Greek Literature in the Classical Period: The Prose of Historiography and Oratory

Greek Literature

Gregory Nagy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136540516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume is available on its own or as part of the seven volume set, Greek Literature. This collection reprints in facsimile the most influential scholarship published in this field during the twentieth century. For a complete list of the volume titles in this set, see the listing for Greek Literature [ISBN 0-8153-3681-0]. A full table of contents can be obtained by email: [email protected].

NARRATIVE SURFACE AND AUTHORIAL VOICE IN HERODOTUS' HISTORIES

CAROLYN DEWALD

It is a topos nowadays that an author does not just construct his text but also encodes into it a narrative contract: he writes into the. text the rules by which his audience is to read it, how we are to understand his performance as author and our own responsibilities and legitimate pleasures as readers.¹ Judged by the standards of later historical prose, the narrative contract that Herodotus establishes between himself, the author, and ourselves, his readers, is a peculiar one. Its rules are very odd indeed. Here I would like to explore two aspects of those rules: the construction of the narrative surface and of the authorial “I” within it. Both these aspects of Herodotus' rhetoric have generally been evaluated against the standard practices of history writing. But if we look at Herodotus' narrative surface and authorial voice on their own terms, the contract they suggest is not (at least in some essentials) a historical one. The Herodotus I would like to propose here is a heroic warrior. Like Menelaus on the sands of Egypt, he struggles with a fearsome beast — and wins. The antagonist that Herodotus struggles with is, like many mythic beasts, a polymorphously fearsome oddity; it consists of the logos, or collection of logoi, that comprise the narrative of the Histories. What Herodotus, like Menelaus, wants from his contest is accurate information. The Histories Herodotus has given us are the record of his heroic encounter: his exploits in capturing the logoi and his struggles to pin them down and make them speak to him the truths that they contain.²

The most obvious difference between Herodotus' rhetoric and that of later history writing lies in the way that Herodotus writes the ongoing narrative account, the res gestae of the Histories. What becomes the standard for conventional historical narrative already appears in the work of Thucydides, writing perhaps twenty years after Herodotus. Thucydides' narrative style is often called transparent. This does not mean that the narrative has not been artfully shaped. But in Thucydides the shaping occurs in the narrative itself: the choice of nouns and verbs, the selection of significant narrative detail, the arrangement of the narrative sequence and the narrated thoughts and words of the participants in events. In Thucydides' narrative and most historical narrative after him, one event appears to lead logically to the next; as the narrative unrolls, its inner logic also becomes clear to the attentive reader.³ And because Thucydides' narrative appears to generate its own shape and its own rules for how we are to read it as it goes along, it seems not only to describe res gestae but directly and in that sense truthfully to represent them.⁴

Herodotus' narrative works on quite different principles; it does not have the same organic, mimetic quality. It appears man-made rather than natural; perhaps we could term it “rhapsodic,” that is, stitched together, uneven, a construction that gives every sign of having been laboriously assembled. For it is composed of a long chain of narrative units that follow each other like beads on a string, extraordinarily different both in form and in content from one another.⁵ Herodotus incorporates into his narrative the accounts of political decision making and battles that form the bulk of later history writing; but he includes as well atemporal descriptions of exotic peoples, places, and things, novelistic vignettes like the story of Solon and Croesus in book 1, and even folk tales. As readers, we are rarely permitted to sink into a direct and unmediated experience of the narrative for very long; the narrative itself keeps breaking and reforming into different pieces that need to be read in different ways.

This rhapsodic or stitched-together quality in Herodotus' narrative has its advantages; for one thing, it gives the Histories much of their peculiar thematic resonance and richness. Foreground and background appear in continuous redefinition, as one moves from one account, and one type of account, to the next. But it is a thematic richness achieved at some cost to the reading contract that is our focus here. We can analyze Herodotus' narrative techniques, producing studies full of scholarly patterns and diagrams that clarify his artistic purposes. Such studies, however, do not remove the fact that Herodotus remains a difficult author to read. For as the narrative of the Histories breaks, reforms, and breaks again, we do not experience the narrative as an unmediated mimetic event in which we participate as readers; the material does not establish its own internal connections. We read it rather as the achievement of an author acting as a master raconteur, subduing difficult and diverse narrative material to his will. Because the material itself is so diverse and the transitions between one segment and the next so patent, we must look to the author, Herodotus himself, to guide us along the logōn hodos, the “route of the logoi.”⁶ We are certainly not allowed the illusion that it exists independent of his efforts, or that we can traverse it by ourselves unaided.

This brings us to the second and equally striking difference between the contract that Herodotus establishes with his readers and that of later historical prose: the role of the authorial “I” within the third-person narrative.⁷ Again Thucydides demonstrates the procedure that later becomes standard. Thucydides almost never interrupts the narrative to comment in propria persona on the contents of the narrative or his own procedures as a historian.⁸ When he does so, it is further to reinforce the authority of the third-person narrative. He reassures us that he, Thucydides, is serious in his pursuit of akribeia, accuracy, and that what we are reading in the narrative has been carefully researched and recorded. Such inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Series Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• Section A. Historiography
• Section B. Oratory
• Copyright Acknowledgments