On "Fussy Authorial Nudges" in Herodotus

Robin Waterfield

Classical World, Volume 102, Number 4, Summer 2009, pp. 485-494 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/clw.0.0124

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Umeå universitet (8 Oct 2013 16:54 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/clw/summary/v102/102.4.waterfield.html

485on “fuSSy autHorial nudgeS” in HerodotuS

ABSTRACT: I suggest that Herodotus is an even more intrusive author than is generally recognized—that he subtly steers his audience’s reactions by dis-tancing himself in meta-narratalogical ways from the truth of certain of the tales he tells. I further suggest that this is another trait typical of an oral performer, or left over from an oral background, in the sense that any oral performer needs to give such subtle nudges to his audience.

I start with a distinctly unacademic claim, known as a fact only to translators. This is that, when you translate a text, especially one as long as Herodotus’ Histories, you become very intimate with the author, in a process that is not so much rational as a form of instinc-tive empathy. Translation is “the slowest and most observant form of reading possible,”1 and one of the results of the snail’s pace at which the translator works is the gradual build-up of this empathy. It is precisely this empathy that can make the difference between a workmanlike translation and a good one. Suppose the translator is undecided between several ways (and there always are several ways) of translating a word or phrase, or ordering a sentence. It is this empathy that a translator must consult, almost as if he or she were asking: “Which of these various possibilities would Herodotus (or whoever) prefer?” That perhaps goes too far in the direction of mysticism, but even if we prefer, more realistically, to say that it takes two to tango—that this feeling of empathy is a product of the translator’s interaction with his author—we still reach a similar ques-tion: “Which of these various possibilities best suits my Herodotus?” Of course, as soon as you have typed in the solution—the English word, phrase, or sentence—reason kicks in and checks that the result is sound. In a sense, it is true to say that a finished translation is a product of the interaction between reason and this empathy.

Sometimes, the matters a translator glimpses are not the kind that affect the translation of particular words, phrases, or sentences. Sometimes, wider issues are borne in on one, to do with the way one’s author worked. As a translator of Plato, for instance, I am absolutely sure that Ryle was wrong to suggest that “Plato normally composed his dialogues for oral delivery to audiences . . . and that Plato himself was normally the deliverer of his Socrates’ words.”2 I could argue this,3 but I would only be finding ways to express what I already felt to be the case.4 And I dare say there are few who would disagree with me, even before they too had paused to find arguments.

485

1 B. Reynolds, “The Pleasure Craft,” in W. Radice and B. Reynolds, eds., The Translator’s Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice (Harmondsworth 1987) 141.

2 G. Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge 1966) 32.3 As, e.g., R. Hathaway did, in “Skeptical Maxims about the ‘Publication’ of Plato’s

Dialogues,” in R. Freis, ed., The Progress of Plato’s Progress (Agon suppl. 2, 1969) 28–42.4 For a recent attempt to argue that all reasoning is an expression of the reason-

ing agent’s prior, pre-verbal feelings, see P. Thagard, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

486

When I translated the Histories,5 I became convinced, in just such an unformed and uninformed way, that the Histories, or chunks of it, had been delivered orally, that Herodotus had worked as a storyteller. Long ago, Powell disposed of the view that there was any reliability in the ancient biographical tales that showed Herodotus as an oral performer in various parts of the Greek world.6 In his Life of Thucy-dides 54, Marcellinus had the later historian bursting into tears as a young man on hearing Herodotus talk; Diyllus (fr. 3 Jacoby) had Herodotus handsomely paid by the Athenians for flattering them in a public recitation of his work; Aristophanes of Boeotia (fr. 5 Jacoby) claimed that Herodotus approached the Thebans to ask for money for a performance; Lucian (Herodotus 1–2) added various other places, including a visit to the Olympic Games; and so on. There can be little doubt that the specifics of these stories are fanciful, but from where did these writers get the idea that Herodotus had been an oral performer? They did not pluck it out of thin air. Diyllus is datable to the early third century b.c.e., and so Johnson is wrong to dismiss the whole bag of stories as no earlier than the first century c.e.7

