Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature by N. Bryant Kirkland

Author:N. Bryant Kirkland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Removable Eyes

Lucian and the Truths of Herodotus

Across Herodotus’s Histories, nothing seems certain except uncertainty and change.1 A quality of instability applies not only to the fortunes of the work’s many actors but also to the reader’s experience in negotiating chronological jumps, shifts in topic, and apparent digressions. Herodotus’s sprawling text has a formal variety that recapitulates thematic focus: instability inheres in both the work’s documentation of the “circle of human affairs” (1.207.2) and the reader’s effort to reduce diffuseness to one clear pattern, amid analepses, prolepses, and diverting logoi that can make reading itself feel destabilizing. And if instability in Herodotus has narratological dimensions that mirror its content, it is also the case that Herodotus’s thematic focus on instability encompasses more than just the rise and fall of various places. As scholars have shown, the Histories has the capacity to unseat an easy sense of fixed identity, too.2 The work’s ethnographic features may lure readers into a sense of patterned fixity—“Greeks behave this way, Persians that way,” and so on—but such would-be patterns inevitably belie the complexity of Herodotus’s world.3

Relatively early on in the work, for instance, Herodotus gives readers cause to doubt ethnographic essentialism when he describes how the Lydians, seemingly overnight, undertook a complete change in lifestyle (τὴν πᾶσαν δίαιταν τῆς ζόης μετέβαλον) by adopting new clothes, surrendering weapons, teaching their sons to be salesmen, and taking up the cithara and harp (1.157.2). Typical markers of ethnographic enumeration—clothes, customs, familial relations—factor here as evidence of willed change, not unbroken tradition. As W. R. Connor has written, “Being Ionian (or Dorian, or Aeolian) . . . was a decision, conscious or unconscious, not an automatic inheritance from one’s ancestors.”4 Other instances of altered names, newly adopted allegiances, and deviations from expected custom only amplify this sense that change in Herodotus is not restricted to shifts up and down in fortune but can, in fact, embrace fundamental reconfigurations of identity. Compare Herodotus’s expressions of uncertainty in discussing the Caunians:

The Caunians I myself believe to be natives of the land, but according to their own account they came originally from Crete. Concerning dialect, they have come to sound like the Carians—or the Carians have come to sound like them. I cannot say for sure which way round it should be. In their way of life they differ greatly from other humans and from the Carians. (1.172.1)

Οἱ δὲ Καύνιοι αὐτόχθονες δοκέειν ἐμοί εἰσι, αὐτοὶ μέντοι ἐκ Κρήτης φασὶ εἶναι. προσκεχωρήκασι δὲ γλῶσσαν μὲν πρὸς τὸ Καρικὸν ἔθνος, ἢ οἱ Κᾶρες πρὸς τὸ Καυνικόν (τοῦτο γὰρ οὐκ ἔχω ἀτρεκέως διακρῖναι), νόμοισι δὲ χρέωνται κεχωρισμένοισι πολλὸν τῶν τε ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων καὶ Καρῶν.

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