Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

Starting from the Solon-Croesus episode, this chapter argues that Herodotus’ inquiry establishes a horizon of expectation in which historical memory (through the narratives of Tellus and Cleobis and Biton) opens up a new space for philosophical knowledge. The second half of the chapter suggests that the Histories’ generic affiliation with history over philosophy is anachronistic in the fifth century BCE. It demonstrates that Herodotus was not interpreted as a historian in his own time and that "inquiry" and "love of wisdom" characterize the dynamic and highly experimental intellectual culture of this period.

Ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, παρ’ ἡμέας γὰρ περὶ σέο λόγος ἀπῖκται πολλὸς καὶ σοφίης εἵνεκεν τῆς σῆς καὶ πλάνης, ὡς φιλοσοφέων γῆν πολλὴν θεωρίης εἵνεκεν ἐπελήλυθας· νῦν ὦν ἵμερος ἐπειρέσθαι μοι ἐπῆλθέ σε εἴ τινα ἤδη πάντων εἶδες ὀλβιώτατον.

(Hdt. 1.30.2)

Athenian friend, such reports have come to us about you due to your wisdom and your travels – that you, as one who loves wisdom, have covered much ground for the sake of theorie. So now a desire has come over me to ask you whether there is some individual you have seen who is the most fortunate of all.

So opens the famous dialogue between the Lydian ruler Croesus and the Athenian “lover of wisdom,” Solon. Croesus’ court had already entertained, we are told, many of the sixth-century Greek “philosophers,” sophistai (1.29.1).¹ These intellectuals traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean, lecturing on cosmology, the natural world, physics and metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and theology, in addition to more metacritical thought on the art of speech and persuasion itself. Solon too traveled there. He left Athens, Herodotus tells us, after setting up laws for his fellow citizens, laws that could not be contested in his absence. His departure was also an opportunity for him to engage in theorie – a pilgrimage or journey beyond the polis to view a spectacle and, in this case, to practice philosophical contemplation.²

Theorie is closely tied to autopsy and the empirical acquisition of knowledge. Travel from the city as an eyewitness to foreign spectacles brings with it the potential for intellectual transformation, which the traveler is then able to bring back to the polis. Croesus, playing upon this notion, attempts to inscribe himself within Solon’s expedition by bringing his guest face to face with his great wealth. The prominence of sight in this opening gambit is significant: He twice inquires whether Solon has seen someone (εἶδες … ἴδοι) who was the most fortunate of all. Building up to his self-serving question, Croesus connects Solon’s travel with his wisdom and relies upon the philosopher’s autopsy to provide the answer to his question.

It is for this reason all the more striking that Solon’s answer nowhere refers explicitly to his travels or personal experience.³ He responds to Croesus’ questions but in each case declines to give an account based on his own spectatorship. Instead, he gives a virtuoso display of wisdom, outlining true well-being in his narration of the lives of Tellus and Cleobis and Biton. He then clarifies that the fragile basis for human happiness is due to the unpredictable action of the divine, which leads to his mathematical display-piece on the years, months, and days comprising a man’s life. Here sight is reintroduced by Solon but as a warning: there are more things to see than one will desire (1.32.2: πολλὰ μὲν ἔστι ἰδεῖν τὰ μή τις ἐθέλει); every day is unlike the last and no pattern emerges.⁴ The whole point of this performance of man’s circumscribed temporality is to show that individual human experience provides little basis for wider inferences.⁵ Solon rejects his host’s emphasis on sight by pointing to the problem of appearance as opposed to reality, offering only: “you appear to me to have a marvellous fortune” (1.32.5: ἐμοὶ δὲ σὺ καὶ πλουτέειν μέγα φαίνεαι). But the use of the infinitive with φαίνεαι (“you seem to be”) rather than the participle (“you evidently are”) hints that this could just as easily be an illusion, as in fact it will turn out to be.⁶ And while Solon’s final pronouncement to Croesus is often translated as “one must look to the end of every affair” (1.33: σκοπέειν δὲ χρὴ παντὸς χρήματος τὴν τελευτήν), it is noteworthy that the verb is not ὁράω but σκοπέω. The latter is used not merely of sight but introspection and reflection.⁷ Its importance is clear from Croesus’ mistranslation of the sentiments of his guest, with whom he becomes thoroughly disgusted; he judges Solon stupid for requiring him “to look (ὁρᾶν) to the end of every affair.” The distortion of the verb ironizes the ruler’s inability to “see” the content of Solon’s message and understand the value of this introspection.⁸

In line with his identification as a philosopher, Solon’s quiet rebuff of visual perception as the criterion for truth has an impressive pedigree among philosophers in the intellectual milieu of the late sixth and early fifth centuries bce. Parmenides too rejected experience, sight, and sound as avenues of truth in favor of judging by logos (DK 28 B 7.3–6). His successor, Melissus, was a strident opponent of autopsy as a criterion of truth, holding that sight is fundamentally misleading: “Hence it is clear that we do not see correctly, and that it is not correctly that these things seem to us to be many” (DK 30 B 8.5). And Herodotus’ contemporary, Anaxagoras, illustrated the fragility of the sense of sight with the example of black and white paint, arguing that adding drops of one color to the other would, for some time, produce no change obvious to the human eye, despite it changing color with each drop in reality (DK 59 B 21). Sight fails to access the fine gradations that are nonetheless existent in matter. Meanwhile, for Solon an individual’s sight fails to capture the encyclopedic breadth of human experience.

The dialogue’s theme of human well-being is a staple in ethical debates taking place in philosophical circles.⁹ It is reported that Anaxagoras articulated a philosophy of eudaimonie, “happiness.” When asked “who was most happy,” Aristotle records that “Anaxagoras too seems not to have supposed that the happy man is wealthy or powerful, for he said that he would not be surprised if he seemed someone strange to most people.”¹⁰ In his Eudemian Ethics, the same incident is recounted, though in this case Aristotle elaborates on Anaxagoras’ concept of strangeness by suggesting that the philosopher’s response implies that well-being should be connected to a life lived according to justice or for theoria.¹¹ The de-emphasis of material wealth and power as markers of eudaimonie in favor of a paradoxical or strange theory of the fortunate individual has an obvious antecedent with the Croesus–Solon interview. The theory’s connection of happiness to a life lived for theoria suggests that Anaxagoras and Herodotus were in dialogue with one another or – more plausibly – that Aristotle was reading Anaxagoras’ theories in light of Herodotus’ Solon. That Solon’s admonitions immediately precede Anaxagoras’ makes this all the more likely (1179a9–17). Indeed, when Diodorus Siculus’ Library records the Solon–Croesus interview in the first century, the historian clarifies that Solon responded with the freedom of speech customary to philosophers, which affirms that Herodotus’ lawgiver was later viewed in this light.¹²

Thematically and methodologically, Solon’s interview with Croesus touches upon important issues preoccupying intellectual culture in the fifth century.¹³ What is conspicuous about Herodotus’ engagement is the way in which knowledge of the past is presented as a means of answering these questions. The identity of the most fortunate human lies in Athenian history in the figure of Tellus, whose life unites individual prosperousness with that of his descendants and his polis. When asked to award a second place, Solon returns to historical exempla through the Argives Cleobis and Biton.

