Whom did Telephus defend in Telephus? We know that he defended himself; fr. 710 proves that. It is widely, and I believe rightly, held that he defended the Trojans also; but this has been denied by some scholars, most recently by David Sansone in an article on the date of Herodotus' publication. In the first part of this paper I shall comment on Sansone' arguments and offer a defence of the conventional view; I shall then make some rather speculative suggestions (...) concerning the reconstruction of the play. (shrink)

Herodotus uses the encounter between the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras and the Spartan king Cleomenes to further his authorial self-presentation. He contrasts his own aims and methods as an inquirer with those of Aristagoras, who becomes a “rival” inquirer for Herodotus in this passage. Seeking military aid from Cleomenes for the Ionian Revolt, Aristagoras points to his bronze map of the world and gives an ethnographical and geographical account of the peoples and land of Asia, from Ionia to Susa. Aristagoras accordingly (...) takes on many of the characteristics of Herodotus himself, including the use of shared ethnographical language. Aristagoras' ethnographical account is marred, however, by a rhetorical strategy that depicts the Asians as wealthy, but weak adversaries. While careful not to criticize Aristagoras' map itself, Herodotus is able to exploit Aristagoras' verbal description of his map to illustrate his own forthcoming account of the Persian Royal Road , which Herodotus assures readers is even more “accurate” than Aristagoras' account had been . Aristagoras is “deceiving” Cleomenes “well,” says Herodotus, until he tells the “truth” about the length of the journey to Susa . Telling the truth is a mistake for the deceiver Aristagoras, but an obligation for the inquirer Herodotus. (shrink)

In the 1903 season of excavations at Naucratis two sherds of Athenian pottery, inscribed with the name of a Herodotus, were found. They were subsequently presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford by the excavator, D. G. Hogarth. In this note I would like to question the supposed relationship between these two ‘signatures’ and the historian Herodotus, who dedicated part of his work to a study of Egypt.

As a Platonist and moralist Plutarch paid particular attention truth. No wonder that in his reference to Herodotus’ Histories he took into consideration the issue of historical truth, which was for him very important — both in its ethical as well as didactic aspect. In his De Herodoti malignitate the Chaeronean moralist is concerned with truth as well as with offering moral uplift. Plutarch presents Herodotus as a perfidious liar who falsely presented such famous and heroic Greeks as Miltiades, Leonidas, (...) Themistocles or Pausanias and — above all — depreciatingly treated the Boeotians and Corinthians. Moreover, Plutarch accuses the historian of Halicarnassus of being malicious. For him Herodotus’ lies were deliberate and slandering. Herodotus was also a blasphemer, a pro-barbarian historian; a man who disregarded women. Finally, we get the Plutarchan portrait of Herodotus himself as a blunt barbarian. Such a presentation of Herodotus seems to attest to Plutarch’s own prejudices, if not wickedness. By the same, however, one must take into consideration the literary tradition in which the whole treatise is rooted. So De Herodoti malignitate contains features of historical polemics and is an example of judicial rhetoric, in which the biographer attempts at persuading his readers that his charges against Herodotus are well justified. The treatise is a work representing the new intellectual trend, the so-called Second Sophistic; a polemic written in a period when the Greek intellectuals were deeply engaged in taking issues with past writers. Moreover, a fundamental aspect of De Herodoti malignitate should be taken into account — truth which is analyzed from a moral and psychological perspective. Although a leading motif of the treatise is truthfulness, the direct subject-matter of Plutarch’s considerations remains a lie, or — to put it exactly — lying. Accordingly, the Boeotian moralist singles out and analyses all the fundamental forms of lying. A suitable interpretation of the treatise De Herodoti malignitate depends thus on our knowledge of the cultural distance between Herodotus and Plutarch, although both authors were the representatives of Greek prosa. (shrink)

This article attempts to gather the evidence for panhellenism in the fifth century B.C. and to trace its development both as a political program and as a popular ideology. Panhellenism is here defined as the idea that the various Greek city-states could solve their political disputes and simultaneously enrich themselves by uniting in common cause and conquering all or part of the Persian empire. An attempt is made to trace the evidence for panhellenism throughout the fifth century by combining different (...) kinds of evidence: that is, both poetic and historical texts, as well as the testimonia for monuments which are no longer extant. Any thought of a panhellenic crusade was impossible before the Persian invasions, but such an expedition, under the dual leadership of Athens and Sparta, was espoused by Cimon. After his death it remained an item of popular talk for the rest of the century and this talk intensified during the second half of the Peloponnesian War. The paper has six parts: the first finds hints of panhellenist ideology in the fragments of Simonides' Plataea elegy and in Aeschylus' Persians. The second part attempts to explain several puzzling passages in Herodotus in terms of his reflecting contemporary panhellenist discourse, especially in his account of Aristagoras of Miletus at Sparta. Part three reconstructs Cimon' s belief in dual hegemony and his plans for a joint Athenian-Spartan expedition against the Persian empire. Part four connects an anecdote about Miltiades with the Cimonian monuments and argues that the artistic program of the Stoa Poikile was intended to support Cimon's panhellenist aspirations. Part five discusses panhellenist sentiments in late fifth-century Greek poetry, and dates the Olympic Oration and Funeral Oration of Gorgias to the period 408-405 B.C., Finally, part six relates the panhellenist writings of Isocrates to earlier developments. (shrink)