Herodotus and the Presocratics
Herodotus’ Histories was composed well before the genre of Greek historiography emerged as a distinct narrative enterprise. This book explores the Histories’ place in its fifth-century BCE context, juxtaposing the text with the extant fragments of Presocratic treatises, as well as philosophizing tragedy and comedy. In doing so, it argues for the Histories’ competitive engagement with contemporary intellectual culture. It demonstrates the ambition of the Histories as an experimental prose work, tracing its responses to key debates on relativism, human nature, and epistemology. In addition to expanding the intellectual milieu of which the Histories is a part and restoring its place in Presocratic thought, K. Scarlett Kingsley elucidates fourth-century philosophy’s subsequent engagement with the work. In doing so, she contributes to a revision of the sharp separation between the ancient genres of philosophy and history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
K. Scarlett Kingsley is an assistant professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College. She is the coeditor, with Tim Rood and Giustina Monti, of The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (2023) and is currently coauthoring Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus: Reading the End of the Histories (forthcoming) with Tim Rood.
Open access