I begin with the Solon–Croesus interview as its importance for the project of the Histories is difficult to overstate. As a programmatic episode, it provides a critical window into the horizon of expectation that what will become the genre of historiography carves out for its audience. In this context, the passage’s emphasis on knowledge claims, on ethics, and on man’s place in the cosmos is conspicuous. These topics speak to the aspirations of the Histories as a work in dialogue with contemporary philosophical thinkers and debates. More radically, the episode enacts a powerful metanarrative moment by using historical events to encode philosophical debates. By modeling Solon as an internal historian who discloses philosophical truths, the text “reads” itself. Solon’s performance casts knowledge of Athenian and Argive history as the métier of the sophistes: the description of Tellus’ life and death arises from Athenian historical memory. The glorious deaths of the young Cleobis and Biton, correspondingly, develop out of Argive and Delphic tradition. Indeed, it is the pastness of their lives that allows Solon to establish their position in the ranks of human good fortune.¹⁴ As a whole, the exchange demonstrates how historical memory opens up a new space for wisdom. In terms of the debate on well-being, history reveals itself as the only space in which the concept can be properly understood. Equally important is the way in which the dialogue resonates with the introduction of the Histories. With the identification of Croesus as the one most responsible for injustice against the Greeks, Herodotus turns to images of motion and travel (1.5.3: προβήσομαι “I will proceed,” ἐπεξιών “going through”) but applies them to his creation of the text. These metaphors serve as an introduction to the textual journey that will unfold, with visits to cities great and small.¹⁵ As with Solon’s journey to Sardis, metaphors of travel are leveraged into insight on the human condition and human well-being: as Herodotus affirms in the opening of the Histories, “knowing as I do that human well-being in no way remains in the same place, I will mention both [large and small cities] equally” (1.5.4: τὴν ἀνθρωπηίην ὦν ἐπιστάμενος εὐδαιμονίην οὐδαμὰ ἐν τὠυτῷ μένουσαν ἐπιμνήσομαι ἀμφοτέρων ὁμοίως).¹⁶

These introductory passages invite interpretation of the Histories by exploring the past in light of contemporary philosophical debates. Herodotus has fashioned a narrative that goes far beyond any individual human life, and it is this breadth that allows for the identification and analysis of wider philosophical patterns resistant to lived temporality. This is a potentiality that Herodotus’ successor, Thucydides, will also exploit for historiography in his celebrated “methodology,” with its orientation to the future value of his work (1.22.4). How then can the Histories be contextualized? As it precedes the fixed generic conventions that inform subsequent historiography, modern scholars have engaged in transtextual readings – readings that place the Histories in relation to other texts diachronically and synchronically – to shed light on the critical methods that Herodotus operated with.¹⁷ By fruitfully juxtaposing the text and its affinities to antecedent and contemporaneous literary culture, the stubborn image of Herodotus as looking backward to an archaic worldview has largely yielded to a deeper understanding of his cultural embeddedness. In particular, due to the work of Rosalind Thomas, it is now widely recognized that Herodotus operated within a mid- to late fifth-century scientific context.¹⁸ Thomas’ research moved the needle beyond simple intertextual parallels in the Histories with known philosophers to trace the “similar intellectual framework” of the historian’s relationship to his intellectual milieu, one to which he is viewed as actively contributing.¹⁹ In addition to providing updated discussions of passages on geography, ethnography, environmental determinism, and the rhetorical techniques and argumentation of epideictic performance culture, this research broke new ground by focusing much more closely upon late fifth- and fourth-century Hippocratic medical literature – in particular with regard to passages in the Histories discussing animal biology and natural science. Yet a recurring sentiment in this research is that Herodotus is “not, of course, interested in or informed about the more abstract philosophical arguments of the Presocratics… He is unmistakably drawn to the observable world.”²⁰ The bold alignment of Herodotus alongside the scientific and, in particular, Hippocratic medical traditions, de-emphasized earlier and contemporary speculative philosophy. Herodotus’ relation to these thinkers is viewed as connected to empiricism, especially in his ethnographic and geographical interests. In line with this, Dietram Müller has argued that Herodotus was the first empiricist, regarding sense perception and experience as the only valid avenues of knowledge. On this reading, Herodotus opposed the Presocratic philosophers, who either rejected or heavily qualified the value of the senses and proceeded by and large by deductive reasoning, which led to seriously flawed views on the natural world.²¹ Evidence of empiricism in the Histories is taken from passages in which Herodotus is critical of his contemporaries, as in depictions of the map of the world that made the earth perfectly circular and surrounded by a river, Ocean, and that split Asia, Europe, and Libya into equally sized landmasses (4.36.2).²² By contrast, Herodotus is seen as approaching his inquiries with no preconceived opinions and drawing only limited conclusions on the basis of his autopsy rather than grand deductive theories. As Thomas stresses of Herodotus: “It is particularly the ethnographical and geographical sections, or the sections dealing with questions of customs in more theoretical ways, that show the Histories to be part of this milieu.”²³ This emphasis on empiricism has a long history in secondary scholarship on Herodotus and has been a productive line of research. However, it has often been conducted at the expense of what might be considered “non-empiricist” philosophical debates, such as those surrounding relativism, ethics, nature, and epistemology.²⁴ As Thomas herself has argued forcefully, we cannot distinguish the as-yet-undifferentiated fields of science and medicine from the concerns of fifth-century philosophy, and it would be surprising for this reason if Herodotus did so.²⁵ I suggested above that empiricism is de-emphasized by Solon in his role as internal historian, which encourages a more expansive approach to philosophical thought in the text. Additionally, if Herodotus has emerged from this invaluable research as an intellectual at home in his historical moment, nonetheless, it remains unclear how the scientific and medical context can help to determine the wider arc of his narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars, which is after all the driving theme of the work.²⁶

This book is an exploration of the relationship of philosophy to early Greek historiography avant la lettre as exemplified by the Histories. As we shall see, Herodotus’ historie on Greek and foreign peoples and events competed in the Presocratic marketplace of ideas in important ways. In the fifth century, philosophical ideas, like market products, competed through the agonistic display culture that characterized philosophical apodexis, demonstration. This oral-literary hybrid created the conditions for the quick dissemination of information and contributed to Herodotus’ wide-ranging philosophical understanding.²⁷ After all, the sophists’ wisdom was for sale, for those who could afford it.²⁸ Were philosophical schools the venues of such information in this period, one might expect a more dogmatic sense of philosophical influence on the Histories. But following the Greco-Persian Wars, the competitive debate style of exposition afforded historiography – and indeed, comedy, tragedy, and medicine – a varied set of philosophical positions to adopt, reformulate, or reject.

From the proem onward, the Histories displays an attunement to philosophical ideas and their historical application and is thus an important chapter in the emerging dialectic on the interactions between philosophy and literary culture.²⁹ Herodotus’ inquiry into human history takes up the challenges posed by the intellectuals of his time and in doing so illustrates the untapped force of historical narrative for working through philosophical questions. Advances in philosophy are used to discuss, explore, and shape his approach to the historical past. This preoccupation with the theories prevalent among the Presocratic philosophers will contribute to the reassessment of Herodotus’ inquiry as distant from non-empiricist concerns.

Of course, no single philosophical doctrine is expounded in the Histories, nor should the text be interpreted as part of any individual “school” of thought.³⁰ For this reason, this book presents a series of arguments that situate the Histories alongside a diverse cast of thinkers including philosophers, sophists, scientists, medical practitioners, and rhetoricians – but also tragedians and comic poets, whose central role in intellectual culture is only recently coming to be understood. Its ambition is not to assess the philosophical merit of Herodotus’ arguments; instead, it aims to reconsider early Greek historiography’s cultural and intellectual context, probing the consequences of its early generic indeterminacy.

The Linguistic Turn’s influence on interpretations of the Histories has helpfully stressed Herodotus’ position as a literary craftsman. Such work has increasingly drawn attention to the artfulness of the composition and to the recurrence of themes and topoi throughout the text.³¹ In building on this research, I operate on the premise that Herodotus’ historie does not simply transcribe philosophical debates but integrates them so as to develop a broader narrative project, which must be seen as having a structural unity. In line with this, the book considers the interaction of philosophical texts, concepts, and ideas in the narrative progression toward the Greco-Persian Wars, as the Histories engages with these subjects not in discrete passages alone but in broad narrative arcs. What emerges from this approach is that while the narrator is almost entirely reticent in directly quoting or otherwise referring to contemporary intellectuals, nonetheless the historical narrative throughout the Histories stakes out a range of philosophical views that place the reader in the hermeneutic position of vicariously testing ideas and methods in a laboratory of historical action.

