Pedestrian Fatalities: The Prosaics of Death in Herodotus

Abstract

Abstract Many warriors die in both Herodotus' Histories and the Iliad, but their deaths are treated very differently, even when the mode of death is the same (as with Ilioneus in Il. 14.489-502 and Masistios in Hist. 9.22, both killed by a spear to the eye). Homeric epic typically highlights the pathetic and subjective experience of an individual's death, and thus the fragility of human life, whereas Herodotus' narrative is more interested in the strategy behind the killing and an external, civic-oriented evaluation of the dead. These narrative differences point to a contrast between the more monologic perspective in the Iliad, with its commitment to heroic honor, and the profound heteroglossia, or multiplicity of voices that characterizes the Histories. In Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, this contrast results from an ideological distinction between ‘poetic’ or ‘closed’ vs. ‘prosaic’ or ‘open-ended’ texts.

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