BMCR 2003.03.25

The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus

, The historian's craft in the age of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. x, 340 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 0199240507. $74.00.

Every so often a volume of essays written by diverse hands appears that reminds us of the specific virtues of the genre. Nino Luraghi’s The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus is one of them. Luraghi’s introduction begins with Oswyn Murray’s 1987 article, “Herodotus and Oral History,” and then backtracks to the earlier historiography of Jacoby and his teachers, Diels and Wilamowitz. Where did Herodotus’ own storytelling skills come from? Aly’s Volksmärchen und Sage was written in 1921; Murray’s 1987 answer made groundbreaking use of the advances in anthropological understanding since then of the oral narrative background from which Herodotus’ text emerged, but, according to Luraghi, it also continued to present Herodotus in Jacoby’s ‘splendid isolation.’

Murray’s paper had first been presented in a seminar he codirected with A. Momigliano in the late 1970s; in a phrase that will recur in this volume several times, Murray followed Momigliano in seeing Herodotus as the last of the Herodoti, “the last and greatest of the logopoioi by virtue of being a logographos” (11). Luraghi isolates three factors that make the project of revisiting Herodotus in his contemporary social and literary context particularly relevant at present: the publication and analysis of the new Simonides poems, Vansina’s and others’ anthropological revisions of the meaning of tradition and of the social function played by a people’s notion of the past (as being more similar in oral and literary contexts than previously thought), and, finally, formulations of the past as part of a ‘social surface’ and as having a complex social function: the recent past remains relatively unstructured and somewhat chaotic, while the distant past has an important and formative, highly formalized role as defining a group identity (building on the work of J. Assman 1992 and Fentress and Wickham 1992). In sum, what used to be considered a question of Herodotus’ sources and models has become a subtler issue altogether. Everyone who works on early Greek poetics, history, and culture will find much of interest in this rich volume.

Murray’s foundational 1987 paper is reprinted as the second chapter in the volume. Some of its more important points that figure in the essays that follow either as basic premises or contested assumptions are:

1. Writing and the habits of thought that writing encourages do not produce the kinds of thing Herodotus’ text contains.

2. The method of transmission in an oral context is more important than the length of time a tradition has lasted; Herodotus’ information about earlier times is not qualitatively different from his treatment of later events (e.g., Polycrates is treated very much in the Histories as Cypselus and Periander are).

3. There is little sign in the Histories of genealogies as profoundly shaping the thinking of the text. (Exceptions: kings of Sparta and Macedon, and rulers of the east.) In general, lists are relatively absent and not relevant for Herodotus. His oral traditions are free and not fixed.

4. The objective truth or falsehood of a tradition is of no importance in judging the accuracy of its transmission; the particulars of the type of tradition from which the story emerged are what count.

5. Herodotus seems to represent separate traditions separately, with relatively little contamination among them. The importance of various Greek aristocratic traditions is exaggerated, except for that of Athens, but regional differences are clear. Here ‘deformation’ is a more helpful term than Tendenz or bias; traditions are maintained because of the specific interests of the group that maintains them.

6. The various traditions found in the Histories (family traditions, royal traditions, official polis traditions (as in Sparta), traditions of Delphi, east Greece, possibly some eastern (aristocratic) families), though used by Herodotus, do not explain his conception of history. They, rather, provide its material. Murray goes on to talk about some specific traditions, Greek and non-Greek, and the various specific shapes that they seem to take, as one can tease these out from Herodotus’ text.

The remainder of the volume consists of papers initially given at a workshop organized by Luraghi, ‘The Dawn of Historiography,’ held in Turin in September 1997, assessing and taking up the challenge posed by Murray’s paper, to embed Herodotus more firmly in his fifth-century, largely oral, context. It begins with four papers analyzing a variety of contemporary interpretative genres and practices. Ewen Bowie, “Ancestors of Historiography in Early Greek Elegiac and Iambic Poetry?,” considers the narrative aspects of archaic and early classical verse (ch. 3). Particularly useful is his care in defining terms and asking basic questions. Bowie emphasizes the untidiness of our current picture and the number of questions that remain unanswered, after the excitement raised by the publication of the new Simonides poems. Features found in Herodotus that may be influenced by elegiac or iambic poetry include: the importance of a reality claim made by the narrator, the narrator’s self-confidence and claim to confer a lasting fame on the subject matter treated, an underlying moral judgment about the behavior of both citizens and non-citizens that forms an integral part of the narrative, divine intervention as a normal part of the narrative of events (here Simonides is particularly instructive), speeches on the part of actors in events, comparison with earlier epic conflicts, and, finally, the preference of generations (i.e., inherited moral obligation) rather than chronology (bare annalistic recording) as the backbone of the temporal narrative. Bowie emphasizes the difficulty of telling whether a fragment’s context is sympotic or not, and even within the sympotic frame of a given fragment, of distinguishing exhortation of one’s fellow citizens from true narrative.

