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Recently the importance for Herodotus' work of contemporary medical and sophistic thought and techniques of argument has been widely recognised, as long had been his dependence on and difference from earlier geographical and ethnographic writing. This volume focuses on the place of these interests in his investigatory techniques and sets them alongside his many narrative skills, from superficially traditonal battle narrative and reworking of Greek or non-Greek traditions that border on myth to the structuring of narrative by highlighting the life of objects, and addresses such fundamental issues as how he chooses between competing explanations and how far he valued truth. The book tackles many of the basic issues that confront any attempt to understand Herodotus' work.
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Herodotus – narrator, scientist, historian
Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes
Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Associate Editors Evangelos Karakasis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie Stephen J. Harrison · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 59
Herodotus – narrator, scientist, historian
Edited by Ewen Bowie
ISBN 978-3-11-058153-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058355-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-058210-9 ISSN 1868-4785 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Editorial Office: Alessia Ferreccio and Katerina Zianna Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com
Preface This volume assembles the written versions of papers which their authors were invited to deliver at a conference at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi planned for 3 – 6 July 2015. The outcomes of the referendum called by the Prime Minister of Greece in late June included the temporary closure of banks and the imposition of capital controls, and the Director of the European Cultural Centre cancelled the conference four days before it was due to start. Those who had been asked in March 2015 to organise it at very short notice were not consulted on whether cancellation was necessary, and it will be for future historians to decide whether prudence or irrational panic prevailed. Despite the frustration, inconvenience and in some cases financial loss incurred by the Greek and international scholars who had accepted the invitation to participate, almost all have agreed to offer their papers for this volume, which is hoped to be a κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί more than compensating for the loss of the ἀγωνίσματα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν. One or two were, understandably, not in a position to do so, and an extra paper has been solicited from a distinguished scholar who had been invited but had a prior commitment for early July. The book’s focus remains that of the projected conference: Herodotus: narrator scientist historian. Its papers explore, from different angles and employing different but complementary methodologies, how one of our greatest writers of Greek prose enlisted for his project techniques of investigation and modes of explanation current in the contemporary intellectual world, where both were being developed in geographical and medical writing, in other departments of what we wo