The consensus view among scholars nowadays is greater or less skepticism about whether Herodotus personally worked as an oral performer, combined with recognition of his debt to earlier oral sources, discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of such sources, and argument about what his reliance on such sources tells us about his working practices and reliability.8 Of course, neither I nor anyone else can actually prove that Herodotus himself worked as an oral performer; he might just have been a writer who preserved oral traits from his sources, or who inherited oral traits because that was how prose presentation was done in those days. But my conviction—almost as unshakeable as the conviction that Plato did not work as an oral performer—is that Herodotus himself did work in this way.9 And when

5 R. Waterfield, Herodotus: The Histories (Oxford 1998).6 J. E. Powell, The History of Herodotus (Cambridge 1939) 32 ff.7 W. Johnson, “Oral Performance and the Composition of Herodotus’ Histories,”

GRBS 35 (1994) 241. I leave aside the unanswerable question whether the final words of Thucydides 1.22 contain an implicit reference to oral recitations by Herodotus.

8 See (among many others) J. Evans, Herodotus, Explorer of the Past (Princeton 1991) 89–146; H. Flower, “Herodotus and Delphic Traditions about Croesus,” in M. Flower and M. Toher, eds., Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (London, 1991 = BICS suppl. 58) 55–77; J. Gould, Herodotus (London 1989); M. Lang, Herodotean Narrative and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); O. Murray, “Herodotus and Oral History,” Achaemenid History 2 (1987) 93–115, (repr. in N. Luraghi, ed., The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus [Oxford 2001] 16–44); R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1989), and “Herodotus’ Histories and the Floating Gap,” in N. Luraghi, ed., The Historian’s Craft, 198–210. There is a good summary of the state of play by L. Kurke, in her chapter on Herodotus and Thucydides in O. Taplin, ed., Literature in the Greek World (Oxford 2000) 115–37.

9 A selection of references to those who believe, or come close to believing, that Herodotus himself worked as an oral performer include R. Brock, “Authorial Voice and Narrative Management in Herodotus,” in P. Derow and R. Parker, eds., Herodotus and His World: Essays from a Conference in Honour of George Forrest

robin wAterfield

487

we check this intuition by means of reason, we find that the evidence is, above all, that the text contains all the tricks of the trade of an oral performer: epic regression, variant versions, parataxis, digres-sions, cohesion strategies (such as ring composition and prospective sentences), and chunking.10 What should give us pause is, chiefly, the hugely intricate architectural unity of the work,11 which is surely too complex for an oral presenter. And so my conclusion is simply that, like Homer, Herodotus was a writer, but what he wrote down was material that he and others had long been telling orally and which accordingly retains marked features of oral presentation.12 No one would claim, then, that Herodotus recited the entire work, over any number of days and nights; but at the same time it would be foolish to deny that he could have, and even might have, given recitations of chunks of it. The most balanced position is: “It has never been seriously doubted . . . that Herodotus could well have given readings from his work-in-progress.”13

The second insight I gained as a result of this empathy across the centuries was a sense of the constant presence of Herodotus’ voice in the text. This too is a familiar feature: as Fowler has said,14 “Voice-markers occur so often that in reading through him one be-gins to notice their absence more than their presence.” But I got the impression that Herodotus guides his audience’s responses in a much more thorough way than is commonly appreciated. And let me start by saying that if the first insight is true—that Herodotus worked as an oral performer—then the second, that he expertly and subtly steers his audience’s responses, is pretty much what we would expect. It is critical for anyone who makes his living by entertaining audiences to be able to manipulate their responses.

(Oxford 2003) 3–16; R. Vignolo Munson, “Herodotus’ Use of Prospective Sentences and the Story of Rhampsinitus and the Thief in the Histories,” AJP 114 (1993) 27–44; G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore 1990) 221–24, (following from “Herodotus the Logios,” Arethusa 20 [1987] 175–84); T. E. V. Pearce, “ ‘Epic Regression’ in Herodotus,” Eranos 79 (1981) 87–90; P. Stadter, “Herodotus and the North Carolina Oral Narrative Tradition,” Histos 1997 (www.dur.ac.uk/Classics/histos/1997/stadter.html); D. Wender, The Last Scenes of the Odyssey, Mnemosyne suppl. 52 (Leiden 1978) 7.

