Herodotus has a similar importance for Norma Thompson, but for her the key story is not that of Gyges and Candaules' wife, but of Arion and the dolphin (1.23-24). The last paragraph of her 'Afterword' reads: 'The task then is to fulfill the human vocation, to create history through art and to form community by means of that perception. To be human is to engage history, for history is all we have. What we make of it will shape a common destiny. If shaped well, the community may thrive; if not, it may crumble when out of its element, or confronted with crisis. Arion's story stirs us towards courage, creativity, and a readiness to leap into an unknown future' (p. 167). The story of Arion is only introduced at the very end of the book, but it can be argued that Thompson sees it as an allegory of the role of Herodotus' History operating at many levels. In the story, Arion is sailing in a Corinthian vessel to Tarentum, when he is set upon by the sailors. Faced with the choice of being thrown overboard or committing suicide, Anon agrees to kill himself after he has sung his last song, dressed in his bardic robes. Having sung his song, Arion leaps into the sea, in full costume, but is rescued by a dolphin, who brings him ashore at Taenarum, whence he makes his way back to Corinth, and denounces his attackers to the tyrant Periander, who summons the sailors, and establishes their guilt. For Thompson perhaps, Arion stands for Herodotus, who offers us his art in all is poetic splendour, but is set upon by critics, ancient and modern: his leap is through time, to a late twentieth-century world which can appreciate his presentation of society for what it is.
Herodotus' ancient critics are Aristotle and Thucydides. In the first chapter, 'The decline and repudiation of the whole: notes on Aristotle's enclosure of the pre-Socratic world', we are presented with a different metaphor. The subject matter of the pre-Socratic writers, including Herodotus, is a vast expanse of unenclosed common land, over which anyone can let their ideas wander freely: Aristotle introduces notions of theory and specialisation to divide this land into narrow plots that must be ploughed by single-minded individuals. Thucydides is discussed in the last chapter, 'Before objectivity, and after', where he is seen as the initiator of the tradition that historians should aim to be objective - a tradition now in inevitable decline (p. 149). Herodotus wrote before, and therefore outside, this tradition: he can therefore speak to us now, and offer a different vision of the historian's role, one which puts stories, not events, at its centre. The fifth chapter, 'The use of Herodotus in contemporary political and cultural criticism', is where Herodotus' modern critics are investigated. Thompson focuses on three writers, Martin Bernal, Francois Hartog and Edward Said. The critique of each is valuable.
The heart of the book lies in the three central chapters, 'The development of social memory', 'The formation of Persian political identity', which focuses on the Persian constitutional debate (3.80-83), and 'Political identities in conflict: Herodotus in contention with his characters'. She explores various episodes in the History, in order to demonstrate what Herodotus has to say. And it is important at this point to emphasise what Thompson is looking for: as the final paragraph, quoted above, makes clear, this is a book about what Herodotus can mean for us now. This is a contribution to modern political debate, rather than to the historical study of Herodotus. That does not mean that the work is of no interest to Classical scholars - only that they may not find what they expect.
Having, I hope, given an impression of how the book works, I must say something about how it doesn't. It is a short work, but it is not easy to read: the brief introduction does not really prepare the reader for what is to follow, and there is no clear thread of argument running through the book as a whole; instead, stories are discussed, often with interesting digressions (for example on the critical fate of Melville's Moby Dick [pp. 155-161]), and then the author passes on; there is no conclusion, but only the discussion of a story to act as a message for the work as a whole. Some might point out that precisely the same criticisms could be made of Herodotus by an unsympathetic reader, but Thompson is handicapped by her prose style. Arion was borne ashore on the back of a dolphin; if Thompson in this book is doing the same for Herodotus, she has found a much less graceful means of conveyance. Some of the chapter headings quoted above give an indication of her way with words. Thompson discusses Aristotle's criticism of Herodotus' 'free-running' prose style (pp. 11-17), but a sentence like: 'At the heart of Herodotean historiography is attentiveness to these diverse amplifications that occur in the discourse about events' (p. 147) is anything but free-running. This is a pity, because an attempt like this to reclaim Herodotus for the present age, and one carried out with an evident love and respect for the History, deserves the attention of any Herodotean.
HUGH BOWDEN
King's College London.
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