Lucio Bertelli, “Hecataeus: From Genealogy to Historiography,” emphasizes the differences between early Greek genealogical historia and, say, Goody’s Sumerian ‘lists of events’ (ch. 4). Early Greek genealogy is critical of tradition, undertakes a search for rational or internal explanation, and is free of the constraining limitations of centralized power or an official or sacral ideology. Genealogy is by definition not simple but complex in its interests (even most basically, families branch out and form liaisons with other families); in addition, Greek genealogical investigation seems to have followed the main lines of the colonial expansions of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Even though we cannot place Hecataeus precisely on the long continuum from Hesiod to Herodotus, we do know that he represents not just the registration but the interpretation of oral tradition — myth made to fit observed reality more closely. Hecataeus’ ‘chronological genealogy,’ bridging the gap between myth and history, made possible the birth of fifth-century historiography.

Next, Robert Fowler, “Early Historia and Literacy,” building on his important 1996 JHS article, takes up the broader and vexed question of literacy and early local historia (ch. 5). He begins by asking whether local or great history came first, emphasizing the sheer number of writers Herodotus knew and the paucity of our own information about them. He agrees with Marincola 1999 that Jacoby’s distinctions are artificial: local history, universal history, ethnography and mythography overlapped and were not separated by their writers into different genres. Moreover, the distinction between literacy and orality is ours — within its terms, Fowler finds it helpful to call Herodotus pseudo-oral (adapting Ruth Scodel’s notion of lyric pseudo-intimacy), because “all the oral devices in Herodotus hover … between the world of the implied and real audiences” (109). In this Herodotus follows (Hesiod and) Hecataeus, whom Fowler likewise calls pseudo-local; “from its beginning mythography was occasion-free, panhellenic, and in these respects literate” (113). Like Herodotus after him (but not, say, Herodotus’ contemporary, Protagoras), Hecataeus considered truth a monistic concept, and probability an absolute criterion. Making genealogies required the background of literacy, since it involved a comprehensive gridding and the ability to solve through investigation and reason the problem of the inevitable chronological contradictions. Herodotus was “not so much … the inventor of history as the great theorist of its methodology” (98).

Finally, Maurizio Giangiulio, “Constructing the Past: Colonial Traditions and the Writing of History. The Case of Cyrene,” addresses the issue of colonial traditions and the nature and function of foundation tales in ancient Greece (ch. 6). Giangiulio focuses on the terms in which an archaic community could understand itself, and therefore sees polis religion and in particular the idea of a ‘sacred identity’ and hence the founder’s cult as central to the creation of colonial foundation stories. (He follows Assmann’s 1992 notion of something out of the ordinary as intrinsic and necessary to the articulation of a collective identity.) The details of a colony’s foundation thus represent ‘intentional history,’ a form of social memory which establishes both the image of the past the community wishes to transmit and its resulting corporate identity. Giangiulio considers in detail the case of Cyrene and the changes in its mythical genealogies that took place after the Battiads lost power, between the time of Pindar and that of Herodotus. Herodotus preserves evidence of real changes in the political climate, since the Delphic elements are kept, while Battus’ link with the Argonauts and the Minyan background goes missing. The mechanics of constructing the past, real historical memories, and contemporary, homoeostatic dynamics are inevitably closely intertwined in the formation and ongoing deformation of foundation stories. Moreover, ‘local traditions’ as preserved in poetry and history are not epichoric: they have from early on been incorporated into larger mainland poetic traditions, and Herodotean inquiry was itself a catalyst of the tradition. There were no official versions; what mattered to Herodotus was the local nature of his information (in all its complexity). A colonial polis’ idea of its past was a shared possession, rooted in cult and a complex ongoing tradition.