10 But see the denial of the force of these stylistic features by Johnson (above, n.7). See n.9 for bibliography on these features of orality, with the addition of S. Slings, “Oral Strategies in the Language of Herodotus,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds., Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Leiden 2002) 53–77, and I. de Jong, “Narrative Unity and Units,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong and H. van Wees, eds., 245–66.

11 See the introductory remarks of C. Dewald in the introduction to my transla-tion (above, n.5) xiii–xvi, or those of L. Kurke (above, n.8) 123–26. A fundamental study is that of H. Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus, American Philological Association monograph 23 (Cleveland 1966).

12 The general context is the wider diffusion of writing and reading, in Athens at any rate, in the second half of the fifth century: see W. Rösler, “The Histories and Writing,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds. (above, n.10) 79–94.

13 C. Fornara, CR n.s. 51 (2001) 238. But it has been seriously doubted, even if only by Johnson (above, n.7).

14 “Herodotos and His Contemporaries,” JHS 116 (1996) 76.

on “fussy AutHoriAl nudges” in Herodotus

488

We can approach the issue of Herodotus’ manipulation of audi-ence response by means of the presence of meta-narrative in the text—which is only a more pompous way of describing the intrusions of the author, what Griffiths has called Herodotus’ “fussy authorial nudges,”15 though in fact I will be suggesting that they play too im-portant a role to be described only as “fussy.” Dewald has counted these for us,16 and found over a thousand such places. But there may be more, and in this paper I want to go a little way down the road of cashing the intuition that there are more subtle ways in which Herodotus intrudes into the text.

Modes of Distancing in Herodotus17

First, by way of brief background, Dewald counted only those places where Herodotus actually uses the first person of himself, saying, for instance (7.152.1–2):

εἰ µέν νυν Ξέρξης τε ἀπέπεµψε ταῦτα λέγοντα κήρυκα ἐς Ἄργος καὶ Ἀργείων ἄγγελοι ἀναβάντες ἐς Σοῦσα ἐπειρώτων Ἀρτοξέρξην περὶ ϕιλίης, οὐκ ἔχω ἀτρεκέως εἰπεῖν, οὐδέ τινα γνώµην περὶ αὐτῶν ἀποϕαίνοµαι ἄλλην γε ἢ τήν περ αὐτοὶ Ἀργεῖοι λέγουσι. ἐπίσταµαι δὲ τοσοῦτον. . . .

Now, I am not in a position to say with absolute certainty that Xerxes did send this message to Argos and that an Argive delegation did go to Susa to ask Artaxerxes about their friendship. The only version of events that I am prepared to affirm is the one told by the Argives themselves. I do, however, know this much . . . , and then he continues a few lines later with his famous disclaimer: “I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them.”18

15 “Stories and Storytelling in the Histories,” in C. Dewald and J. Marincola, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge 2006) 131.

16 “Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus’ Histories,” Arethusa 20 (1987) 147–70. Some of Herodotus’ first-person intrusions are also considered by J. Marincola, “Herodotean Narrative and the Narrator’s Presence,” Arethusa 20 (1987) 121–37.

17 It would be sheer repetition for me to paraphrase the brilliant paper by G. Cooper, “Intrusive Oblique Infinitives in Herodotus,” TAPA 104 (1974) 23–76. He demonstrates beyond any doubt that such oblique infinitives—where the verb of a subordinate clause within indirect speech is, unnecessarily and somewhat ungrammatically, in the infini-tive—serve as “an intensification of the oblique relationship of the whole complex sentence” (28), and so allow the reporter “to distance himself from responsibility for the speech of the speaker reported” (76). There are some fifty examples in Herodotus, and they include many of those places where Herodotus might otherwise have been thought to be gullible, such as the gold-digging ants (3.105), Zopyrus’s account to the Babylonians (3.156), Heracles and the Scythian mother-monster (4.8–10), and so on. Cooper’s results are summarized and endorsed by D. Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus, Phoenix suppl. 23 (Toronto 1989) 22–23.

