"The Pre-Socratic storyteller: Herodotus and the philosophical tale". Seminar of Ancient History (cur. Dr. Vasiliki Zali-Schiel), University of Liverpool, April 26, 2022. By Ioannis Konstantakos

"The Pre-Socratic storyteller: Herodotus and the philosophical tale". Seminar of Ancient History (cur. Dr. Vasiliki Zali-Schiel), University of Liverpool, April 26, 2022. By Ioannis Konstantakos https://www.academia.edu/78300222/_The_Pre_Socratic_storyteller_Herodotus_and_the_philosophical_tale_Seminar_of_Ancient_History_cur_Dr_Vasiliki_Zali_Schiel_University_of_Liverpool_April_26_2022?rhid=40950886871&swp=rr-rw-wc-22211619&nav_from=979bcd08-2de5-48f2-87cb-94e056397be8 Herodotus’ work is best understood in connection with his contemporary philosophical movements and overall intellectual activity, especially in classical Athens. With his encyclopaedism and broad research interests, his anthropocentric view of science, and his passion for cultural anthropology, Herodotus comes close to the sophists and other versatile intellectuals of his time. The narration of didactic and exemplary stories, an emblematic component of Herodotean art, also owes something to the philosophical tales of the sophists, such as Prodicus, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Hippias, who composed reflective parables to represent in an aesthetic manner notions and syllogisms of ethics, cosmology, or social theory. Similarly, Herodotus’ novellas and anecdotes dramatize intellectual concepts, ideas and arguments that are important for the author’s philosophy of history and his view of human experience. In the most successful cases, the Herodotean stories encapsulate and illustrate the universal laws of history, the deeper forces which underlie historical evolution and condition the course of humanity. This function will be examined through a series of examples drawn from more or less celebrated narratives of Herodotus’ oeuvre. The conversation of Solon and Croesus (1.30-33) juxtaposes the representatives of two opposed cultures with incompatible worldviews, somewhat like a sophistic agon. The history of humanity is hereby presented as a struggle between civilizations which are unable to comprehend each other. In parallel with this famous dispute, the confrontation of Greeks and Indians before King Darius (3.38) highlights the impossibility of mutual understanding between different cultures as the prime mover of the historical process. Thrasybulus’ riddling advice to Periander (5.92ζ-η), which echoes analogous wise formulations of Artabanus (7.10ε) and Solon (1.33), highlights the despotic structure of the cosmos; simultaneously, it reveals the hubristic desire of the powerful to replicate the cosmic order to which they are themselves subject. The final anecdote of Herodotus’ composition, Cyrus’ advice to his people (9.122), must be read together with the earlier narrative about the beginning of the Persians’ rise to world power (1.125-126). The two stories, in combination, establish the alternation of dominion and decline as a capital rule in the life of nations and reveal a central axiom of Herodotean thought, the circularity of history. ...