Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2012

Published In

Myth, Truth, And Narrative In Herodotus

Abstract

In the fifth century, traditional myths about gods and heroes of a remote age still constituted a shared cultural language for speaking about a variety of more or less specific current issues of a philosophical, ethical, social, and political nature. Other than tragedy and epinician poetry, we should especially remember the role of myth in Thucydides, whose ‘Archaeology’ sets down his fundamental, and ideologically charged, view of history. It is time to reassess Herodotus' participation in this contemporary coded discourse and examine the ways in which he uses the mythical past as well as the cases when he appears to signal his choice not to use it. One dismissive passage in Herodotus (3.122) confirms the significance of Minos — the focus of this chapter — in fifth-century discourse as a precursor or rival of Athenian thalassocracy (Thucydides and Bacchylides). But two additional mentions, in Books 1 and 7 respectively, connect Minos in more interesting ways to present realities of Greeks and non-Greeks in the East and West. How is the treatment of Minos in the Histories representative of Herodotus' ‘myth-speak’?

Keywords

Trojan War, heroic age, thucydides, minos, Polycrates, Hearsay, akoê, Historiê, Protesilaus, Theseus

Published By

Oxford University Press

Editor(s)

E. Baragwanath And M. De Bakker

Comments

This material was originally published in Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus edited by Emily Baragwanath and Mathieu de Bakker, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://global.oup.com/academic/rights.

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