The next five papers move on to Herodotus himself. Nino Luraghi, “Local Knowledge in Herodotus’ Histories,” reconfigures the problem of Herodotean akoa, preferring to treat all mentions of sources in Herodotus as a fundamentally homogeneous system (using Calame 1986). He claims that although Fehling 1971 conceived the issue of Herodotean source criticism wrongly, many of his observations were correct. With Fowler he argues that the local dimension of Herodotus’ Histories is its most essential feature (ch. 7). It is hard to be more specific, since Herodotus’ visit to a site and conversation with local informants cannot be distinguished in the text from either a written source purporting to give a particular local opinion or an opinion expressed by someone who is from a particular place but does not live there. An important implicit assumption of local source citation is that one can learn about the concerns and history of others by listening to their logoi (with the exception of those living on the margins of the world). The knowledge of traditions possessed by the cultivated elite is treated as knowledge of the community as a whole. Historical logoi are by their nature tendentious; two-thirds of the akoa statements in Herodotus are contested. ‘Local knowledge’ is not organized or official, and Herodotus doesn’t specifically address the various potential contradictions or shortcomings of his informants and their categories of retention of the past. Most suggestively, while Jacoby took statements of local knowledge as metonymies, Luraghi takes them as metaphors. They are not about establishing precisely where or how a given piece of information was collected, but rather stand for the entire ‘social surface’ — i.e., the group to which it belongs, that holds it to be true. Thus the discourse of historia is a metadiscourse on the Histories and their implied author, not an autobiography, and it would have been received as such by Herodotus’ audiences. Paradoxically, however, the fact that the Histories came into being as a fixed text also began to call into question the very nature and validity of the local information collected, because tacitly the Histories as a literary construction demonstrate that the past is not ‘what everybody knows,’ but rather something one must try to arrive at by historia, investigation.

Two pieces consider ways in which Herodotus’ text perhaps reveals specific deformations or misunderstandings by Herodotus or his sources of earlier traditional material. Alan Griffiths, “Kissing Cousins: Some Curious Cases of Adjacent Material in Herodotus,” addresses three pairs of juxtaposed but superficially unconnected stories that contain an underlying symbolic or even symbiotically-linked meaning that has been missed, or at least not emphasized, by Herodotus himself (ch. 8). In the account of sex and medicine in Babylon (1.196-199), the treatment of the sick looks like the functional narrative transformation of Babylonian temple prostitution (fixed/mobile; free/forced; choosing/chosen). Griffiths argues that in the passage on the blinding of the Scythian slaves (4.2), we have a reversed cause and effect and probably a misunderstood account of an original sexual transgression and its subsequent punishment by blinding. In 3.117, Herodotus fails to spell out something the context makes clear, that the ‘Watergate crisis’ (in which the story of the water of a huge plain feeding five peoples is controlled by the central Persian government) tacitly interprets the larger motifs of the beginning of Darius’ reign.

The Herodotean deformation that Wolfgang Blösel considers is political rather than structural and symbolic: “The Herodotean Picture of Themistocles: A Mirror of Fifth-century Athens” (ch. 9). It concerns Herodotus’ treatment of Themistocles and the slanderous story of his acceptance of thirty talents from the Euboeans in the summer of 480 BCE (8.4-5). Blösel thinks that the story as it stands makes little sense and that it had originally been a story about Themistocles and the Histiaeans in which the money had been paid in order to make Themistocles persuade the Greeks to retreat. Herodotus’ motive for changing the story would have been to acquit Themistocles of the charge of treason. In general, I have difficulty with modern scholars discerning in the text an intentionality predating Herodotus but quite different from his because they posit an ignorant or deliberately cavalier decision on Herodotus’ part radically to rearrange the material he had been given, for political or artistic reasons of his own. This calls into question the fundamental integrity of his own claims to accurate reporting of logoi in particular and the historical enterprise in general in a way that requires (but rarely receives) an explicit argument about the larger complications of this position. Nevertheless, both Griffiths’ and Blösel’s pieces stand as important reminders that Herodotus must not be read in a naively fundamentalist fashion. It is also an assumption on our part if we choose to believe that both the structure and language of Herodotus’ text reflect what local informants told him, or, a fortiori, that they account for a set of historical events that really lay behind the stories.