These principles of narrative composition are exemplified in what is perhaps the most famous example of Herodotus’ ambitions in intellectual culture, his excursus on the nature (physis) of the Nile River that leads it to flood during the summer (2.19–27).³² It is well known that Herodotus’ recognition of the three ways that Greek intellectuals have attempted to explain the phenomenon refers to the theories of Thales,³³ Hecataeus, and Anaxagoras. Of course, none of these thinkers is named. They had attributed the flooding to the Etesian winds, Ocean, and melting snow, respectively. The Histories airs each theory and after rejecting them in turn, Herodotus proposes his own solution to the summer flooding, but he does so by qualifying the discussion as being “about the unseen” (2.24.1: περὶ τῶν ἀφανέων). His opinion is one that he has already employed to explain Egypt’s geological change: the retreat of moisture. He hypothesizes that evaporation occurs in the winter in Egypt due to the sun’s irregular position in the sky during this time of year – a result of the wind. It is evaporation that keeps the Nile from overflowing each winter, as it otherwise would, and as all other rivers do. In presenting the theories of his rivals and then subsequently overturning them, the histor stages a sophistic debate, much as we expect they proceeded in the competitive agones sophias.³⁴ Herodotus’ admission of the question’s resistance to empiricism situates him within a subset of contemporary thinkers considering the use of proofs outside of the realm of direct autopsy.³⁵ His conclusion appears to be highly original and aspires to persuade the same audience and to accrue the same cachet as that of the fifth-century sophistai. But Herodotus’ interest in physis does not stop here, nor does his willingness to respond polemically to intellectual debates surrounding it. Herodotus’ discussion of the Nile’s flooding is regularly interpreted in isolation, as a digression from historical memory, which constitutes the backbone of the work. As we shall see, read in light of Herodotus’ discussion of physis elsewhere, this passage contributes to a progressive story arc for physis as a category of historical explanation. It is a concept that plays a role in clarifying the Hellenic victory over the Persians in the text and among Herodotus’ contemporaries. This is all to say, individual episodes will be shown to gain in significance when placed in a broader narrative context.

Part of the difficulty of analyzing the Histories alongside contemporary philosophical texts rests in these fields’ separation into the discrete genres of history and philosophy, which seem to operate on the basis of very different frameworks. However, this taxonomy obscures more than it reveals. The remainder of the introduction addresses the thorny question of the genre of the Histories and philosophical treatises through the lens of contemporary genre theory. Genre theory provides a valuable approach to texts’ horizon of expectation. The Histories’ horizon of expectation can be fruitfully investigated by a close reading of the proem. The proem will lead to a discussion of the valence of the ancient terms historie and philosophia and also to a consideration of the value of the label “Presocratic” for the philosophers writing in the period in which Herodotus was composing the Histories. The chapter concludes with a look at the afterlife of this relationship, to history’s competition with philosophy. This phenomenon gestures to the way in which Herodotus’ inquiry is productive for understanding the longue durée of ancient historiography.

A Splendid Isolation? Historie, History, and Philosophy

We cannot overestimate the importance of Herodotus in determining the trajectory of what will become the genre of historiography.³⁶ Yet in spite of an awareness of its anteriority, the Histories is often interpreted in light of the generic expectations of later historiography, which only arose in its wake. Perhaps most influential is the contention of Felix Jacoby, that Herodotus’ project evolved from a geographical one to ethnography to the telos of historical thinking, in the genre of the war narrative.³⁷ But in the period in which Herodotus was writing, how would audiences have approached the text?

Genre studies provides a critical methodology for discussing the position of texts in their historical moment. Literary genres are ordered sets of discursive properties arising from speech acts. Through repetition, these discursive properties create mental frameworks, or horizons of expectation, on what to anticipate from a text. Encoding texts into patterns determines, in large part, how audiences interpret literary products. All audiences read for genre, whether consciously or not.³⁸ Indeed, genre is at heart a reader-response activity. It places the audience in the position of imputing a template to a text, a template that inevitably shifts and evolves in the process of moving through a narrative.³⁹ The audience’s projection of a text’s horizon of expectation will dictate the way in which they interpret it as a whole.⁴⁰ This is not to suggest that any prose genres were rigid and inflexible. The experimentation found in such texts in the fifth century in particular counters this possibility. Chris Pelling has rightly observed, “we do better to think of ‘on-the-whole’ expectations …. Many classical texts will have worked by revising readers’ expectations as they go, continually constructing their own ‘genre.’”⁴¹ Audiences were prepared for encountering existing generic frameworks as well as innovation within them.

How, then, does a new genre, such as historiography, come into being? New genres emerge out of existing genres, morphing “by inversion, by displacement, by combination.”⁴² Carolyn Miller has argued that two metaphors – evolution and emergence – predominate in the scholarly discussion of innovation and genre; she maintains that these metaphors offer differing conceptions of the phenomenon.⁴³ Emergence highlights the innovative nature of the new genre, which arrives in its field with little obvious precedent. It will have genetic relationships with existing genres, but this is less relevant than its appearance as novel in relation to them. These genres are seen as underdetermined. Alternatively, evolution implies change over time, with an emphasis on the modification of existing genres in the production of new ones. Variants eventually produce a new product. The first metaphor stresses a perceived radical break, the second, continuity. Miller determines that emergence-based models serve to highlight the experience of novelty that a new work can provoke.⁴⁴ When a culture identifies a work as constituting a new genre, this serves to satisfy a function in a given community rather than having any essentializing-objective reality. A work’s perception as fully distinctive has to be considered in line with the role that it plays in the context of related genres. Evolution, meanwhile, provides an explanation for innovation that is alert to interrelation. It blurs categories; at the same time, it assesses departures from normative elements in a given genre.

Scholars considering the genre of the Histories have often pointed to the uniqueness of the text.⁴⁵ This conclusion relies upon separating the project from contemporary and antecedent literary products and interpreting the dearth of prose texts surviving from the fifth century as evidence in favor of Herodotus’ distinctiveness. At heart, it is an emergence-based approach, which presumes that the Histories exceeds its predecessors in creating a radically unique generic product. Emergence-based accounts rely upon the cultural response provoked by genres conceived of as new. Is there, then, a basis for this modern conclusion if we turn to the reception of Herodotus in antiquity? Given the absence of an overt critical discussion of the Histories in the fifth century, we can instead assess the meta-discourse of historiography as a genre. It is striking that Herodotus almost never plays a role in the genre’s origin story. The seventh-century cataloger Isidore of Seville awards the title of first “pagan historian” to Dares the Phrygian, apparent eyewitness to the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Herodotus is said to be the second historian after Dares but the first in Greece.⁴⁶ In any case, the comment leads to the long tradition of interpreting Dares the Phrygian as the first historian. Another “first-hand” history of the Trojan War was said to have been written by the Cretan Dictys (FGrH 49), though he is not included in critical discussion of the origins of historiography. The tenth-century CE Byzantine encyclopaedia, the Suda, reports that Acusilaus was the oldest historian (ἱστορικὸς πρεσβύτατος).⁴⁷ In discussing Hecataeus of Miletus, the Suda reveals an alternative tradition, stating that Acusilaus’ work is spurious and that in fact Hecataeus produced the first work of history in prose (πρῶτος δὲ ἱστορίαν πεζῶς ἐξήνεγκε).⁴⁸ Elsewhere, the Suda records that some consider Pherecydes of Syros the first author of a history in prose, while others think it is Cadmus of Miletus.⁴⁹ Pliny the Elder, at least, held that Cadmus introduced the writing of history (7.205). More critical is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who observed that the first historians are bare names and that even those apparently early historians with surviving texts, such as Cadmus of Miletus and Aristaeus of Proconnesus, are not unanimously accepted as genuine.⁵⁰ Nonetheless, prior to Thucydides, Dionysius can name around a dozen historians outside of (and largely earlier than) Herodotus, with the proviso that there were many others (5). The third-century CE Latin grammarian, Solinus, awarded the Ionians the palm for founding history, beginning with Xanthus of Lydia.⁵¹ Cicero is in fact a rather lone voice in his famous statement that Herodotus is the “Father of history” (De leg. 1.5). But in On the Orator, he writes that Herodotus “adorned” (ornavit) the genre first, listing Pherecydes, Hellanicus, and Acusilaus as the originators of Greek historiography.⁵² This is in line with Greek literary criticism’s position on history’s stylistic evolution via Herodotus. This meta-discourse on the genre of history shows that while Herodotus could be interpreted in antiquity as a distinctive figure in the history of historiography, he was not its “founder.” In nearly each case, he is seen as part of a wider tradition of prose authors writing historical narrative. There are important ideological forces that shaped this anachronistic understanding of Herodotus’ Histories as another in a long line of historical narratives, but for our purposes it is sufficient to show that the meta-discursive reflection does not historicize the Histories’ unique generic position in its fifth-century milieu.⁵³ This is as far as an emergence-based account can take us.

