general, even primitive notions that can be established independently of specific languages. The comparative concept of relative clause, for instance, might be described as “a clause that is used to narrow the reference of a referential phrase and in which the referent of the phrase plays a semantic role” (Haspelmath 2010:672). This understanding would make it possible to treat both (English) the man who came to dinner and (Japanese) tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person”4 as conceptually comparable. The label used to refer to them can be considered of secondary importance.

As explained in the Preface to Hornblower's edition of bk. 5 (2013), most of the sections of the Introduction to that volume covered bks. 5 and 6 together. The Introduction to the present volume does not, therefore, revisit every aspect of every topic covered there. The promises there made, about postponement of certain topics – Herodotus on Kleomenes, Aigina, and Homer – until the Introduction to bk. 6, have been kept, but not by the straightforward inclusion of entire sections with those titles. We have nowhere attempted a separate section on Herodotus’ sources for bks. 5 and 6. More than a century ago, Felix Jacoby (1913: cols. 419–67 [1956: 114–38]) heroically went through the whole of the Histories, assigning sections to sources. The trouble with this sort of operation, certainly unfashionable in 2016, is that some such suggestions are much more plausible than others, so that the question is best dealt with in notes to individual passages.

Brevity has been at a premium throughout. We particularly regret that our references to modern scholarship have often had to be perfunctory, giving the impression of much more originality than we can claim.

As in bk. 5, we use bold type, for clarity and brevity, when referring to chapter numbers of the book which is the actual subject of our commentary; thus 70.2n. = ‘see note on 6.70.2’. For references to Hornblower's 2013 commentary on bk. 5, we have said e.g. ‘see 5.126.1n.’, because we regard bks. 5 and 6, and therefore also the commentaries on them, as a continuum. For the most part we follow Herodotus’ own spelling of personal names and place names, but we apologise for inconsistency; in particular we could not, as children of the 1960s, bring ourselves to talk about Hippies when discussing the Peisistratid tyrant.

We acknowledge gratefully the insights provided by the contributors to two Oxford seminar series: a graduate class on bk. 6 in 2011, and a seminar series on the ‘green and yellow Herodotus’ in 2013, covering all nine books, and addressed by the editors of individual volumes. Hornblower would also like to repeat his 2013 thanks to those UCL MA students who attended his two-term class on bks. 5 and 6 in 2009–10.