This book contains detailed studies of a number of individual passages and episodes (which always turn out to have wider ramifications for the understanding of Herodotus or for the history of the archaic and classical Greek world, or both) as well as considerations of wider themes (perceptions of ethnicity and ideas of ‘tradition’, of historical space and about the origins of history). Topics included are: prophecy, oracle-selling, and resurrection, and also narrative management and the prosaics of death. The Herodotean chronology is revisited. There are also accounts on epiphany, and of why H ... More

This book contains detailed studies of a number of individual passages and episodes (which always turn out to have wider ramifications for the understanding of Herodotus or for the history of the archaic and classical Greek world, or both) as well as considerations of wider themes (perceptions of ethnicity and ideas of ‘tradition’, of historical space and about the origins of history). Topics included are: prophecy, oracle-selling, and resurrection, and also narrative management and the prosaics of death. The Herodotean chronology is revisited. There are also accounts on epiphany, and of why Herodotus did not mention the Hanging Gardens and why he has not been taken as seriously as he should have been by military historians. Finally, the book examines Cleisthenes and Cleomenes, Argos and Corinth, and Athens and its democracy.