18 Similar forms of this disclaimer occur at 2.123.1, 3.9.2, and 4.195.2.

robin wAterfield

489

A good cluster of uses of the first person there. But, as Dewald herself recognizes,19 there are also cases that do not involve the first person. In the first place, there is the occasional use of resump-tive passives such as “as has already been said,” meaning “as I have already said.” Here are a couple of examples: in the course of discussing the various Ionian dialects, he first mentions Ionian settle-ments in Caria, and then moves on to Lydia; the places he lists in Lydia “share a dialect that is quite different from the one spoken in the places [I have] already mentioned” (τῇσι πρότερον λεχθείσῃσι, 1.142.4). Talking about regions farther north from Scythia, he says “All the land [I have] mentioned (αὕττη ἡ καταλεχθεῖσα πᾶσα χώρη, 4.28.1) experiences very severe winters.” What is interesting about these resumptive passives is how few they are, given that it is such a normal expression: as a very intrusive historian, Herodotus prefers the active first person.

Another common passive is of course λέγεται. Sometimes this is purely neutral: “It is said that Thales was there . . . ” (1.75.4), followed by a string of accusatives and infinitives. But there are also plenty of instances where the mere use of the impersonal verb seems to distance Herodotus somewhat from his sources, as an ac-knowledgement that they do not necessarily command belief. “It is said” can be indistinguishable from the more skeptical “or so it is said.” And so even such an apparently neutral word as λέγεται can become a vehicle for authorial intrusion. Consider 1.87.1: Herodo-tus introduces the account of Croesus’s miraculous escape from his funeral pyre with the phrase λέγεται ὑπὸ Λυδῶν. Is it too much to think that Herodotus is displaying a degree of skepticism about the tale that a storm-cloud fortuitously and suddenly appeared in the clear sky and rain quenched the pyre? Herodotus is supposed to be superstitious,20 but he is not quite so superstitious;21 he was, after all, influenced in a number of ways by the Greek enlightenment.22 It has

19 “There is an enormous additional amount of metanarrative comment spread throughout all nine books that is not explicitly added by the first-person narrator per se”: “ ‘I Didn’t Give My Own Genealogy’: Herodotus and the Authorial Persona,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds. (above, n.10) 275. Dewald has also revealed aspects of Herodotus’ narrative voice in “The Figured Stage: Focalizing the Initial Narratives of Herodotus and Thucydides,” in T. Falkner, N. Felson, and D. Konstan, eds. Contextualizing Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue (Lanham 1999) 221–52. See also I. de Jong, “Aspects narratologiques des Histoires d’Hérodote,” Lalies 19 (1999) 217–75.

20 “The history of nations [in Herodotus] is but the grand stage on which may be seen the workings of Divine Providence,” W. W. How and J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus 1 (London 1912) 48. More subtle versions of the same idea may be found in Gould (above, n.8) 67–76; T. Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford 2000); J. Mikalson, “Religion in Herodotus,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds. (above, n.10) 187–98, and Mikalson, Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars (Chapel Hill 2003).

21 7.191.2 provides a straightforward example of Herodotus expressing skepti-cism about religious matters, but the fundamental premise is 2.3.2: everyone knows equally little about the gods.

22 See e.g., K. Raaflaub, “Philosophy, Science, Politics: Herodotus and the Intel-lectual Trends of His Time,” in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds. (above,

on “fussy AutHoriAl nudges” in Herodotus

490

recently been well argued that “Herodotus’ theological stance is very much that of Protagoras and his predecessors,” but that he hides his criticisms behind a screen of diplomacy.23 Perhaps, then, mere λέγεται may function in much the same meta-narratological way as the famous and repeated disclaimer I quoted a short while ago from 7.152: he did not feel obliged to believe everything he wrote down. Writing is a many-faceted art. It is plain that Herodotus was a master at it, and masters are surprisingly economical with their words and techniques. Simple devices such as λέγεται can turn out to serve subtle purposes.24

Mutatis mutandis, so can the attributed or unattributed λέγουσι, “they say,” which again is indistinguishable, except by considerations of context, from “or so they say.” When the verb has a subject (or when λέγεται is qualified, as in the phrase I quoted above, λέγεται ὑπὸ Λυδῶν), this too may function as a distancing device, but the issue is made more complex by the fact that nowadays our instant reaction is just to think that Herodotus was referencing his sources. But there were no canons of established historiographical usage in Herodotus’ day; he was not mentioning his sources out of duty or pride, or fear of copyright laws.25 Perhaps his purpose was to pass on a degree of skepticism.