Evolutionary theories of new genres, by contrast, move away from the reception of texts and center on their relationships – identities and departures – within a literary community.⁵⁴ As Miller puts it:

If we are concerned to explain how innovation happens, under the presupposition that stability and continuity constitute the default condition, then evolution can help conceptualize the processes and mechanisms by which variations come about and are replicated and propagated.

(2016), 16

Because “new” genres emerge out of existing ones, it is possible to chart generic affinities on the basis of expectations that texts generate internally, even in the absence of meta-discursive commentary. As the following discussion will argue, the Histories provokes strong audience expectations as early as the proem.

The proem begins with a self-description as an exhibition of historie, “inquiry.”⁵⁵ Historie comes to refer to the genre of historiography but only in the fourth century BCE and even then not exclusively. What, then, would the audience of the last third of the fifth century have associated this term with?⁵⁶ Around 500 BCE, the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus had described the activity of Pythagoras as follows: “Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, became proficient in investigation (ἱστορίην ἤσκησεν) more than all other men, and after he had made a selection of these writings he made his own wisdom, excessive learning (πολυμαθίην), false artifice.”⁵⁷ The fragment is frustratingly terse. Nonetheless, it is clear that the intellectual labor of Pythagoras could be identified as an activity of “inquiry” and that Heraclitus believed this took the form of searching out prose treatises. Heraclitus is sometimes thought to denigrate this methodology of practicing historie, as Pythagoras’ florilegium is characterized so negatively.⁵⁸ This may be right, or it may be that Pythagoras made a promising start only to falter.⁵⁹ In any case, it is clear that historie could fall within the realm of philosophical activity.

In a lost tragedy, Herodotus’ contemporary, Euripides, idealizes historia as the activity of the virtuous citizen in the following terms:

Happy is the man who | has acquired an understanding of inquiry (ὄλβιος ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας | ἔσχε μάθησιν) | without setting out to harm other citizens | or to carry out unjust deeds, | but observing the ageless order of | immortal nature, where it was formed, | for what reason, and how (ἀλλ’ ἀθανάτου καθορῶν φύσεως | κόσμον ἀγήρων, πῇ τε συνέστη | καὶ ὅπῃ καὶ ὅπως). | Never does an interest in shameful | deeds come near to such men.

(DK 59 A 30 = TrGF F 910 Kannicht)

As for Heraclitus, Euripides’ historia is an intellectual process associated with philosophical knowledge.⁶⁰ The formula of praise connects human well-being (ὄλβιος) to education in inquiry, in what is perhaps a nod to Anaxagoras’ theories on human happiness.⁶¹ The citizen practicing historia is opposed to those harmful features of civic participation, hostility, and injustice. The unknown persona loquens of the fragment links inquiry to the contemplation of the immortal nature of the world order, which is likely to be associated with the observation of the heavens. Explaining the location, direction, and origin of this eternal order are the activities of inquiry, and they are ethically determined inasmuch as they lead to virtuous civic behavior.

Another roughly contemporary reference to this terminology can be found in the fifth-century Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine (20.1–3). This anonymous text includes the language of historia in a critique of the physicians and philosophers (sophistai), who argue that one must understand what a man is before undertaking the art of medicine.⁶² The author maintains that this is the sphere of those like Empedocles who have written on what a man is, his origin, and his composition. He then reverses the order of knowledge, stating that those interested in philosophy must begin from the art of medicine “to know accurately this information (τὴν ἱστορίην ταύτην) about what man is, through what causes he arose, and the rest” (20.2).⁶³ The nod to Empedocles and those writing “on nature” is again evocative of the association of historia with philosophical intellectual research. Inquiry is a totalizing process of understanding the human for the doctor, which includes in it the knowledge of the definition of man, his genesis, and his elemental makeup. The final fifth-century reference occurs in the latter part of the century in the Hippocratic On the Art of Medicine, in which the physician inveighs against sophists who criticize the art of medicine without contributing any new knowledge to it.⁶⁴ Such thinkers are accused of “making a display of their own inquiry” (1: ἱστορίης οἰκείης ἐπίδειξιν, Littré), language reminiscent of Herodotus’ exposition of inquiry (ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις).⁶⁵ In contrast to Herodotus, the medical practitioner criticizes this kind of display of knowledge as unproductive. The evidence suggests that historia embraces a wide range of sensory activity in research.⁶⁶ By the early fourth century BCE, Plato’s Socrates confirms this hypothesis, in a discussion of his youthful interest in the kind of philosophy that his predecessors had practiced. Socrates explains that he desired “this wisdom (ταύτης τῆς σοφίας) which they call the inquiry on nature (περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίαν).”⁶⁷ He clarifies that this is the wisdom to know the causes of each thing and why they happen; it includes an inquiry into the things in the heavens and on the earth, the origin and dissolution of things, and why they exist. More specifically, young Socrates ponders the nourishment and death of humans; the elemental composition of thought; and the origins of the senses, memory, opinion, and knowledge.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, Alcidamas, Plato’s contemporary, critiques the failed philosopher as one who neglects inquiry, ἱστορίας (historias), as well as education and skill in speaking (F 1.1 Avezzù). Inquiry, then, is closely linked in the fifth century with philosophical intellectual culture; in fact, this connection persists in the fourth century as well. It is a praxis that draws the intellectual toward wisdom.

Thomas has thoughtfully discussed the Histories in relation to some of the passages noted above and concluded that they signal that Herodotus’ work “belonged in the world of scientific enquiry, whether it be into nature, or the nature of man, or as in Herodotus, the nature of the conflict between the Greeks and barbarians in the widest possible interpretation of that conflict.”⁶⁹ This points in the right direction. By considering the Histories in light of the horizon of expectations that it constructs, it is possible to go further. Generic self-definition relies upon existing communicative parameters to guide readers. Contemporary audiences encountering the experimental prose work that is the Histories would have attempted to place it within a network of corresponding literary systems to make sense of it. While the work will exceed, in many respects, contemporary philosophical literary products, at the same time readers of the Histories would have made sense of its appeal to historie in terms of contemporary philosophical texts, if its uses elsewhere are any indication. The general theme of human warfare and its causes places the audience in the position of identifying and contrasting the project with its partners in contemporary intellectual culture.⁷⁰ That is, the Histories does not create its audience ex nihilo, it relies upon readerly competence to do the work of situating its literary ambitions in an already-existing reading culture. This is not to suggest that the Histories is solely in dialogue with philosophy but that it is a key point of reference.⁷¹

The mental framework evoked by the proem’s reference to a display of “inquiry” continues in its statement that it does so “in order that the things brought about by mankind (τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων) not fade with time, nor that the deeds great and marvellous (ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά), some realized by Greeks and others by non-Greeks, not be without fame” (1.p). It may be objected that the Histories’ ambitious scope of human events and deeds exhibits a breadth of inquiry that exceeds the more restricted ambit of philosophical treatises. After all, the range of the project led Diodorus Siculus to father the first universal history on Herodotus:⁷²

Of the historians, Herodotus, beginning from the period before the Trojan War, wrote of the common actions of just about the entire inhabited world (γέγραφε κοινὰς σχεδόν τι τὰς τῆς οἰκουμένης πράξεις) in nine books, and he brings his composition to an end with the Greeks against the Persians at the battle at Mycale and the siege of Sestus.

