Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus' Histories

Description

Reading Herodotus is a 2007 text which represented a departure in Herodotean scholarship: it was the first multi-authored collection of scholarly essays to focus on a single book of Herodotus' Histories. Each chapter studies a separate logos in Book 5 and pursues two closely related lines of inquiry: first, to propose an individual thesis about the political, historical, and cultural significance of the subjects that Herodotus treats in Book 5, and second, to analyze the connections and continuities between its logos and the overarching structure of Herodotus' narrative. This collection of twelve essays by internationally renowned scholars represents an important contribution to scholarship on Herodotus and will serve as an essential research tool for all those interested in Book 5 of the Histories, the interpretation of Herodotean narrative, and the historiography of the Ionian Revolt.

Elizabeth Irwin is Assistant Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She is the author of Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation (2005). Emily Greenwood is Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006) and co-editor, with Barbara Graziosi, of Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (2007).

"The thick but narrow focus of the volume as a whole makes it a must-read for Herodoteans, though historiographers and Greek prose specialists too will profit from a careful study of it with Book 5; and certainly, any scholar researching any passage in Histories 5 will have to consult it (with the aid of its excellent index locorum)." --BCMR