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The Audiences of Herodotus

Oral Performance and the Major Battle Narratives

By: Ian Oliver

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Hardcover | 29 January 2025

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Hardcover
204 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2

Hardcover

RRP $180.00

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By recognizing the pervasive influence that Herodotus's career as an oral performer had on his composition of the Histories, The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Battle Narratives argues that the Histories' versions of the three most important battles in the Persian Wars—the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea—persistently and disproportionately advance the interests, biases, and political agendas of distinct audiences in the mid-fifth century, well before Herodotus assembled his famous work of history as it survives to us. The Salamis and Plataea narratives reflect a mid-century audience of Athenians and their allies; the Thermopylae narrative reflects an Amphictyonic audience gathered at the Pythian Festival. Ian Oliver concludes that, as a participant in a culture of wisdom performance (epideixis), Herodotus originally composed short, ideologically motivated performance pieces that he intended to promote tendentious reinterpretations of these momentous events, then relied on these narratives when he composed his final text: the unitary Histories.

Industry Reviews

"Herodotus the historian of ancient Greece was a famous first, one-off whose complex work has continued to instruct and delight--and challenge--listeners and readers for some 2500 years. Ian Oliver's approach to this literary megalith via epideixis--a rhetoric of ceremony, declamation, display and entertainment--is demonstrably and demonstratively fruitful." --Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge "In this thought-provoking study, Ian Oliver deploys an audience-based analysis of Herodotus' major battle narratives to investigate their possible roots as performance texts. A tantalizing dimension of the text's archaeology, the Histories' diverse compositional contexts have left traces in the final, unified work in the form of implicit perspectives that recall distinct audiences and temporal moments, and oral rather than written modalities. As well as revealing further dimensions of the Histories' remarkable multiplicity, Oliver deepens our understanding of Herodotus' intellectual milieu, shedding important light on his connections with contemporary purveyors of wisdom including the praise poet Pindar, his place between oral and literate culture, and the nature of early Greek oral storytelling." --Emily Baragwanath, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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