The Liar School of Herodotos

The Liar School of Herodotos
Author: W.K. Pritchett
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 365
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004674837

Professor Pritchett, questioning the patron-izing and dismissive tone which a group of scholars has reserved for Herodotos, devotes his attention to four works of the past decade which have to do with Herodotos' source-citations, his epigraphical listings, his record for Scythia, and the treatment of the topography of Thermopylai by a geomorphological survey team, as well as some miscellaneous writings. His procedure is to take up passage by passage the examples where Herodotos has been charged with falsification in an effort to show that there exists in the literature evidence which mutes the allegations. He concludes with sections on a general appraisal of Herodotos by specialists and a discussion of Herodotos' audience. The monograph is of general interest to students of Greek historiography. There is an index of the Herodotean passages which are scrutinized.

Herodotus: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Herodotus: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide
Author: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 51
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199802866

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

A Guide to Reading Herodotus' Histories

A Guide to Reading Herodotus' Histories
Author: Sean Sheehan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474292682

Modern scholarship judges Herodotus to be a more complex writer than his past readers supposed. His Histories is now being read in ways that are seemingly incompatible if not contradictory. This volume interrogates the various ways the text of the Histories has been and can be read by scholars: as the seminal text of our Ur-historian, as ethnology, literary art and fable. Our readings can bring out various guises of Herodotus himself: an author with the eye of a travel writer and the mind of an investigative journalist; a globalist, enlightened but superstitious; a rambling storyteller but a prose stylist; the so-called 'father of history' but in antiquity also labelled the 'father of lies'; both geographer and gossipmonger; both entertainer and an author whom social and cultural historians read and admire. Guiding students chapter-by-chapter through approaches as fascinating and often surprising as the original itself, Sean Sheehan goes beyond conventional Herodotus introductions and instead looks at the various interpretations of the work, which themselves shed light on the original. With text boxes highlighting key topics and indices of passages, this volume is an essential guide for students whether reading Herodotus for the first time, or returning to revisit this crucial text for later research.

Herodotus in the Anthropocene

Herodotus in the Anthropocene
Author: Joel Alden Schlosser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022670484X

We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activities are recognized for effecting potentially catastrophic environmental change. In this book, Joel Alden Schlosser argues that our current state of affairs calls for a creative political response, and he finds inspiration in an unexpected source: the ancient writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. Focusing on the Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Schlosser identifies a cluster of concepts that allow us to better grasp the dynamic complexity of a world in flux. Schlosser shows that the Histories, which chronicle the interactions among the Greek city-states and their neighbors that culminated in the Persian Wars, illuminate a telling paradox: at those times when humans appear capable of exerting more influence than ever before, they must also assert collective agency to avoid their own downfall. Here, success depends on nomoi, or the culture, customs, and laws that organize human communities and make them adaptable through cooperation. Nomoi arise through sustained contact between humans and their surroundings and function best when practiced willingly and with the support of strong commitments to the equality of all participants. Thus, nomoi are the very substance of political agency and, ultimately, the key to freedom and ecological survival because they guide communities to work together to respond to challenges. An ingenious contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and ecology, Herodotus in the Anthropocene reminds us that the best perspective on the present can often be gained through the lens of the past.

Herodotus and the topography of Xerxes’ invasion

Herodotus and the topography of Xerxes’ invasion
Author: Jan Zacharias Van Rookhuijzen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2018-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110612534

In his Histories, Herodotus of Halicarnassus gave an account of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (480 BCE). Among the information in this work features a rich topography of the places visited by the army, as well as of the battlefields. Apparently there existed a certain demand among the Greeks to behold the exact places where they believed that the Greeks had fallen, gods had appeared, or Xerxes had watched over his men. This book argues that Herodotus’ topography, long taken at face value as if it provided unambiguous access to the historical sites of the war, may partly be a product of Greek imagination in the approximately fifty years between the Xerxes’ invasion and its publication, with the landscape functioning as a catalyst. This innovative approach leads to a new understanding of the topography of the invasion, and of the ways in which Greeks in the late fifth century BCE understood the world around them. It also prompts new suggestions about the real-world locations of various places mentioned in Herodotus’ text.

Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction

Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Jennifer T. Roberts
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2011-06-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191620238

Herodotus has come to be respected by most scholars as a responsible and important historian. Herodotus was both a critical thinker and a lively storyteller, a traveller who was both tourist and anthropologist. Like Homer, he set out to memorialize great deeds in words; more narrowly, he determined to discover the causes of the wars between Greece and Persia and to explain them to his fellow Greeks. In his hands, the Greeks' unforeseeable defeat of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes, with their vast hosts, made for fascinating storytelling. Influenced by the work of the natural scientists and philosophers of his own and earlier eras, Herodotus also brought his literary talents to bear on a vast, unruly mass of information gathered from many interviews throughout his travels and left behind him the longest work that had ever been written in Greek - the first work of history, and one which continues to be read with enjoyment today. Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction introduces readers to what little is known of Herodotus's life and goes on to discuss all aspects of his work, including his fascination with his origins; his travels; his view of the world in relation to boundaries and their transgressions; and his interest in seeing the world and learning about non-Greek civilizations. We also explore the recurring themes of his work, his beliefs in dreams, oracles, and omens, the prominence of women in his work, and his account of the battles of the Persian Wars. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Liar School of Herodotos

The Liar School of Herodotos
Author: William Kendrick Pritchett
Publisher: Brill
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN:

Professor Pritchett, questioning the patron-izing and dismissive tone which a group of scholars has reserved for Herodotos, devotes his attention to four works of the past decade which have to do with Herodotos' source-citations, his epigraphical listings, his record for Scythia, and the treatment of the topography of Thermopylai by a geomorphological survey team, as well as some miscellaneous writings. His procedure is to take up passage by passage the examples where Herodotos has been charged with falsification in an effort to show that there exists in the literature evidence which mutes the allegations. He concludes with sections on a general appraisal of Herodotos by specialists and a discussion of Herodotos' audience. The monograph is of general interest to students of Greek historiography. There is an index of the Herodotean passages which are scrutinized.

Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus

Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus
Author: Thomas Figueira
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351805584

Herodotus is the epochal authority who inaugurated the European and Western consciousness of collective identity, whether in an awareness of other societies and of the nature of cultural variation itself or in the fashioning of Greek self-awareness – and necessarily that of later civilizations influenced by the ancient Greeks – which was perpetually in dialogue and tension with other ways of living in groups. In this book, 14 contributors explore ethnicity – the very self-understanding of belonging to a separate body of human beings – and how it evolves and consolidates (or ethnogenesis). This inquiry is focussed through the lens of Herodotus as our earliest master of ethnography, in this instance not only as the stylized portrayal of other societies, but also as an exegesis on how ethnocultural differentiation may affect the lives, and even the very existence, of one’s own people. Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus is one facet of a project that intends to bring Portuguese and English-speaking scholars of antiquity into closer cooperation. It has united a cross-section of North American classicists with a distinguished cohort of Portuguese and Brazilian experts on Greek literature and history writing in English.

The Historian's Craft in the Age of Herodotus

The Historian's Craft in the Age of Herodotus
Author: Nino Luraghi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199215119

The origins and development of Greek historiography cannot be properly understood unless early historical writings are situated in the framework of late archaic and early classical Greek culture and society. Contextualization opens up new perspectives on the subject in The Historian's Craft inthe Age of Herodotus. At the same time, such writings offer significant insights into how works of Herodotus reflect the attitude of fifth-century Greeks towards the transmission and manipulation of knowledge about the past. Essays by an international range of experts explore all aspects of thetopic and, at the same time, make a thought-provoking contribution to the ongoing debates concerning literacy and oral culture.

The Malice of Herodotus

The Malice of Herodotus
Author: Plutarque
Publisher: Aris and Phillips Classical Te
Total Pages: 161
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 0856685682

The Malice of Herodotus can perhaps best be described as the world's earliest known book review. But it is much more than that, for in the course of 'correcting' with considerable vituperation what he saw as Herodotus' anti-Greek bias, Plutarch tells us much about his own attitude to writing history. So that together with Lucian's How to Write History (see Lucian A Selection in this series) it forms a basic text for the study of Greek historiography. It is also perhaps the most revealing example of Plutarch's prose style with its rhetorical variety and energy and odd mixture of good and bad argument. But in citing lost works, Plutarch has preserved valuable fragments which don't exist elsewhere and need to be assessed by all students of the Persian Wars. Greek text with translion, introduction and commentary.