Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature

Abstract

Abstract This book is the first monograph devoted to the reception of Herodotus among Imperial Greek writers. Using a broad reception model and focused largely on texts outside of historiography proper, the book analyzes the entanglements of criticism and imitation in select works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, and Pausanias. It offers a new angle on Herodotus’s intellectual afterlife, channeled through evocations both explicit and implicit in literary criticism, the moral essay, public oration, satire, and periegetic literature. The book shifts focus from reputation only—what ancient authors explicitly had to say about Herodotus—toward the kinetic interrelation between Herodotus’s reputation and his active reworking across genre and mode. It demonstrates how Herodotus was strategically construed and often implicitly summoned—as fabulist, classicist, moralizer, and evasive intellectual—and how such Herodotean presences played to the wider purposes of Imperial writers. Herodotus became a touchstone for writers concerned with a nimbus of questions that the Histories first helped to articulate. Imperial Greeks found Herodotus useful in puzzling through questions of authorial persona, mimesis, the relationship between aesthetic and ethical criticism, the self, and the contingent definitions of Hellenism under Rome. Ultimately, the book widens an incomplete reception history and reads bi-focally, examining how attention to the presence of Herodotus in various texts unveils new layers of meaning in those works, while also showing how ancient receptions offer insight into the Histories.

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