The fluidity of generic boundaries in classical Greek culture is part of what makes its study fascinatingly complex, as Scarlett Kingsley argues in her Introduction to Herodotus and the Presocratics. But the high level of specialization within modern subfields can often obscure key connections across the spectrum of classical Greek intellectual history. Some of the most thought-provoking recent contributions to this field have in fact aimed to transcend such disciplinary boundaries—a group to which Herodotus and the Presocratics should now be added.[1]
The originality of Kingsley’s contribution can be readily gauged if compared with its closest intellectual predecessor, Rosalind Thomas’ groundbreaking Herodotus in Context (2000). As Kingsley argues (pp. 6–9), the longstanding interest in Herodotus’ empiricism, of which Thomas’ work is perhaps the most compelling and influential example, has led interpreters to downplay the Histories’ interactions with theoretical inquiry (although, one might add, in some cases the dichotomy between theoretical and empirical might be in the eye of the reader). The overarching contribution of Herodotus and the Presocratics is to revise and complement this interpretative paradigm by tracing Herodotus’ relationship to the philosophical speculation associated with the so-called Presocratics. While Kingsley is explicit about the problematic status of the term “Presocratic” (30–1), her use of this category is significantly more capacious than usual, including authors like Sophocles, Antiphon, and Hippias—so much so that the line between “Presocratic” and “classical Greek” is at times hard to draw.
The connection between Herodotus and the Presocratics traced by Kingsley is particularly intriguing insofar as it focuses on the narrative of the Histories, rather than on its author’s assumed views: “the historical narrative throughout the Histories stakes out a range of philosophical views that place the reader in the hermeneutic position of vicariously testing ideas and methods in a laboratory of historical action” (9, emphasis mine). Kingsley understands the Histories as a laboratory in which contemporary concepts and conflicting theories operate, interact, and clash. The lack of a strong thesis in some of Kingsley’s chapters is thus less a flaw than a feature of this wide-ranging exploration, which puts Herodotus’ readers front and center. To anchor her argument, in most chapters Kingsley selects a particular Herodotean passage as her focal point, but the systematic work of contextualization makes her analyses much richer than isolated close readings.
The methodological section of the Introduction starts with the refreshing observation that “in spite of an awareness of its anteriority, the Histories is often interpreted in light of the generic expectations of later historiography, which only arose in its wake” (11). However, while warning against “generic essentialism” (33), Kingsley’s Introduction seems at times to fall under its spell, especially in her treatment of “generic miscegenation”: “[Herodotus’] historiē contains generic miscegenation already in the fifth century” (35). This contention presupposes the possibility of pure genres, an interpretative mirage that is even less productive in a context where generic heterogeneity is the rule rather than the exception.[2] The Introduction is more effective when tackling “generic indeterminacy” (9 and passim), but the use of genre theory à la Todorov, with its focus on (the modern construction of) literature, downplays the Histories’ cultural alterity. Consider the following example: “the Histories does not create its audience ex nihilo, it relies upon readerly competence to do the work of situating its literary ambitions in an already-existing reading culture” (19). Here, several terms domesticate the Histories by turning it into a modern work of literature: “literary ambitions” presupposes a well-defined field of literature; “reading culture” and “readerly competence” (a term that echoes reader-response criticism’s problematic “informed readers”) gloss over the complex status of writing in the fifth century; and even an italicized title like “the Histories” can function in this context as a hallmark of modern authorship (Castelli 2020, 43–55 and 191–207). Kingsley’s adoption of genre theory to address the Histories’ generic indeterminacy makes the Introduction feel like a false start, especially because Kingsley’s insightful discussions can largely be read independently from it.
Chapter 2 (“Relativism, King of All”) demonstrates the complexity and ambiguity of nomos in the Histories. Kingsley starts from the famous comparison between the Greeks’ and the Callatians’ divergent funerary customs (Hdt. 3.38). Far from endorsing the simple relativism of nomoi, as analyses of this passage usually surmise, Kingsley argues that the Histories repeatedly complicates the value of nomos by showing how it can be weaponized. This chapter culminates in an astute analysis of the way Darius’ language in the Constitutional Debate redefines the Persian nomoi (71–2), in which Kingsley shows that in the narrative of the third book “the unjust actions of the Great King are naturalized as cultural tradition” (75).
Chapter 3 (“The Pull of Tradition: Egoism and the Persian Revolution”) discusses self-interest as a motive for human action. The centerpiece here is the episode of the False Smerdis in the third book of the Histories, which is put in conversation with tragic (esp. Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and sophistic texts. Despite the intriguing conceptual tapestry that results from this reading, Kingsley’s reconstruction of the debate around self-interest moves on a high level of generality (for instance when comparing Herodotus’ Darius and Odysseus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and feels less focused than the arguments pursued elsewhere in the book.
The opposite is true of Chapter 4 (“History peri physeos”), which is driven by a tight and clear-cut thesis, namely that the paradigm of environmental determinism is a reductive understanding of the operation of physis in the Histories. Such a challenge is not entirely new (e.g., Thomas 2000, 103–14), but Kingsley persuasively shows that physis plays a more prominent role in the economy of the Histories than usually acknowledged, directing our attention to a different set of intertextual resonances that include Anaximander (124), Aeschylus (127), and Antiphon (139). These readings show, among other things, how Kingsley’s approach can complement the dominant emphasis on the empirical dimension of the Histories.
