Arising from a 2012 Liverpool conference, this volume’s ten chapters explore Herodotean reception across various contexts throughout the ‘long nineteenth century’ (roughly, from the French Revolution until shortly after the First World War). In their introduction, Thomas Harrison and Joseph Skinner liken Herodotean reception to a ‘kaleidoscope’ (20) but aim to avoid reducing his afterlife ‘to a series of fractured images divorced from their wider context’ (2). The range of inquiry, encompassing school primers, geographical treatises, nationalist ideologies and more, proves worthy of the author in question, conveying through broad strokes and close observation the profusion of uses to which the Histories gave rise.
Tim Rood’s ‘From Ethnography to History’ profitably examines the role played by ethnography in constructions of the Herodotus-Thucydides binary and the history of historiography. The teleological ‘evolutionary process’ (29) towards Thucydidean (and supposedly non-ethnographic) historiography oversimplifies ancient historiography’s ‘extraordinarily varied forms’ (25) and the many accounts of Herodotus (from the early modern era through to the nineteenth century) in which ethnography presents less problematically than it would later (especially for Felix Jacoby).
Edith Hall’s splendid ‘Romantic Poet-Sage of History’ argues for taking ‘“unserious” reception seriously’, tracing Herodotus across ‘contexts beyond the Academy’ (49), including children’s literature, lyric poetry and musical comedy (with a focus on Arion, the dolphin-rescued musician). Hall well elucidates how Herodotus ‘penetrated to many cultural levels and milieux’ (69).
Suzanne Marchand’s ‘Herodotus as Anti-Classical Toolbox’ insightfully explores the possibilities Herodotus afforded ‘Romantics and orientalists’ in resisting Eurocentric scholarship. Herodotus offered ‘tools’ for constructing ‘forms of at least mildly “philobarbaric” world history’ (76), perturbing Graecocentric narratives.
Mark Molesky’s ‘George Grote and the “Open-Hearted Herodotus”’ analyses Grote’s admiration for Herodotus, including his crediting him for helping to move history ‘into the age of historical reason’ (106). Grote esteemed Herodotean fair-mindedness, interpreting the ‘probity of Herodotus’s authorial voice as a sign of intellectual maturity’ (112).
Skinner’s ‘Imagining Empire through Herodotus’ offers a fine-grained examination of the Histories as both auxiliary to and interpreted through imperialism, with attention to the ‘myriad sequences of encounter’ (140) inculcating notions of empire from schooldays through to colonial governance.
David Gange’s ‘Two Victorian Egypts of Herodotus’ traces Herodotus across debates over Egypt’s connections to ancient Greece, illustrating the complex ‘intertwining of mid-Victorian ideals, the Old Testament and Herodotus’ (160).
Phiroze Vasunia’s lucid ‘Of Europe’ studies the politics of defining Europe (geographically, culturally, etymologically) and the ways in which different nineteenth-century figures revolved Herodotean ideas on the nature of Europe ‘because Europe itself was still not a fixed entity’ (182).
Caspar Meyer’s ‘From Scythian Ethnography to Aryan Christianity’ examines the varied uses of Herodotus’s Scythian logos among Russian intellectuals concerned with ‘multicultural antiquity and national identity’ (221).
Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s ‘Herodotus and the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War’ shows how the Histories provided an interpretive lens for the war and, subsequently, how its outcome may have affected (anglophone) scholarship. Pre-war commentators of the ἀρχὴ κακῶν passage (Hdt. 5.97.3) often criticized Herodotus’s own possible criticism of Athens, while post-war readers, perhaps reacting to Greece’s defeat, praised Herodotus’ apparent insight that ancient Greeks had brought evils upon themselves.
Harrison’s ‘Herodotus’s Travels in Britain and Beyond’ offers an impressive survey of Herodotean-inspired prose compositions, especially for Oxford’s Gaisford Prize. These not only mimic Herodotean niceties of style but also (implicitly) reveal ‘a sophisticated understanding of Herodotus’s authorial persona, his rhetoric of proof’ and the ‘“discourses of othering” reflected in his work’ (268), even as their insular drollery reflects self-serving presumptions of class and ethnicity.
As often with reception studies, detailed exposition can dizzy; such inevitably occurs here, but the editors have nonetheless ensured that Herodotean intellectual reverberations repeatedly come into focus. Amid granularity, through lines emerge. As demonstrated especially by Hall and Skinner, Herodotus’s reach spanned class and, to a lesser but still notable degree, gender. Herodotus recurrently serves competing intellectual agendas: his ‘range’ all but guarantees his cutting in different directions, serviceable ‘for’ or ‘against’ Philhellenism, say, or firm definitions of Europe. The volume does not stint on the amusing factoid (for example, Beazley’s 1907 Herodotus at the Zoo casting the people of Cambridge as Egyptians, since they revere crocodiles (χάμψαι) in Xαμπρίζ (266, with Hdt. 2.69.3)). Several contributions (Rood, Hall, Marchand, Skinner, Vasunia, Harrison) crest above their particulars and should inspire further study, whether of other iterations of Herodotus’s ‘anti-classicality’ or the inadvertent insightfulness offered by seemingly frivolous imitations. One encounters many fine close readings (see, for instance, Hall on George Eliot’s 1873 poem ‘Arion’ as cleverly incorporating the ‘heavyweight “adult” discourse’ (64) of the Persian Wars). Overall, the volume successfully imparts how an author once deemed ‘childlike’ (43 n.103) proved a serious fellow indeed in the long nineteenth century.