Such referencing commonly, though far from universally, occurs in the course of variant versions:26 “According to M, X happened, while according to N, Y happened.” There are two possibilities: sometimes Herodotus gives us variant versions straight, without ap-parent explicit comment;27 quite often he indicates by first-person intrusion—even by trenchant first-person intrusion—which version he thinks is the most plausible.28 In either case he may or may not name his sources. Whether or not he does so, the very telling of variant versions is equivalent to suggesting to the audience, with the typical

n.10) 149–86; R. Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge 2000) and Thomas, “The Intellectual Milieu of Herodotus,” in C. Dewald and J. Marincola, eds. (above, n.15) 60–75.

23 S. Scullion, “Herodotus and Greek Religion,” in C. Dewald and J. Marincola, eds. (above, n.15) 202. Related positions (that Herodotus suppresses his personal be-liefs in favor of those of his informants) can be found in Lateiner (above, n.17). W. Burkert, “Herodot als Historiker fremder Religionen,” in G. Nenci and O. Reverdin, eds., Hérodote et les peuples non grecs (Geneva 1990) 1–39, also sees Herodotus as somewhat of a skeptic.

24 The distancing use of λέγεται has been recognized by e.g., Lateiner (above, n.17) 22 and by Fowler (above, n.14) 78. Cooper (above, n.17) lists the story of Croesus on the pyre as one where Herodotus uses the intrusive oblique infinitive to distance himself from his sources. See also H. D. Westlake, “Λέγεται in Thucydides,” Mnemosyne 30 (1977) 345–62.

25 Source-referencing is identified as an original Herodotean trait by Fowler (above, n.14) 71. See also N. Luraghi, “Local Knowledge in Herodotus’ Histories,” in Luraghi, ed., The Historian’s Craft (above, n.8) 138–60.

26 The canonical study of Herodotus’ variant versions is Lateiner (above, n.17) 78–90. See also F. J. Groten, “Herodotus’ Use of Variant Versions,” Phoenix 17 (1963) 79–87.

27 1.65.4; 2.175.5; 3.32; 3.85–87; 4.103.2; 5.44–45; 6.52–54; 6.137; 7.229–230; 8.84; 9.74; 9.95.

28 Statistics in Lateiner (above, n.17) 84–90.

robin wAterfield

491

Herodotean shrug: “You can believe whichever of the two versions you prefer, or neither of them; it’s up to you.” The very fact that Herodotus chooses to record variant versions is a distancing device; he wants the audience to recognize that at least some of the stories do not automatically command belief. When he attributes one or more of the versions to a particular people, it is almost another aspect of his cultural relativism.29

Finally, a more delicate set of instances, which can be introduced by means of a nice English example, a footnote by Oswyn Murray. In talking about the Athenian investigations into the two scandals of 415, he says: “For modern attempts to discover the truth that Thucydides could not discover, see especially. . . .”30 Now, it is obvious to us, because we are native English speakers, sensitive to nuances in the language, that Murray is disparaging modern attempts to uncover the truth, and the reason it is obvious to us is because of the grammati-cally unnecessary clause “that Thucydides could not discover.” He could have said simply: “For modern attempts to discover the truth, see especially. . . .” By including the other clause, he shows that he wants us to doubt the validity of such attempts.

