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.

The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi offers an example of how an ancient cult site was transformed into a Panhellenic sanctuary as a result of political and military conflicts involving some of the leading city-states of the region. After the so-called First Sacred War in the 590s/80s BC, Delphi was launched as the center of the Greek world with its oracle and its Panhellenic games. The Doric style of the Apollo temple and other buildings on the site helped to communicate the ambitions and values of the amphictyony that was in charge of the administration of the sanctuary after the war. The standardization of architecture and sculpture was an important feature in the elite competition that took place in Panhellenic sanctuaries like Delphi, where cities from all over Greece set up costly treasuries and votive statues. Ionic monuments such as the sphinx of the Naxians alternated with Doric buildings. On the basis of recent scholarship, the Ionic order can be interpreted as a regional variation of the “Panhellenic” Doric order. As can be shown, the Ionic order corresponds with cultural values such as abundance, variety, multilingualism, and openness toward Near-Eastern and Egyptian influences that are also characteristic of Ionian poetry, philosophy, and culture.

The analogy between the divine order of the kosmos and the human order of the polis was well established in Greek thought and the basis of a persistent but evolving political cosmology that attempted to link human and divine. The analogy is well attested in both literary evidence and the use of kosmos-derived terms in archaic political structures from several Greek cities. But this analogy was unstable, as philosophical ideas of nature and the divine challenged one side of it and the development of the civic microcosm of the polis, and particularly radical Athenian democracy, challenged the other. The traditional form of the analogy represented by Homeric epic was inherently conservative, in placing Zeus and kings (basileis) in the same position in each side of the analogy, controlling the ordering of cosmic and civic elements respectively, and the office of kosmos, seen particularly in the cities of Crete, replicated that. This chapter explores the use of analogies between macrocosm and microcosm in the political language of the polis, evidenced by epigraphy, and in a range of literary genres from Homeric epic to old comedy, historiography and philosophy.