ARCHAIC GREEK HISTORY Robin Osborne the Begi,Nning and End Ef

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ARCHAIC GREEK HISTORY

Robin Osborne

The begi,nning and end ef archaic Greek history

Herodotus traces back past generations for as long as he can be confident that the line is a human line. At 6.53 he stops the line of Dorian kings with Perseus on the grounds that Perseus was not held to have a human father. Herodotus explicitly contrasts Perseus with Heracles, who in Amphitryon had a human father, and with the pos• sibility of following the ancestry of Perseus' mother Danae back not just to her father Acrisius but through him to the Egyptians. The impor• tance of making such a division between the generations of gods to the generations of men was debated, but Herodotus was not alone in making it: at 2.143 he tells how the priests at Egyptian Thebes refused to accept that a man could be descended from a god, and so constructed for Hecataeus an alternative genealogy which did not involve his ancestry having been divine sixteen generations before. Like his Tegean informants (9 .26), Herodotus does not, on the other hand, distinguish the world of men from the world of heroes. Men descend from heroes (6.69.4), and they become heroes (5.47.2, 5.114.2; cf. 6.38.1, 7 .167 .2) with equal ease. For as long as there have been men, Greece has had a history: the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, or Helen (1.1 - 3) have potentially the same role in histori• cal causation as the Aeginetan abduction of statues from Epidaurus (5.82- 4). When Herodotus recounts how the children of the child• ren of the Argonauts established themselves on Taygetus and claimed ancestral rights at Sparta, he is happy to use information about prac• tice at Sparta in his own time (judicial executions are always car• ried out at night) in order to make credible the story about what then happened to them (4.145- 9). Events of the distant past do not demand different sorts of explanation from events of the recent past. 1

1 On Herodotus and mythology, see Detienne (1986) 48- 52, Shimron (1989) ch. 3, Lateiner ( 1989) 63- 7. 498 ROBIN OSBORNE

THESSALY "Dodona

LYD IA

• City ■ Sanctuary

Greece. Adapted from A. M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age ofExperiment (London 1980), 16-17 fig. 1.