(11.37.6)

Diodorus’ identification of Herodotus as a universal historian was not adopted, so far as we know, by other ancient readers, but it does indicate the work’s astonishing chronological, geographical, and thematic breadth.⁷³ In the proem, the Histories advertises itself as a universalizing compilation of the Greek and non-Greek past, and this pledge is kept in the course of the narrative. Interestingly, the extant historians following Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, appear to reject his expansive compass and restrict the field of inquiry to a much more circumscribed temporal and geographic orbit.⁷⁴ From the proem onward, the discursive universalism of the Histories is a distinctive part of its generic footprint.

This totalizing program is reinforced at the conclusion of the accounts of the learned Persians and Phoenicians on the origins of the conflict. Herodotus distances himself from these reports and instead advances the figure that he “knows” to have been the first to commit injustice against the Greeks, Croesus (1.5.3).⁷⁵ It is an identification that he forecasts will lead to a discussion of small and great cities of men due to their reversals in the span of distant and more recent history, in an observation that spurs the famous pronouncement on the cycle of prosperity and decline:⁷⁶ “So I will make mention of both alike, knowing as I do that human well-being (τὴν ἀνθρωπηίην ὦν ἐπιστάμενος εὐδαιμονίην) in no way remains in the same place” (1.5.4). Cities and their cycles are ultimately highways back to the human subject.⁷⁷ The student of this inquiry will acquire knowledge of the growth of human prosperity and its inevitable entropy. As it will in the Solon-Croesus interview, here too awareness of the distant past creates a unique kind of knowledge about human well-being.

The ambitious scope of the Histories has a parallel in sixth- and fifth-century philosophy. Tony Long has persuasively argued that the early Greek philosophers are united in their research into “all things.” Their “project is not to talk about or explain literally everything, but rather to give a universalist account, to show what the ‘all’ or the universe is like, to take everything – the world as a whole – as the subject of inquiry.”⁷⁸ Distinctive to early Greek philosophy is its attempt to produce a discourse on all things, an extensive body of knowledge. Xenophanes promises to speak “about all things” (DK 21 B 34); Empedocles will address how “all the things” became visible, how the four elements hold “all things” (DK 31 B 38) and in one programmatic statement rhetorically asks “who would boast that he has found the whole (τὸ δ’ ὅλον)?” (Laks-Most D 42); meanwhile, Heraclitus polemically states that “all things happen” in accordance with his logos (DK 22 B 1) and that “all things come about by strife and necessity” (B 80); Anaxagoras begins his book by stating that “all things were together” (DK 59 B 1), before describing the totality’s properties; Ion of Chios starts his philosophical treatise by contending that “all things are three” (FGrH 392 F 24a);⁷⁹ and after Diogenes of Apollonia’s proem, the philosopher proposes that “all things are differentiated out of the same thing and are the same thing” (DK 64 B 2).

This universalizing program is confirmed by the kinds of research undertaken by the early Greek philosophical thinkers, research that includes theology, cosmology, and cosmogony, as well as epistemological, political, and ethical thought. From Anaximander onward, philosophers wrote accounts of the universe’s order: on the generation and composition of the cosmos (and at times, its destruction), celestial bodies, meteorology, the generation of humans and animals, the principles of sensation and cognition, and the origins of the social contract. Heraclitus’ On Nature, for example, was said to be divided into three tracts – one on the universe, one on politics, and another on the divine (A 1).⁸⁰ His fragments demonstrate this multi-disciplinarity. In one, he complains about the excessive learning of Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecataeus, whose education, Heraclitus says, failed to result in intelligence.⁸¹ Without additional context it is difficult to be sure what attracted Heraclitus’ criticism. In any case, by including Hecataeus in his critique, in addition to the more familiar philosophical figures of Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes, Heraclitus points to the inclusion of mythography, ethnography, and geography in the sphere of philosophical intellectual culture already in the first half of the fifth century.⁸² His own philosophy aims to repudiate and supplant the work of these thinkers.

Herodotus’ contemporary, the sophist Hippias of Elis, similarly displays this totalizing research trend toward the latter part of the fifth century in what is thought to be the incipit of his provocative and genre-bending Collection (Synagoge).⁸³

τούτων ἴσως εἴρηται τὰ μὲν Ὀρφεῖ, τὰ δὲ Μουσαίῳ κατὰ βραχὺ ἄλλῳ ἀλλαχοῦ, τὰ δὲ Ἡσιόδῳ, τὰ δὲ Ὁμήρῳ, τὰ δὲ τοῖς ἄλλοις τῶν ποιητῶν, τὰ δὲ ἐν συγγραφαῖς, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι, τὰ δὲ βαρβάροις· ἐγὼ δὲ ἐκ πάντων τούτων τὰ μέγιστα καὶ ὁμόφυλα συνθεὶς τοῦτον καινὸν καὶ πολυειδῆ τὸν λόγον ποιήσομαι.

(FGrH 6 F 4 = DK 86 B 6)

Of these, perhaps some have been said by Orpheus, others by Mousaeus, briefly, here and there, and others by Hesiod, Homer, and by other poets and those writing in prose, some by Greeks and others by non-Greeks. I, placing together the greatest and those akin to one another out of all of these, will fashion this novel and multiform logos.

In its promise to include the work of these early Greek poets in addition to other poets and prose writers, including non-Greeks, the Collection advertises itself as an encyclopaedic compilation of knowledge. Like the Histories, a selectivity principle is “greatness,” yet novelty too is thematized, as Hippias builds a wisdom tradition in a manner that may be evocative of later doxography. Unfortunately, the contents of the Collection have been almost entirely lost.⁸⁴ We do know that it discussed, for example, the wisdom of the famed Milesian beauty, Thargelia – a woman who Aspasia was said to pattern herself upon – Thargelia was known for “commanding cities and rulers” and for bringing a number of Greek poleis to terms with the Persian king Xerxes during his invasion.⁸⁵

The totalizing research of the philosophers is neatly encapsulated in the biographical portrait of Hippias that survives.⁸⁶ The sources point to his virtuoso ability to compose epic verse, dithyramb, tragedy, and elegy, as well as prose of all kinds (A 12). In addition to the Collection, we know of his Names of Ethne and a systematization of Greek chronology in the Catalogue of Olympic Winners. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, Socrates inquires what kind of discourses Hippias performs during his visits to Sparta. After amusingly describing Sparta’s distaste for lectures on cosmology, mathematics, grammar, and music theory, all of which Hippias is fully capable of delivering, he informs Socrates that they particularly enjoy speeches “on the generations of heroes and men and of the founding of cities in antiquity, and all ancient logoi (ἀρχαιολογίας) altogether they listen to most favourably.”⁸⁷ In addition to the familiar philosophical meditations on the heavens, geometry, and rhetoric, it is significant that the sophist included chronology, genealogy, and ancient history in his research program. Beyond these speeches in Sparta and the publication of the Collection, this is substantiated by Hippias’ apparent decision to respond to Hellanicus’ chronological catalog, the Priestesses of Hera in Argos, with his own catalog based on the Olympiad. What this indicates is that the universalizing tendencies of early Greek philosophy could and did include the study of the past in its project.⁸⁸