Herodotus does the same kind of thing. Consider 3.121.1, close to the start of the story of the Persian Oroetes’ assassination of Polycrates of Samos. Herodotus gives two versions of the insult that goaded the satrap into a desire to kill the tyrant. In the first, an in-sult from a fellow Persian had to be taken out on Polycrates; in the second, Polycrates himself delivered the insult. Herodotus introduces the second version by saying οἱ δ᾿ ἐλάσσονες λέγουσι. There are two possible ways to understand this ἐλάσσονες: “According to another account, less generally accepted. . . .”31 takes the word to be evalu-ative; “An alternative version, though less common. . . .”32 takes it, less prejudicially, to be purely numerical. In either case, however, the point is the same: Herodotus did not need to say it; he could have said just “Others say” or “It is also said.” But he did not, and the fact that he did not inclines his audience to prefer the alternative to the minority version.

Arguably, then, Herodotus makes his presence felt in his text to a greater extent than has been appreciated. Why? Was he just “fussy”? Or perhaps we should add this intrusiveness to the list of techniques available to an oral performer. Herodotus may be one of the most intrusive historians in the ancient world precisely because of

29 Most famously at 3.38. For more general aspects of Herodotus’ cultural relativ-ism, see R. Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor 2001) and Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Language of Barbarians (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

30 In O. Murray, ed., Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford 1990) 149, n.3.

31 This is the translation of A. de Sélincourt and J. Marincola, Herodotus: The Histories (London 1996).

32 This is my translation (above, n.5).

on “fussy AutHoriAl nudges” in Herodotus

492

his oral background. The traces of orality that we find in Herodotus chiefly serve a single purpose—not to leave the audience behind at any point, as Brock once put it.33 So ring composition marks the beginning and end of logoi, great and small; parataxis and variant versions allow the speaker to add or omit stories or story-fragments to suit his audience; epic regression fills the audience in on a char-acter’s or a community’s background; prospective sentences serve not just as introductions, but also to heighten audience anticipation; and so on. And perhaps we may add to this list that authorial intrusion, even when subtle, allows the audience consciously or unconsciously to layer the information they are receiving.

The Non-verbal HerodotusLet us return, in conclusion, to the story of Oroetes and Poly-

crates. At the very start of the next paragraph (3.122.1), Herodotus gives one of his shrugs: “Anyone can believe whichever of these ver-sions that he wants.” But if, as argued above, Herodotus has already to a certain extent steered his audience’s reaction, then this shrug is disingenuous. Is there a way to unearth a subtle layer of Herodotus’ work here, almost his personality? For we can certainly support the claim that Herodotus can be disingenuous. Here is another instance, chosen because it occurs in one of those dozen or so cases where full variant versions of events are given and Herodotus appears to remain neutral.34 At 6.137 we are given two versions of the Athe-nian expulsion of the Pelasgians from Attica. We get a form of the disclaimer—“I’m not in a position to comment on the justice or injus-tice of the act”—and a neutral conclusion: “The one version is from Hecataeus, the other from the Athenians.” But, armed with a degree of skepticism about Herodotus’ neutrality, we surely incline towards Hecataeus’ version and away from the Athenian one. Hecataeus said that the Athenians just plain coveted the land the Pelasgians were farming; the Athenians said that they were punishing the Pelasgians for sexual harassment of their daughters. Does common sense not suggest that the Athenian version is just too good to be true?35

Here, then, is another possible case of disingenuity. Consider the famous constitutional debate of 3.80–82. We know, because it is utterly obvious, that this is anachronistic and unrealistic—just a

33 (Above, n.9) 6; but apart from this quotation, Herodotus’ contact with his audience is the chief topic of his paper.

34 See n.25.35 What criteria might Herodotus have been using to assess the plausibility of

the stories he tells? He tells us at 2.99.1 that autopsy and common sense and rational enquiry are preferable to hearsay, and applies this rule pretty consistently throughout the Histories. So it is largely just a matter of common sense: Herodotus has applied his common sense to his material and expects his audience to do the same. But he is also acutely aware that he has seen and enquired much more than his audience—witness his proud boast in the proem—and so he feels it his duty to arouse their common sense by the kinds of more or less subtle intrusions we have been looking at. He wanted his audiences to be entertained, but not entranced.

robin wAterfield

493

way of presenting some current political theory;36 but why should we assume that it was not just as obvious to Herodotus? He insists on its authenticity—famously, and uniquely, not just in the immediate context (3.80), but at 6.43 as well. The gentleman protests too much, methinks. Surely, he is being disingenuous.

