‘I didn’t give my own genealogy’: Herodotus and the authorial persona

Abstract

This chapter begins by noting Herodotus' refusal to tell his own genealogy, and with the idea that in his first-person authorial voice he fashioned an 'expert's persona' that owed its authority to the fact that the author/narrator remains an outsider to the text proper in important ways. Herodotus' authorial persona remains an anomaly, therefore, but one with a certain odd spaciousness and idiosyncratic integrity. But what Herodotus has ultimately done with his authorial voice, both critically retelling logoi and assessing, interpreting the material he recounts as data, is to create for us within the text the presence of his own alert and critical authorial consciousness as a spatium historicum in itself. History, the hands of Herodotus its first practitioner, is resolutely binocular: both narrative and critique of narrative, both the voice of many others and the voice of the histōr himself in helpful supplementation. Keywords: authorial voice; genealogy; Herodotus; histōr ; idiosyncratic integrity; narrator; spatium historicum

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