In speaking of the early Greek philosophical inquiry into nature, André Laks has affirmed the importance of discursive universality but has also stressed the study of origins as equally characteristic of the Presocratics: “On the one hand, it is directed toward a totality … on the other hand, it adopts a resolutely genetic perspective (it explains the existing conditions of things by tracing the history of its development from the origins).”⁸⁹ We have already seen that the Histories promises a totalizing historical undertaking. What of the second element Laks discusses, the inclination to assess cause? For this, we can start by looking to the final line of Herodotus’ preface, which turns away from the general to the specific reasons for immortalizing the Greek and non-Greek past: “and in particular that the reason they warred against one another (not be without fame)” (1.p καὶ <δὴ καὶ> δι’ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι).⁹⁰ This summation further clarifies the scope of the inquiry by pointing to its interest in genetic analysis. It looks to the origin of the war and to the attribution of blame as its cause. If we turn to the early Greek philosophical corpus for context, it must be admitted that the terms αἰτία (aitia), αἴτιος (aitios), and πρόφασις (prophasis) are in fact quite rare. But a contemporary of Herodotus’, Gorgias, in his rhetorical treatise the Encomium of Helen, lays out the plan of his speech by stating, “I will advance to the beginning of the coming argument, and I will set out the causes on account of which it was likely (προθήσομαι τὰς αἰτίας, δι’ ἃς εἰκὸς) that Helen’s expedition to Troy occurred” (DK 82 B 11.5).⁹¹ Herodotus’ younger contemporary, Democritus, apparently stated that “the cause (αἰτίη) of error is ignorance of what is better” (DK 68 B 83). Elsewhere he is reported to have preferred to “discover one causal explanation (αἰτιολογίαν) rather than become the king of the Persians” (B 118).⁹² As we saw above, the author of On Ancient Medicine aimed to demarcate the art of medicine as distinct and did so by separating the questions of those “like Empedocles,” who inquire into “what a man is from the beginning, and how he first came about, and from where he was constructed” (20: ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὅ τί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος, καὶ ὅπως ἐγένετο πρῶτον καὶ ὁπόθεν συνεπάγη). The doctor clarifies that it is impossible to know “this historie on what a man is and through what causes he arose” (δι᾿ οἵας αἰτίας γίνεται) until the art of medicine has been perfected.⁹³ In the extant fragments, Empedocles himself never uses the term αἰτία, but he is rightly interpreted as being interested in the project of origins and causes even so. So too Protagoras and Pericles apparently spent an entire day discussing the death of Epitimus of Pharsalus, who had been struck by a javelin in a pentathlon. Their conversation centered on the one who was more responsible (μᾶλλον … αἰτίους) for his death – the javelin, the man who threw it, or the presiders over the contest (DK 80 A 10). The more common language found in the Presocratics is ἀρχή (arche), “beginning” or “origin.”⁹⁴ The learned Persians, according to Herodotus, explain the “beginning” (τὴν ἀρχὴν) of the enmity as arising from the Greek sack of Troy (1.5.1).⁹⁵

In the period before and after Herodotus wrote, memorializing the Greco-Persian Wars fell largely within the province of poetic composition.⁹⁶ Indeed, its best attested thematic relatives are in epigram,⁹⁷ Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus and Phoenician Women, Aeschylus’ Persians, Simonides’ elegiac poetry, and shortly after Herodotus, Timotheus of Miletus’ Persai and Choerilus of Samos’ epic Persika.⁹⁸ In light of this, beyond the rhetoric of the preface that we examined above, the Histories’ medium of Ionic prose also indicates its position in the field of contemporary literature.⁹⁹ It is true that Xenophanes, Parmenides, and, later, Empedocles composed philosophy in verse, but this practice virtually disappears with them. From Anaxagoras onward, the default medium of philosophy is prose. Even Parmenides’ intellectual successors, Melissus and Zeno, continued his project in prose. If it is correct to see the shadowy works of Anaximander and Anaximenes as prose works in addition to the known prose of Pherecydes and later, Heraclitus, then these mid-fifth-century philosophers may have been returning philosophy to its traditional medium.¹⁰⁰ Prose philosophical works abandon the traditional appeal to the Muses and in doing so cultivate a different kind of authority. This validation is an implicit – and at times explicit – rebuke of the traditional didactic preeminence of Homer and Hesiod. The Histories also capitalizes on the new uses to which prose is being put.¹⁰¹ Like the philosophers, Herodotus rejects the traditional authority of the Muses, creating a contractual, provisional authority that is underpinned by the research of the narrator and the adjudication of his audience.¹⁰²

The Histories must be situated in light of the expectations of the reading community of its time.¹⁰³ The preface’s generic signals place it in a literary context that is not exactly one of splendid isolation. Drawing attention to the proem’s horizon of expectations demonstrates its contacts with the Presocratic intellectual tradition. The generic experimentation evident in the philosophers in this period, as in Hippias, points to the audience’s ability to navigate innovative generic forms. These readers were regularly placed, as we shall see, in the position of adapting their literary expectations to the flexible dynamism of Presocratic thinkers. The audience of the Histories is in a parallel position.

Using philosophy to leverage knowledge about historiography immediately confronts the messy reality that “philosophy” itself only emerges as a discrete discipline in the fourth century BCE.¹⁰⁴ That is to say, if generic contextualization of the Histories has remained opaque, this is partly because intellectual culture has yet to explicitly define itself into separate disciplines. No one is a “historian” but nor do intellectuals define themselves as “philosophers” yet either. The term “philosopher” itself makes this clear. Its first extant use is in Heraclitus’ declaration: “For it is necessary for men who are lovers of wisdom to be inquirers into quite a lot of things” (χρὴ γὰρ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι).¹⁰⁵ References to the “love of wisdom” increase from the middle of the century; we saw above that the author of On Ancient Medicine attributes the questions regarding what a man is from the beginning, how he came into being, and from what material to philosophia, issues separate from the study of medicine proper (20). Further, Gorgias’ Encomium mentions the need to learn “philosophical arguments” (B 11.13) in the context of persuasive rhetoric. Clearly Herodotus’ Croesus picks up on the term’s stress of the desire for learning in his description of Solon as one who travels as a “lover of wisdom”; and Prodicus was said to refer to the wisest individual as occupying the territory of the “philosopher” and the statesman (Pl. Euthyd. 305c). Its use in the context of “philosophy,” “rhetoric,” and “history” is reflective of the broad intellectual project of the Presocratics and a lack of firm disciplinary boundaries. Still, even in these early references there is an effort to define or delimit the activity of the “love of wisdom”: it can be the knowledge acquired by inquiry and travel; it may constitute persuasion – but is not in the sphere of those who study the heavens or who give speeches to thrill the masses; it can serve as the search for origins and constitution – not the practice of medicine; and it can refer to theoretical activity – not that of the active politician.¹⁰⁶ Conceptual narrowing is obvious in the Dissoi Logoi too, a text that begins by claiming that there are two arguments made “by those philosophizing (ὑπὸ τῶν φιλοσοφούντων) about good and bad” (DK 90 B 1.1).¹⁰⁷

Philosophia arises out of the broader word for wisdom or skill, sophia, which is the more common expression for philosophical understanding in the sixth and fifth centuries.¹⁰⁸ It and its cognates are an umbrella for skill in a given activity. It encompasses expertise in craftsmanship (Il. 15.412), the discovery and playing of musical instruments (h.Merc. 511), and musical talent in general (F 306 MW).¹⁰⁹ It becomes a general concept for acute mental faculties: according to Solon, “wisdom” declines in those over sixty-three years of age (Philo, de opif. mundi 104.16). Pindar puts it in the province of rulers, in a fragment that describes Persephone sending up the souls of men who become kings, who are “greatest in wisdom” (F 133.4). Elsewhere, he claims that it is hateful “wisdom” to recount the wars of the gods (Ol. 9.38). Anaxagoras is said to have held that humans as a whole have power to exploit animals through “experience, wisdom, and skill” (B 21b). The word includes mastery of a craft as well as knowledge in a more general sense. As an agent, it approaches the notion of an “expert.”¹¹⁰ The wise, sophoi, encompass a diverse cast of philosophers, poets, musicians, doctors, scientists, artisans, and seers. For this reason, it is impossible to separate the wisdom tradition from what will come to be the disciplines of philosophy, science, the arts, and medicine. The capaciousness of the ancient concept is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Theognis, for whom sophia “stronger than inflexibility,” is comparable to an octopus whose color changes with each passage to a new rock (1.212–17 Young).