The last two pieces on Herodotus himself consider Herodotus’ treatment of chronology. Rosalind Thomas, “Herodotus’ Histories and the Floating Gap,” takes up Henige’s 1974 formulation of the ‘hourglass effect’ — that is, that in oral traditions memories cluster either around a very early, foundational time or the quite recent past; what is obscured is everything in between (ch. 10). When written historiography began, one of its most important tasks was to fill this gap, which is where genealogy came in. Thomas’ paper focuses on a number of origin stories in the Histories that fit Henige’s pattern since they often lack a precise chronological link to later events (something partly obscured by Herodotus’ method of using digressions): the Cypselids, the Ionians, the Spartans (even though there is a king list, there are no stories) and of non-Greeks, Egyptians and Scythians. A trail of reciprocal vengeance through time partly makes up for or obscures the floating gap, but the multiplicity and complexity of the traditions Herodotus handles also complicate the genealogical scheme; there is no single line of official tradition, Greek or non-Greek, in the mid and late fifth century BCE. Moreover, there is the distorting gravitational pull of the world of Homeric epic, so that much energy went into connecting the family or the polis to Homeric heroes and their various nostoi.

Pietro Vannicelli, “Herodotus’ Egypt and the Foundations of Universal History,” also deals with chronology in the Histories, but focuses on book two (ch. 11). While Thomas points out that Herodotus uses Egypt not just to periodize human history but also to incorporate gods into the sweep of human chronology (Hecataeus and 2.143 are relevant here), Vannicelli posits Herodotus’ treatment of Egypt and its long record of successive human kings and priests as a way tacitly to criticize Greek traditions and to show Greek indebtedness to Egypt. He focuses on 2.2-4 and 2.99-146, the former passage concerning the investigation of earliest Egyptian antiquity, the latter the long pre-dodecharchy pharaonic period and its ambitious synchronism with Greek genealogy through the story of Heracles. Vannicelli considers 2.2-4 structurally comparable to 1.1-5 in that it overtly poses the methodological problems of beginnings, points to learned barbarian logioi, and culminates in a first-person recusatio, here using the authority of priests of Memphis, Thebes, and Heliopolis. Ancient Egyptian temples, statues and altars are erga, monuments, whose continued presence challenges the destructive effects of time and extends the limits of memory. This leads to the partition of historical time into periods. The main turning points of the long span of Egyptian history Herodotus takes to be Min, Moeris, and Psammetichus, and these undergird the narrative of 2.99-182. The intrusion of Heracles into the Egyptian account links up the authority of the Egyptian chronology to the Greek spatium historicum; one subtle effect is that the Egyptian priests, in enforcing the sharp separation of gods and men, deprive the Greek aristocratic lineages of foundational authority. In the twenty-sixth dynasty there appears the possibility of reliable archaic history. The same tripartite partition of Egyptian time (Min-Moeris; Sesostris-Sethus; the twenty-sixth dynasty) applies to the Lydians, to upper Asia, and to Scythia too; Heracles’ presence in these different stories reveals a basic effort by Herodotus to synchronize the great cultures of the ancient world, and also to move toward closing Thomas’ floating gap. Psammetichus on the other hand indicates the limits of the possibility of knowledge, both in the chronological and the geographical sphere.

Three articles consider Herodotus’ contemporaries and immediate successors. Astrid Möller, “The Beginnings of Chronography: Hellanicus’ Hiereiai” discusses Hellanicus in the context of the late fifth century’s handling of chronology (ch. 12). After a careful discussion of Jacoby, Möller, like Fowler and others, doubts Jacoby’s contention that horography and chronography came after Herodotus. She then asks: but where did the annalistic pattern of writing kat’ eniauton come from? The only fifth-century historian who might have used chronicle records that we know of is Xanthus, but if he did rely on records they were not Greek ones. Charon may have made lists, but there is no evidence of an annalistic pattern, while Hellanicus’ work as a genealogist emphasized the creation of links between peoples, cities, and concepts but would not have emphasized the precise year in which something happened. In order to become useful for establishing an annalistic pattern, “the genealogical tree has to be stripped of its branches and the related stories” (251). Möller discusses Spartan king lists and the Near Eastern chronicle as possible models but concludes with Ambaglio 1980 that there are practical reasons why the long continuous line of Argive priestesses of Hera would have proved particularly useful for someone beginning to make records on a year-by-year basis. She ends with Thucydides’ criticisms of Herodotus (5.20) and his own alternative mechanism for chronological exactitude. Her preference for the inspiration behind Hellanicus is the oriental documentary model of the chronicle, although she sees him also using genealogical, historiographical, and oral tradition.

