Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and was also critical to their interpretation in retrospect. This book examines the representation of human motivation in Herodotus' Histories, building on recent work that views the historian against the background of the sophists and exploring the implications of this for the Histories' narrative books. Working from the theoretical basis of reader response criticism, it uses Plutarch's insights to plot Herodotus' narrative strategies for guiding his readers' re ... More

Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and was also critical to their interpretation in retrospect. This book examines the representation of human motivation in Herodotus' Histories, building on recent work that views the historian against the background of the sophists and exploring the implications of this for the Histories' narrative books. Working from the theoretical basis of reader response criticism, it uses Plutarch's insights to plot Herodotus' narrative strategies for guiding his readers' response to questions of motives. Its focus is the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represents this elusive variety of historical knowledge; but through illustrating and analyzing a range of such techniques across a wide selection of narratives, it supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally. Herodotus is revealed as a master of both narrative and historiography, able tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Subjects discussed include the influence of Homer as a narrative model; the account of Leonidas and Thermopylae—where the subtle interweaving of heroic and more pragmatic motivations contribute to the historian's self-characterization; the Samian and Persian stories, with their depiction of irrational motivation; the Athenian stories, which reveal Herodotus' polarizing technique of presentation; the complications of rhetoric, with its slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘Greek unity’, in the Ionian Revolt narrative—which proves a touchstone for assessing the later campaign; motives and necessity in the Greek states' response to the Persian threat; and the characterization of the Histories' most prominent individuals, Xerxes and Themistocles.