In the fifth century, the term “sophist” (σοφιστής) emerges and is nearly indistinguishable from the sophos.¹¹¹ Pindar and Aeschylus use it in reference to musical experts (Isth. 5.28; Aesch. F 314).¹¹² It also can indicate an “intellectual” or “deviser,” with their respective positive and negative valences.¹¹³ Apparently, Diogenes of Apollonia used the term for the natural philosophers (φυσιολόγους) who he aimed his work against (DK 64 A 4), a usage that seems to follow the author of On Ancient Medicine’s reference to sophists as those who wrote about nature.¹¹⁴ Aristophanes’ Socrates humorously identifies the sophists as diviners, medical practitioners, lazy long-haired dandies with rings, song-twisters of the dithyramb chorus, quacks who call themselves astronomy experts, and composers (Nub. 331–4). Herodotus’ own usage tracks this level of generality, though without negative connotations: the political and ethical wisdom figures – including Solon – who visit the court of Croesus are sophists (1.29);¹¹⁵ sophists teach the worship of Dionysus following Melampus’ Egyptian borrowings (2.49.1); finally, Pythagoras is a sophist (4.95.2). The absence of fine-grained distinctions among intellectuals in the period in which Herodotus is writing reaffirms the trouble that comes with interpreting philosophical inquiry in isolation. Still, in spite of the capacious research interests and the absence of hardened discursive boundaries in the wisdom tradition, there remain family resemblances in philosophical-scientific treatises stretching back over a century by the time Herodotus was composing. The swathe of natural scientific, ethical, theological, linguistic, and rhetorical topoi parodied in, for example, Aristophanes’ Clouds suggests the presence of a set of diverse but recognizable concerns that preoccupied intellectual culture. Moreover, the engagement of fifth-century comedy, tragedy, and medical treatises with this material confirms these questions had a broad audience.¹¹⁶

What then are we to call this group? I have chosen to refer to it as “Presocratic” in this book, but this language is not uncontroversial. The word only appears in the late eighteenth century and is popularized in Hermann Diels’ seminal edition of the early Greek philosophers, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903).¹¹⁷ One virtue of Diels’ designation is that it includes the natural philosophers and also the so-called sophists, who should be read alongside one another. A failing is that it regularly misses relevant material from tragedians, comic poets, and historians. But beyond the anachronism of the designation “Presocratic” and its narrow breadth, there are chronological and thematic problems that arise in referring to these figures as pre-Socratic. Chronologically, the philosophers included in Diels’ edition continue into the fourth century, following the death of Socrates. The more pressing issue for our purposes is that in neither content nor method are they radically different from what we are given to understand of Socrates’ own philosophy. Thematically, they focus on – among other things – natural philosophy and the human, subjects of inquiry not qualitatively different from Socrates, at least according to Aristophanes. By contrast, Plato and Xenophon agree that Socrates was suspicious of natural philosophy, but he is not alone in this either, even if his reasons for suspicion appear unique.¹¹⁸ Nor is Socrates the first to practice the dialectic method, the discussion through question and answer.¹¹⁹ The above qualifications of Socrates’ distinctiveness may be rejected as too extreme. But interpreting him as a watershed figure in the history of philosophy depends largely on a Platonic reading of Socrates. For all of these reasons, perhaps “Pre-Platonic” would be preferable or “early Greek philosophers.”¹²⁰ By convention, I continue to use the label “Presocratic” for its ready familiarity and its ability to demarcate the figures in the sixth and fifth centuries in what will become the fields of science and philosophy, with an awareness that Socrates may not be quite the transitional figure that this language presupposes and that this group embraces a larger class than what is found in Diels.¹²¹

Conclusion: Clio, Love of Wisdom

Genres have no essence and no clear boundaries. They survive by change both diachronic and synchronic.¹²² Since their taxonomies are unstable, it is easiest to rely upon meta-commentary to do the work of identifying what constitutes a work’s place in a particular genre. Yet this placement is wholly dependent upon the audience that negotiates its status. Status is liable to shift given new and ever-changing audience expectations within a genre. This is evident in the Histories’ reception as historiography but equally in its rejection by later authors as historiography due to its perceived failure to observe the standards of the tradition. Ctesias apparently called Herodotus a liar and a λογοποιός (logopoios), “writer of tall tales” (FGrH 688 F 8); Ps.-Aristotle dubs him a μυθογράφος (“writer of legends”) in the context of his discussion of the flooding of the Nile (BNJ 87 F 79a); for Dio Chrysostom too he is a λογοποιός, in a reference to his false stories about Corinth (Or. 37.7); and Lucian uses the same term of Herodotus’ tale that Arganthonius lived to 150 years of age, which Lucian confirms some refer to as a mythos (Macrobii 10). So too Plutarch exploits the negative post-Platonic conception of the sophists’ activities by arguing that Herodotus’ inquiry tracks their own practice of making the worse account the better (Malice 855e). In each of these instances, Herodotus’ standing as a historian is undermined by the suggestion that his Histories does not quite meet the requirements of the genre.¹²³

Since there is little explicit ancient critical discussion of historiography as a genre, it is often necessary to rely on the discursive practice of historiography as a guide, which implies certain expectations and values about historiography as a genre. In the first section of this chapter, we saw that the dialogue between Solon and Croesus on the nature of human well-being serves as a metanarrative for the Histories’ exploration of philosophical questions through its reflection upon the human past. Solon’s calculation of the days constituting a man’s life totalled them at twenty-six thousand, two hundred and fifty. It is an impressively large number – even if the math has been fudged. But this display-piece is only marshalled in order for Solon to conclude that no day mirrors another, that is, even a sage can make no prognostication on Croesus’ well-being because of the impossibility of using individual experience as a guide. Instead, Solon turns to Athenian and Argive history. In this way, the human past is exploited for philosophical clarity. The remainder of the book will develop this insight and suggest that Herodotean inquiry can be fruitfully considered as a product of fifth-century intellectual culture.

But what precisely might we gain from redrawing these generic boundaries? Situating early Greek historiography in its context in the fifth century is not simply a matter of broadening Herodotus’ intellectual affinities. These questions determine how we understand the rise of historiography as a genre and the direction that it subsequently takes. The poly-generic nature of historiography continues long after it has become a discrete discipline. Diodorus Siculus, for example, opens his universal history with a return to the issue of human eudaimonia. Well-being is perfected, he maintains, through exposure to men founding cities, passing just legislation, and inventing new arts and sciences for the benefit of mankind. Above all, historiography confronts its audience with these actions and causes the individual to move toward self-fashioning. History is, Diodorus then proclaims, “as though a mother-city of all philosophy” (1.2.2: τῆς ὅλης φιλοσοφίας οἱονεὶ μητρόπολιν οὖσαν).¹²⁴ The metaphor indicates the intellectual dependency of philosophy on historiography and the marked priority of the latter. Diodorus’ interpretation is evidently not responding directly to the Histories. Nonetheless, it approaches the project of historiography from a similar standpoint, one that is responding to the interests and the intellectual relationships that the Histories, in part, determines. Of course, we could interpret this as history’s evolution from generic purity to miscegenation, as an attempt to draw upon the enormous cultural cachet granted to philosophy. Yet this commits historiography to a generic essentialism that begs the question.

The interpretation of historiography as a genre capable of expressing philosophical truths is, significantly, ubiquitous in the reception of Herodotus’ immediate successor, Thucydides. In making an argument that philosophy advances a “common character,” the anonymous author of the Ars rhetorica uses, after Plato, Thucydides’ methodological statement on the clarity to be gained on the future by his work to make the case for philosophy operating through history (1.22): “Thucydides seems to say this when he speaks about history, that history is philosophy by examples.”¹²⁵ Whether or not Thucydides is in fact advocating this in his statement on the utility of his work, his History is being understood as doing the same work as philosophy. Likewise, the tradition in the Vita of Marcellinus places the Athenian historian in the company of the great sophists and philosophers, Gorgias (36, 51), Antiphon (22), Anaxagoras (22), and Prodicus (36).¹²⁶ In those speeches that admit an answering speech, we are told that the historian “philosophizes” (53). Despite the dubious historical value of the ancient biography, this work represents a critical window into the ancient reception of Thucydides, one that saw his History as emerging out of an environment of fifth-century philosophical thought. There is no image so revealing of this interpretation as Marcellinus’ description of Thucydides composing his history “under a plane tree” (25: ὑπὸ πλατάνῳ ἔγραφεν) – the locus philosophicus beginning with Plato’s Phaedrus.¹²⁷