Roberto Nicolai, “Thucydides’ Archaeology: Between Epic and Oral Traditions,” considers the Archaeology in book one as Thucydides’ attempt to argue his own answer to the methodological problems raised by ancient history (ch. 13). Nicolai reads the Archaeology as if it were an oration with an exordium, a sequence of exempla (as in an epideictic discourse), and a recapitulatio that returns, ring-structure style, to the concerns of the beginning: “the reconstruction of the distant past cannot be separated from the method by which it has been carried out” (265). The structure of this part of the History is quite different from the rest. In it Thucydides considers possible sources of information for the past: akoai, Homer and the poets, logographoi, ethnographic comparisons, and archaeology. He inserts a cluster of methodological statements (otherwise rare in the History), regarding how to measure truth and the reliability of information. In general, the Archaeology is designed to show that the history of the distant past as reconstructed by poets and logographoi is not trustworthy. Nicolai acutely observes that if one follows the reasoning of the passage as a whole the only real resource is the logic of analogy and verisimilitude, which makes the Archaeology not history but “a general sociological thesis … about power and progress” (276). If this is true, it is not meant as a modern objective reconstruction of the distant past, but rather as a selective and biased account of Thucydides’ own, affirming the superiority of the present and of those who are able to explain it. Thucydides belittles the reliability of all previous tradition (including Herodotus’ treatment of the relatively recent Persian Wars); only the most recent history can be the object of accurate scrutiny and trustworthy reconstruction, satisfying the standards for becoming a paradigm.

Finally, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Myth, History, and Collective Identity: Uses of the Past in Ancient Greece and Beyond,” considers a particular case study of tradition and history as ‘social surface,’ showing that even in the thoroughly literate world of Hellenistic Greece history is being continuously re-shaped to fulfill complex contemporary sociopolitical functions (ch. 14). Often it is highly purposive. “A society’s ‘intentional history’ is of fundamental significance for the imaginaire, for the way a society interprets and understands … its collective identity” (286). Gehrke takes a close look at the cult of Artemis Leukophryene in Magnesia on the Meander, in 208 BCE. In the revamped and splendid festival that began in that year and was to take place every fourth year thereafter, various quasi-mythic friendships and kinship foundation myths putatively linking Magnesia on the Meander with cities throughout the Greek world were mobilized and presented as historical. The Magnesians’ account became the official foundation myth of their city and apparently was universally accepted as such by the other Greek communities involved. 151 Greek poleis and federal states enthusiastically recognized the antiquity and the permanence of the reciprocal bond being developed. Thus third-century mainstream Greek historiography remained in close connection with myth, showing us that, quite separately from the more demanding standards of Herodotus and Thucydides, throughout Greek historiography, “every innovation became another binding fact, projected into the past, and accepted by all as history, as long as it was received or ‘believed'” (301). Intentional history served three important functions: to provide a basis for questions of right and legal claims; to establish a sense of a people’s collective identity; and to cement claims of friendship and close familiarity. For the Greeks, the mythic and the historical remained closely interconnected for the whole of their history — a theme of considerable importance for understanding the ambitious and even pretentious mythmaking of our own various contemporary nationalisms.

As though all this were not riches enough, there is a final essay, both magisterial and challenging, by Murray, reflecting on a number of the arguments raised in the preceding papers and on his own long career of thinking about Herodotus and also pointing to still inadequately explored areas in early historiography (ch. 15, “Herodotus and Oral History Reconsidered”). Murray begins by linking his original essay to ‘the generation of the soixantehuitards‘ and observing that the title of his 1987 piece had been deliberately provocative, linking Herodotus to orality in three ways: his sources were oral and should therefore be read in the light of anthropological studies of orality; Herodotus was himself an oral performer; Murray’s own generation, responding to Marshall McLuhan, was itself released from ‘the tyranny of literary studies’ in ways that made new kinds of assessment of Herodotus’s orality possible.

