The Histories and Writing

Abstract

Thucydides is rightly regarded as an outstanding representative of the cultural change which took place from the second half of the fifth century onwards. Herodotus established a main theme, the conflict between the Greeks and the barbarians, from the beginnings until the final repulsion of the Persian invasion in 479. The interchangeable use of legein and graphein indicates that both verbs mean the same in the situation of oral performance. The Histories contain a fairly large number of passages (about thirty) which are striking because Herodotus speaks of his own time in the past tense. Several indicators such as chronology, organization of the material, and commitment to legein ta legomena have shown that the Histories were put into written form because Herodotus felt the need to give his knowledge an existence independent of his own, and to preserve it for posterity. Keywords: barbarians; graphein ; Greeks; Herodotus; legein ta legomena ; legein ; Persian invastion; Thucydides

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