If Thucydidean historiography is interpreted as poly-generic, it is not alone.¹²⁸ In the second century BCE, Polybius accused Timaeus of slandering others with words that he himself could be described with, asserting that Timaeus was argumentative, a liar, and audacious. He was even “unphilosophical” (ἀφιλόσοφος).¹²⁹ If, as it seems, Polybius is turning Timaeus’ criticism of others against him, then Timaeus’ insult may have been levied against the historian and nephew of Aristotle accompanying Alexander the Great, Callisthenes. We are told that Timaeus said that Callisthenes was a flatterer and “quite distant from philosophy” (πλεῖστον ἀπέχειν φιλοσοφίας), writing as he did.¹³⁰ In the same fragment, Callisthenes is subsequently identified as a philosopher but as one who is struck down by the divine for his actions in supporting the impious deification of the mortal Alexander. Elsewhere, Polybius accuses Timaeus and his ilk of falling into the trap of the Academic Sceptics, with their obsession over paradox and doubt (12.26c–d). This set of references to philosophy and historiography in Polybius is as valuable as it is difficult to parse given the fragmentary nature of all three of the historians. Callisthenes’ identification as a philosopher by Timaeus may signal that Callisthenes’ reputation as one – he is commonly referred to as one in the sources – arose from self-identification in his work;¹³¹ this would be what Timaeus challenges or ironizes. Meanwhile Polybius’ criticism against Timaeus as “unphilosophical” suggests the aspiration of the ideal historian is just this. Polybius’ further warnings about the dangers of Timaeus’ turn toward the paradoxical imply that he was concerned to interpret the historian within the context of a philosophical intellectual culture. Theopompus seems to have made a similar claim in the preface to his Philippica, opposing the acquisitive sophistic activities of his contemporaries, Isocrates and Theodectes, with his own self-sufficient philosophical study (αὐτάρκως ἔχοντας … ἀεὶ τὴν διατριβὴν ἐν τῷ φιλοσοφεῖν καὶ φιλομαθεῖν ποιεῖσθαι).¹³² More detailed information on this kind of historiography is present in the philosopher Posidonius’ Histories, which was said to be composed “no differently than his philosophy” (FGrH 87 T 12a). Indeed, he is continually referred to as a philosopher and not a historian in spite of the historical content of both of his known published works. A similar hybridity could be seen, we are told, in the account of one Cleombrotus of Sparta, who composed his history as material for his philosophy.¹³³ This phenomenon was common enough to be parodied in Lucian’s How to Write History, which tells of an anonymous historian of the Parthian War who established in his proem that the philosopher alone should write history.¹³⁴

Situating Herodotus in line with Presocratic culture will demonstrate that this historie contains generic miscegenation already in the fifth century that made it receptive to the concerns of later philosophy. If this argument is persuasive, then the above examples cannot be interpreted quite so readily as departures from the generic purity of historiography but will be continuing to draw on philosophy’s relationship to the inquiry into the human past.¹³⁵ That is, historiography will be competing with philosophy for authority in the field of Greek paideia as it comes to have its own generic self-consciousness, but this competition is itself partly determined by a shared discursive framework.

The aim of the book is to situate Herodotus as an active participant in philosophical debates in the fifth century, a fact that will simultaneously enrich a literary reading of the Histories. As one of the few complete works of scientific historie to survive from the fifth century, this text has the potential to deepen our awareness of the problems occupying contemporary philosophical intellectuals, in particular in light of its own aspirations. This is part of a broader effort to demonstrate the presence of philosophical language and themes in historiography, suggesting that we should expand our understanding of the poetics of historiography and its horizon of expectation. The following chapters canvass debates on custom, self-interest, nature, and epistemology in the Histories and demonstrate engagement in various ways. Philosophy contributes to the nascent genre thematically, as in the recurrence of issues centering on relativism. It underwrites historie through aetiology, by using the circumscribed boundaries of “human nature” as a means of explaining human action. In addition, it orients the text methodologically, in its contestation of truth claims and its problematization of verification. These modes of philosophical interaction should not be taken as exhaustive. That is, the book does not attempt to consider every passage in which philosophical “influence” has been detected. In each instance, it considers a prominent philosophical concept or set of intersecting questions, by exploring its position in the intellectual tradition broadly conceived. It proceeds by close philological reading of the Histories’ engagement with such debates, although intertextuality alone will not be the barometer of interaction.

In Chapter 2, “Relativism, King of All,” we turn to Herodotus’ engagement with the philosophical debate on relativism. There is a common consensus that Herodotus supports nomos in the Histories without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this interpretation fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Presocratic thinkers were likewise working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. As we shall see, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

Chapter 3, “The Pull of Tradition: Egoism and Persian Revolution,” moves to the debate on self-interest and profit and its impact on traditional ethics. Fifth-century intellectual culture reveals a variety of positions on how to view human action undertaken to maximize self-interest. Herodotus’ narration of the conspiracy to dethrone the False Smerdis is a key episode demonstrating the contest between the concerns of the individual and the plurality, in particular in terms of the actions and speeches of Otanes, Darius, and Prexaspes on the individual and the community and on truth and falsehood. The chapter analyzes the conspiracy and its aftermath alongside, among other texts, Antiphon’s On Truth and Sophocles’Philoctetes. Though the Histories is seldom put in dialogue with these works, the chapter argues that they share a common interest in the consequences of rugged individualism for the civic body. The ascension of Darius as the Great King through self-interest establishes the persistence of the profit motive in the figure of the ruler and its deleterious effects on the populace.

The concentration on ethical debates surrounding custom and advantage transitions in Chapter 4, “History peri physeos,” to the role of physis in the Histories. This concept has long been neglected in Herodotus, in large part due to the prominence of its counterpart, nomos, but also because of the absence of a strong opposition of nomos and physis. When it has been treated, it has been by anachronistically viewing natural environment as synonymous with physis. By contrast, this chapter challenges the assimilation of environment to physis. It argues that Herodotean physis is characterized as a set of stable underlying characteristics that creates limits on form and action. Significantly, environmental conditions are not viewed as informing human physis, which is seen as stable across regional difference, in contrast with, for example, the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places. The consistency of physis removes human nature as a causal paradigm for explaining action on, for example, the battlefield.

How does the Histories explain the success of the Greeks against the vastly superior force of the Persians in the Greco-Persian Wars? Chapter 5, “Physis on the Battlefield,” turns to an important motif in the work, the potential of surpassing physis. Presocratic, and later, Platonic thinkers were equally interested in the question of whether and how one might master human nature. In the Histories, this discussion is connected to issues of compulsion and bravery. It becomes evident, however, that the explanatory power of transcending physis has its limits and that the expectations of the historical actors in the text who refer to it are not straightforwardly confirmed by the narrative action. The juxtaposition of speech and deed points to Herodotus’ problematization of physis as a causal paradigm explaining success.

Herodotus’ unique “voiceprint” has attracted much attention from modern scholars. Chapter 6, “Historical Inquiry and Presocratic Epistemology,” picks up this interest in the narratorial voice in terms of Herodotus’ reticence in making firm truth claims. In line with Presocratic thinkers reimagining the relationship of their work to truth and authoritative discourse, the Histories often cultivates a resistance to epistemic certainty. “What is said” and “what seems” are found with much greater frequency than “what is true.” Juxtaposing the Histories with contemporary discussions on epistemology will demonstrate the extent to which claims to the truth were problematized as a standard of inquiry in the fifth century.

This book cannot hope to canvass all interactions between historiography and philosophy in the period under consideration. Its focus upon the Histories and its relation to intellectual culture looks to specific debates and attempts to contextualize their presence in what will become the genre of historiography. It is to be hoped that this will spur additional research. Chapter 7, “Herodotean Philosophy,” takes the Dissoi Logoi as a case study on the reception of Herodotus by philosophy in the early fourth century. The treatise’s engagement with relativism and the Histories will illuminate the early impact Herodotus made on sophistic circles, pointing toward the role of historiography avant la lettre in the generation and communication of philosophical insight.