Like many essays in this volume, this final piece could usefully supply required reading for every graduate seminar on Herodotean historiography. Murray begins with sources and the lack of fixed oral traditions in Greece, commenting that more work remains to be done teasing out different types of ancient (oral) historical traditions in terms of the nature of collective or individual memory. For Herodotus’ text this means looking at the complexity of types of transmission found in the narrative and also at Herodotus’ own (East Greek?) relation to various kinds of oral transmission. Murray himself remains doubtful that we will ever entirely understand Herodotus’ role as a protos heuretes, or solve the very real problem of his ‘splendid isolation.’

Murray remains unconvinced that local chronicles figured as important sources for Herodotean narrative; he is more sympathetic to genealogy but comments that Herodotus’ actual use of genealogies is sparing. This brings him back to Jacoby, and Murray rightly observes that Jacoby’s initial formulations of how to think about early Greek historiography are likely, for better or for worse, to remain foundational. Regarding the problem of Herodotean chronology, Murray notes that Herodotus at least doubles the ‘three generations’ rule of anthropologists, when dealing with the supposedly historical content of oral historiography. In a suggestive couple of paragraphs, Murray links the problematization of Herodotean chronology as Fowler, Thomas and Vannicelli discuss it in this volume to the solutions achieved by Thucydides and Hellanicus, discussed by Möller and Nicolai. He singles out the contribution of Israeli scholars, especially Chaim Rosén and David Asheri, concluding “It is perhaps even a little disturbing to find Herodotus so clearly vindicated as a positivist historian; but that is an aspect of his work that we must live with, however we explain it” (321).

On the other hand, pointing to new work on orality in general and to the new Simonides fragment on Plataea in particular, he comments that “Herodotus the enquirer cannot be separated from Herodotus the literary artist” (322), the creator of “the greatest continuous prose narrative in Greek literature, and a literary masterpiece.” After discussing a number of the contexts for Herodotus’ astonishing achievement advanced in this volume, Murray ends the essay not dismissing them but rather turning toward the topic of Gehrke’s essay: “like Aristotle, ‘as I grow older I fall more and more in love with myth.'” He uses Wittgenstein to reflect on the fact that facts are not solid things, but interpretations of events; oral tradition “is truer to the beliefs of the past … precisely because it is more biased, more open to manipulation” (324). In the postmodern world we now inhabit, myth and history are always intimately connected.

As the length of this piece indicates, I found this a provocative and exciting book. I am not sure that its various authors would agree with the scant and somewhat arbitrary selection of their arguments discussed here, but I hope that it testifies to the complexities of the interlocking issues that an attempt to read Herodotus within a contemporary and largely oral fifth-century context raise. The contributors and in particular Professors Luraghi and Murray have given us an enormous amount to think about.

Brief Bibliography (of titles mentioned in the course of the review):

W. Aly, Volksmärchen, Sage und Novelle bei Herodot und seinen Zeitgenossen (Göttingen, 1921; repr. with appendix 1969).

D. Ambaglio, “L’opera storiografica di Ellanico di Lesbo,” in Ricerche di storiografia antica ii (Pisa, 1980), 9-192.

J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992).

D. Boedeker, “Heroic Historiography: Simonides and Herodotus on Plataea,” Arethusa 29 (1996), 237-42, repr. in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides: Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford, 2001), 120-34.

C. Calame, “Hérodote sujet de son discours,” Études de letters (1986:3), 24-48, also in C. Calame, The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.), 75-96.

D. Fehling, Die Quellenangaben bei Herodot (Berlin and New York, 1971), revised as Herodotus and his ‘Sources: Citation, Invention and Narrative Art, trans. J. G. Howie (Leeds, 1989).

J. Fentress and C. Wickham, The Social Memory (Oxford, 1992).

R. Fowler, “Herodotos and his Contemporaries,” JHS 116 (1966), 62-87.

J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977).

D. Henige, Oral Historiography (London, 1982).

F. Jacoby, “Über die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie und den Plan einer neuen Sammlung den griechischen Historiker fragmente,” Klio 9 (1909), 80-123.

J. Marincola, “Genre, Convention and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography,” in C. Kraus (ed.), Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden, Boston, and New York, 1999), 281-324.

A. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1990).

R. Scodel, “Self-correction, Spontaneity, and Orality in Archaic Poetry,” in I. Worthington (ed.), Voice into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (Leiden, 1996), 59-79.

G. Shrimpton, History and Memory in Ancient Greece (Montreal, 1997).

J. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985).