[This essay was originally published in Herodotus: Narrator, Scientist, Historian , ed. Ewen Bowie, 109–122. Trends in Classics 59. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. It is published here with permission of de Gruyter. In this online edition, the original page numbers of the print edition will be indicated within braces (“{”… Read more
[This is an early draft of an article eventually published in Pushing the Boundaries of Historia, ed. Mary C. English and Lee Fratantuono, Routledge 2018, pp. 7–12. It appears here by permission of the editors. The page-breaks of the printed version will be indicated within braces: for example, “{7|8}” indicates where… Read more
[This essay was originally published in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday (ed. A. Korangy and D. J. Sheffield) 185–191. Wiesbaden 2014. In this online edition, the original page numbers of the print edition will be indicated within braces (“{” and… Read more
Abridged translation of Mythische Erzählstrukturen in Herodots “Historien”, published in 2011 by De Gruyter. Herodotus is often criticised for his mythical representation of historical events. However, this offers an important key to the understanding of the text. Starting with the reconstruction of a contemporary mythical-ritual framework, in her reading of… Read more
In Imagining Illegitimacy, Mary Ebbott investigates metaphors of illegitimacy in classical Greek literature, concentrating in particular on the way in which the illegitimate child (nothos) is imagined in narratives. Employing an approach that maintains that metaphors are a key to understanding abstract ideas, Ebbott connects the many complex metaphors associated… Read more
Readers of Herodotus’s histories are familiar with its reports of bizarre portents, riddling oracles, and striking dreams. But Herodotus draws our attention to other types of signs too, beginning with human speech itself as a coded system that can manipulate and be manipulated. Objects, gifts, artifacts, markings, even the human… Read more
In Greek thought, barbaroi are utterers of unintelligible or inarticulate sounds. What importance does the text of Herodotus’s Histories attribute to language as a criterion of ethnic identity? The answer to this question illuminates the empirical foundations of Herodotus’s pluralistic worldview. The first translator of cultures also translates, describes, and evaluates foreign speech to… Read more
