Historiography of Space in Homer and Herodotos Susan Ford
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Historiography of Space in Homer and Herodotos Susan Ford A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University September 2015 This thesis is my own work. All sources used have been acknowledged. All translations are my own unless explicitly stated otherwise. Susan Elizabeth Ford September 2015 ii Again I am grateful to generous friends Dr Rachel Hendery and Dr Colleen Chaston for reading whole chapters. I remain deeply indebted to Emeritus Professor Jill Julius Matthews for her persistence in supervision of my prolonged and prorogued apprenticeship. iii Acknowledgements This thesis owes even more, perhaps, than most PhD theses, to the support and encouragement of friends and family. My mother and sisters, Audrey, Margaret, Prudence and Kate, have provided support, endless bed and board, and emergency funds on more than one occasion, without demur or delay. Dr Rachel Hendery, ‘linguist extraordinaire’, has been a friend always available for advice, encouragement and practical help, including the loan of cars and cats, for the whole course, even when she had deadlines to meet herself. Dr Colleen Chaston read and re-read anything I wrote, with insight and expert knowledge, provided country hospitality, coached me for interviews and led me up mountains, all with extraordinary patience and grace. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the swift decision- making of Professor Joan Beaumont, for granting me a later-year PhD scholarship; I have also to thank the College for the award of fieldwork funding in 2010 to enable me to go to Greece. I am especially grateful also to the Canberra / ANU Friends of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens for the award of substantial special funds which enabled me to extend my stay in Greece. I have found companionship and collegiality among the very many extraordinary students, past and present, of linguistics at ANU, especially Lila, Shannon, Antoinette and Elisabeth. There has been consolation and jollity among the students, especially Elaine, Will and Ian, of the ANU Anglo-Saxon reading group, run by Assoc. Prof. Cynthia Allen, whose patience in explaining the Great Vowel Shift for the fiftieth time is proverbial. Jill Greenwell† has been a friend of matchless competence to be called on in any circumstances and Dr Phoebe Garrett stepped in at the last moment to proof read. The opportunity to discuss Herodotean matters with Dr Doug Kelly was very valuable and the comments of Dr Erica Bexley, who generously read the penultimate draft, kept me on track. My thesis advisors Dr Avery Andrews, who turned me away from ontological speculations in the nick of time, Dr Peter Londey, who allowed me just to read Greek, Professor Elizabeth Minchin, who taught me Homer and Professor Richard Baker, who introduced me to some of the wondrous writing of modern geography, have been patient. My greatest intellectual debt is to my supervisor of the last two years, Professor Jill Julius Matthews, who, an historian herself, may often have despaired of turning me into one, but as a supervisor nevertheless continued to coach, encourage and, finally, demand, that I think more and write better. iv Abstract The Homeric poems and the Histories of Herodotos are crucial to our understanding of the intellectual life of the ancient Greeks. They are the earliest extant poetry and the earliest extant prose; they have never been lost and have always been read. Knowledge of the external world and of other peoples, though far from formalised as the study of ‘geography’ in this period, is prominent throughout the poems and the Histories: most readers of the Iliad get a very strong impression of place from their interaction with the text: the plain before the great citadel of Troy where the battle is fought, and the homes of the Trojan allies. Similarly, the Odyssey persuades many that they know and can recognise Ithake and surrounding islands. The Histories are an encyclopaedia of geographical knowledge of fifth-century Greeks which, conspicuously, includes knowledge of Skythia, Egypt and Persia as ‘other’ lands. In spite of this strong impression of place enduring even into the modern world it is not easy to know exactly why and how it arises and what narrative structures and strategies create it. The Homeric poems and the Histories are fundamentally about people and places (not cosmologies, or plants, or machines). Their completeness and length make it possible to study the spatial concepts held by their creators in detail. The thesis offered is that there have been three largely independent approaches to understanding the thinking about space in these texts and that by studying these approaches we can learn more about what categories of space are presented, thus avoiding a petitio elenchi. The three approaches discussed with this purpose in mind are autopsy, or retracing of steps, graphic demonstrations, and linguistic analyses (for which I present a number of case studies). v Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ...............................................................................................................................1 1. Motivation .....................................................................................................................1 2. Historiography ...............................................................................................................2 3. Overview ..................................................................................................................... 11 4. Recapitulation ............................................................................................................. 21 Part I Autopsy.......................................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 1 Historical Autopsy .................................................................................................. 22 1.1 Geographical description ........................................................................................ 22 1.1.1 Recognisability ................................................................................................ 26 1.2 Naïve Geography .................................................................................................... 28 1.3 Identifying landscapes ............................................................................................ 29 1.4 Autopsy by Leaf ....................................................................................................... 30 1.5 Autopsy by J. V. Luce ............................................................................................... 38 1.6 Summary ................................................................................................................. 42 Chapter 2 Autopsy by Homer and Herodotos ........................................................................ 44 2.1 Text and landscape ................................................................................................. 44 2.2 Motivation for autopsy ........................................................................................... 45 2.3 Herodotos’ Labyrinth Description ........................................................................... 54 2.4 Goat Island .............................................................................................................. 56 Part I: Summary ...................................................................................................................... 58 Part II Visualisation ................................................................................................................. 60 Chapter 3 Visual Forms ........................................................................................................... 60 3.1 Setting up the problem: Ancient Greek cartography (or not) ................................ 60 3.1.1 Ancient Greek cartography ............................................................................. 60 3.2 The intention of graphics ........................................................................................ 66 3.3 Visualisation research ............................................................................................. 71 Chapter 4 Pseudo-maps .......................................................................................................... 74 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 74 4.1.1 Origins ............................................................................................................. 75 4.2 Nineteenth-century ................................................................................................ 77 4.2.1 Rennell’s Geographical system of Herodotos ................................................. 77 4.2.2 Spruner-Menke, Müller, Smith & Grove ......................................................... 80 4.2.3 Müller .............................................................................................................. 83 4.2.4 Edward Bunbury ............................................................................................. 85 4.2.5 Myres and the two maps available to Herodotos .......................................... 87 vi 4.3 Twentieth century..................................................................................................