THE AUDIENCES OF HERODOTUS THE INFLUENCE OF PERFORMANCE ON THE HISTORIES by IAN CODY OLIVER B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2010 M.A., University of Colorado Boulder, 2012 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics 2017 This thesis entitled: The Audiences of Herodotus: The Influence of Performance on the Histories written by Ian Cody Oliver has been approved for the Department of Classics Peter Hunt, Committee Chair Jackie Elliott, Committee Member Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Oliver, Ian Cody (Ph.D., Classics) The Audiences of Herodotus: The Influence of Performance on the Histories Thesis directed by Professor Peter Hunt Scholars have long recognized that Herodotus wrote his Histories when literature was often researched, composed, and circulated by oral rather than written means. Like his contemporaries, Herodotus gave oral demonstrations of his expertise (in Greek, epideixeis) in widely diverse settings across Greece. Most modern scholarship, however, treats Herodotus’ Histories as fundamentally unrelated to these performances, assuming instead that, in the Histories, Herodotus wrote for a single, broad, and Panhellenic readership. My dissertation argues that significant portions of the Histories in fact follow Herodotus’ earlier oral performances closely—sometimes so closely that the original audience and historical context can be identified. In my dissertation, I analyze three Herodotean battle narratives (Plataea, Salamis, and Thermopylae) where anomalies in composition appear to reflect these narratives’ origins as oral epideixeis with specific original performance dates. In short, my proposed original performance dates match the compositional context of Greece in the mid-fifth century BCE better than the traditional ‘publication’ date two decades later. If we recognize that Herodotus’ text reflects widely differing historical contexts, not only can we place Herodotus more satisfactorily in the oral culture of fifth-century Greece, we can also see how closely Herodotus engaged with the regional politics of his time. My approach thus challenges entrenched assumptions about the composition of the Histories, significantly improving our current understanding of Herodotus’ personal bias, his historiographical method, and his intended audience. iii CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: EPIDEIXIS AND THE HISTORIES.........................1 Wisdom-Performance and the Histories .............................................3 The Case for Unitary Composition ...................................................15 Audience-Based Analysis .................................................................21 Methodology .....................................................................................27 Project Overview ..............................................................................35 II. THE BATTLE OF PLATAEA: 8.133 – 9.70 .........................................40 Setting Limits (8.133-9.70) ...............................................................41 Pro-Athenian Bias in Herodotus’ Plataea Narrative .........................47 Pleasing an Athenian Audience ........................................................55 Identifying a Political Alignment......................................................63 Dating the Epideixis ..........................................................................76 Conclusion ........................................................................................85 III. THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS: 8.1 – 8.89 ..............................................87 Setting Limits (8.1-89) ......................................................................89 Points in Common with the Plataea Narrative ................................100 Pleasing an Athenian Audience, Part II ..........................................113 [1] Rhetoric ...............................................................................113 [2] Naval and Maritime Subjects ..............................................120 iv [3] Athenian and Phocian Topography .....................................124 [4] Ships, Walls, and Men.........................................................127 [5] Local and Oracular Religion ...............................................130 Conclusion ......................................................................................134 IV. THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE: 7.172 – 7.233 .........................135 Performance at a Panhellenic Festival ............................................136 Setting Limits (7.172-233) ..............................................................148 Pleasing an Amphictyonic Audience ..............................................159 Group Identities: The Ionians and Athens ................................160 Group Identities: The Dorians, Doris, and Sparta.....................163 Group Identities: The Boeotians, Thespiae, and Thebes ..........166 The Other Defenders: Phocis and Locris ..................................170 The Medizers: The Thessalians (et al.) .....................................171 The Pythian Host: Delphi..........................................................175 The Collective Amphictyony ....................................................176 Dating the Epideixis? ......................................................................178 Conclusion ......................................................................................180 V. CONCLUSION .....................................................................................182 Comparing the Epideixeis with Each Other ....................................187 Comparing the Epideixeis with the ‘Unitary’ Histories .................192 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..…………………………………………200 APPENDIX: IDENTIFYING FURTHER EPIDEICTIC MATERIAL A. Related Epideictic Material (7.139.2-7.144).........................................214 B. Other Possible Epideixeis .....................................................................217 v vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: EPIDEIXEIS AND THE HISTORIES Modern scholarship has largely abandoned Jacoby’s separatist theories.1 Attempts to chop the Histories into a series of discrete ‘lectures’ (logoi)2 have given way to comprehensive analyses of a presumably unitary text that seek to extrapolate the tangled threads of Herodotean composition.3 Yet the complexity of Herodotus’ text continues to defy simple explanation, precluding straightforward interpretations of the author’s true convictions. Did Herodotus admire or fear Athens?4 Are the Persians noble paragons or savage barbarians?5 Most recent scholars—relying on such tools as narratology,6 source-criticism,7 and reader-response8—have reached the conclusion that such questions miss the point, that Herodotus intentionally problematized his text to invite audience engagement. While this conclusion is elegant (and even productively applied), it simply cannot explain every quirk and whim of Herodotus’ text. 1 Jacoby 1913: esp. col. 330-33. 2 E.g., Cagnazzi 1975. 3 E.g., Kurke 1999: 31. “The ideological workings of the Histories can only be teased out of a careful reading of its shifts, slippages, and ironic refractions.” Nagy 1990: 215-338 considers Herodotus’ narrative as an ‘ainos’; cf. Munson 2001: 5-8. 4 E.g., Fornara 1971b: 37-58. “He is too detached to be an Athenian propagandist and too complex to permit his intent to be extracted by inference from an isolated passage” (ibid. 58). 5 E.g., Dorati 2000. 6 E.g., Lateiner 1989; Munson 2001. 7 E.g., Luraghi 2001; Giangiulio 2005. Cf. Hornblower 2002. 8 E.g., Baragwanath 2008. 1 On the contrary, some sections of the text seem quite distant from this unifying characteristic.9 To supplement this interpretation of the Histories, then, I propose to revisit Jacoby’s theory of ‘lectures’—not in its original form, of course, but adapted to recognize the fundamental unity of the text as we have it. In short, I argue not that the Histories is wholly made up of ‘lectures’, but partially: I aim to detect the presence of original performance audiences woven into the fabric of the Histories. By recognizing how Herodotus’ career as a performer shaped his final product (i.e., the complete, written Histories), we can better understand the vacillating seeming-whims of Herodotus’ narrative and place significant portions of the Histories in their original political, chronological, and modal ‘publication’ context. The most surprising conclusion that this method produces is that Herodotus’ text does not all belong to the same political, chronological, and modal context. In particular, I isolate three sections (for which I use the term epideixis, discussed below) that imply a different audience, time, and modality from the written Histories. Although this conclusion runs counter to a scholarly preference to date the Histories to the 420s BCE (or later),10 it actually corroborates recent work on oral tradition, wisdom-performance, and Herodotus’ role therein.11 Essentially, if Herodotus’ narrative is complex and multi-faceted—even self-contradictory at times—this result is at least partially the product of the varied compositional contexts that produced it. The Histories, then, would represent a ‘final text’ that is conceptually unitary but nonetheless