It is however in Chapter 5 (“Physis on the Battlefield”) that the book is at its most original. Here Kingsley extends the discussion of physis to moments in which it is exceeded, which are signaled by phrases like “better/stronger than one’s physis” (ἀμείνων/κρείσσων τῆς φύσεως). Using the debate between Xerxes and Demaratus in Book 7 as the lynchpin for her analysis, Kingsley identifies a particular strand of the fifth-century discussion of physis, which she suggestively terms “transhumanism” (142, n. 5). Kingsley shows how Herodotus’ narrative tests the theoretical underpinnings of transhumanism, with a move that perturbs the simple binary logic of nomos vs. physis. This chapter showcases the payoff of a methodological framework that can easily toggle between text and context: Kingsley not only uses contemporary speculation to enrich Herodotus’ text but also lets the peculiar emphases of the Histories shine a new light on fifth-century theoretical debates.
Chapter 6 (“Historical Inquiry and Presocratic Epistemology”) turns to the epistemological assumptions that underpin the narrator’s voice in the Histories. This is a rich field of exploration, as it draws extensively on the Presocratic debates on truth and being (to on). In a very successful section, Kingsley argues that Herodotus engages with Presocratic epistemology through a marked use of a “grammar of truth” (179–86), in particular by “domesticating the participle τὸ ἐόν as a referent applicable to the past” (189). This example is representative of the close and fruitful attention paid to verbal patterns throughout this chapter.
The seventh and final chapter (“Herodotean Philosophy”) reads differently from the previous ones, as it zooms in on a single text as an example of Herodotean reception—the Dissoi Logoi (which Kingsley, following the majority opinion, dates to the early fourth century). A large part of the discussion is dedicated to cultural relativism, a topic treated in Chapter 2, thus creating a ring-composition in the book’s argument. A brief comparison between the experience that Empedocles’ sophos acquires in multiple lives (DK 31 B 129) and the one that Herodotus gathers from the historical past provides a suggestive conclusion (205–6). Three appendices round off the book by expanding upon Kingsley’s treatment of relativism and epistemology.
As this brief summary suggests, one of the features that makes Kingsley’s book stand out is the breadth of the textual evidence brought to bear on the Histories. Not only does Kingsley deftly move across the spectrum of fifth-century culture, but she also often keeps an eye on its later reception (e.g., p. 108 on Athenaeus; pp. 201–2 on Maximus of Tyre). Equally commendable is Kingsley’s extensive engagement with prior scholars in multiple languages (in some places even too extensive, where it arrests the flow of the argument: pp. 190–4). These aspects show that Kingsley’s inquiry is, like Herodotus’ historiē, in constant and productive dialogue with its intellectual predecessors—and contemporaries.
A lot of the interpretative work done by Herodotus and the Presocratics is a balancing act that thoughtfully complicates engrained ideas (e.g., Herodotus’ privileging of nomos over physis: 121–38; Herodotus’ aversion to truth-claims: 179–86). While Kingsley is not alone in challenging or nuancing these interpretative paradigms in Herodotean scholarship, her work brings this debate to a broader audience by making epistemological curiosity a key feature of Herodotus’ intellectual profile. Kingsley’s Herodotus is less a systematic theorist than—in keeping with the Histories-as-laboratory—a bold experimenter, whose profound interest in alternative explanations prevents him from committing to a single theoretical stance.
The reach of Kingsley’s discussion is sometimes stymied by a tendency to make individual examples stand in for categories, as when Antiphon represents “Presocratic circles” (62 n. 83) or a μέν…δέ antithesis represents “sophistic style” (96). This can lead to overgeneralizations like the following: “what [Hippias’ work] indicates is that the universalizing tendencies of early Greek philosophy could and did include the study of the past in its project” (23). This sentence is built on a series of debatable assumptions: that “early Greek philosophy” is a unity, that it has a project, that Hippias’ work is part of it, and that it can in fact stand in for it.
Such criticisms, perhaps inevitable for a project of this interdisciplinary breadth, do not detract from the most important contribution of this book: the invitation to contemplate an alternative intellectual geography for Herodotus’ Histories, which firmly establishes its vital role in contemporary theoretical debates. Kingsley’s insightful analysis of the Histories’ laboratory makes Herodotus and the Presocratics a must-read for Herodotean scholars, as well as for anyone interested in classical Greek intellectual history.[3]
References
Billings, J. 2021. The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens. Princeton.
Castelli, E. 2020. La nascita del titolo nella letteratura greca: dall’epica arcaica alla prosa di età classica. Berlin.
Foster, M., L. Kurke, and N. Weiss. 2019. Introduction. In Genre in archaic and classical Greek poetry: theories and models, ed. Margaret Foster, Leslie Kurke and Naomi Weiss, 1-28. Leiden.
Grethlein, J. 2010. The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge.
Holmes, B. 2010. The Symptom and the Subject: the Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton.
Kurke, L. 2011. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Princeton.
Nightingale, A. W. 1995. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge.
Proietti, G. 2021. Prima di Erodoto: aspetti della memoria delle Guerre persiane. Stuttgart.
Thomas, R. 2000. Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion. Cambridge.
Notes
[1] E.g., Billings 2021; Kurke 2011; Holmes 2010.
[2] E.g., Grethlein 2010, 149–204; Nightingale 1995; Foster, Kurke and Weiss 2019.
[3] A minor desideratum: it might have been interesting to see Kingsley engage with Giorgia Proietti’s landmark Prima di Erodoto (2021). The vastly different backgrounds in which they place Herodotus’ work (civic memory for Proietti, intellectual inquiry for Kingsley), as well as Proietti’s extensive use of material culture, might together yield an even richer image of the fifth-century context to which the Histories respond.