We may, then, have ways of cautiously uncovering such re-fined meta-levels of the text. Some of these non-textual subtleties are relatively easy to spot: we know there is humor in the story of Hippocleides’ dancing away his prospects (6.129), even though we cannot hear Herodotus’ chuckle or see the raised eyebrow; we know that Herodotus is being stagey when he adopts high rhetoric, as from time to time in Socleas’s speech to the Spartans (5.192); we can be sure that his learned excursuses on continental division or the flooding of the Nile were delivered in a proud or donnish tone of voice. How far can we go with this? The story of Scyllias of Scione’s supposed ten-mile underwater swim (8.8) is rejected with high pomposity: “I hereby state that in my opinion he went to Artemisium by boat.”37 Can we afford to be generous enough to think that Herodotus was making use of faux solemnity in order to raise a smile? What about his renowned gullibility,38 which is troubling because every occasion on which Herodotus displays gullibility can be countered by one when he displays admirable skepticism or common sense? Can we be sure that at least some of these stories were not told, tongue in cheek, for the sake of entertainment? His commitment to entertainment is plain in every ludicrous or marvellous tale he chooses to retell—plain even in his use of the term ἀπόδεξις in the proem, a term deriving from oral entertainment.

We know, or at least psychologists tell us,39 that in adult, hu-man, face-to-face intercourse, sometimes as little as 20 percent of communication depends on the meaning of the actual words spoken; the rest is divided among things like intonation, pauses, gestures, facial expressions and body language. The percentages vary (at an academic conference one relies less on body language than at a party), but communication is always some such blend. As a successful oral

36 It is “generally agreed that the debate is . . . far more likely to derive from political discussion in fifth-century Greece rather than sixth-century Persia,” as R. Winton moderately put it (in M. Schofield and C. Rowe, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought [Cambridge 2000] 110). The basic discussion is that of Lateiner (above, n.17) 167–86.

37 8.8.3: περὶ µέντοι τούτου γνώµη µοι ἀποδεδέχθω πλοίῳ µιν ἀπικέσθαι ἐπὶ τὸ Ἀρτεµίσιον.

38 Starting with Aristotle’s scorn at G.A., 756b5 ff. Aristotle criticizes Herodotus more mildly at G.A. 735a10 and H.A. 523a17. Cicero’s assessment at Laws 1.2.5 is more balanced than is usually recognized: he remarks, without undue condemnation, that in Herodotus sunt innumerabiles fabulae, even though he is the “Father of History.”

39 E.g., M. Argyle, Bodily Communication, 2nd ed. (London 1988). Herodotus himself is, of course, one of the few historical writers whose style allows him to report at least some of the non-verbal cues of his characters: see D. Lateiner, “Non-verbal Communication in the Histories of Herodotus,” Arethusa 20 (1987) 83–119, and (above, n.17) 26–30.

on “fussy AutHoriAl nudges” in Herodotus

494

performer, Herodotus must have been a master of these modes too; even though (as I suppose) he finally wrote down his work, traces of these modes are bound to linger in the text. It is not just formal aspects of Herodotus’ orality that need to be studied; we also need the sensitivity to glimpse his non-verbal traits, the sensitivity that emerges from the kind of empathy with an author that I mentioned at the beginning. Lakonia, Greece ROBIN WATERFIELDClassical World 102.4 (2009) robinwat@hol.gr

robin wAterfield

CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF THE ATLANTIC STATES2009 ANNUAL MEETING

October 8–10, 2009Wilmington, Delaware

For the 2009 meeting several special sessions have been planned. They include a roundtable discussion by book publishers and other representa-tive exhibitors on the study and teaching of classics from their distinctive perspectives; a workshop for K–12 and college teachers on writing and integrating Latin song lyrics into the classroom, featuring Stanley Farrow; and a panel in memory of John Hunt. For more information consult the CAAS Web site at www.caas-cw.org/meetings.html or contact Program Coordinator Judith P. Hallett at jeph@umd.edu.