E. Baragwanath, Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus

Winner of the Conington Prize 2008:

Emily Baragwanath, Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, coll. "Oxford Classical Monographs", 2008. xi, 374 pages. ISBN 9780199231294. $130.00.
Recension par Michael A. Flower (Princeton University) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.07.35.

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Présentation de l'éditeur:

* Illustrates and analyses Herodotus' techniques for representing motivation over a wide selection of his narratives

* Offers a methodology for reading the Histories more generally

* All Greek is translated, so the text is accessible to all readers with an interest in this great ancient historian

In his extraordinary story of the defence of Greece against the Persian invasions of 490-480 BC Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and became critical to their interpretation afterwards. Much as the contemporary sophists strove to discover truth about the invisible, Herodotus was acutely concerned to uncover hidden human motivations, whose depiction was vital to his project of recounting and explaining the past. Emily Baragwanath explores the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represented this most elusive variety of historical knowledge. Thus he was able to tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Baragwanath illustrates and analyses a range of these techniques over the course of a wide selection of Herodotus' most intriguing narratives - from those on Athenian democracy and tyranny to Leonidas and Thermopylae - and thus supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally.

Emily Baragwanath, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Readership: Scholars and students of classics, ancient literature, ancient history, literary theory.

Table des matières:

1. The Histories, Plutarch, and reader response

2. The Homeric background

3. Constructions of motives and the historian's persona

4. Problematized motivation in the Samian and Persian logoi (Book III)

5. For better, for worse . . .: motivation in the Athenian logoi (Books I and VI)

6. `For freedom's sake . . .': motivation in the Ionian Revolt (Books V-VI)

7. To medize or not to medize . . .: compulsion and negative motives (Books VII-IX)

8. Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII-IX)

9. Themistocles: constructions of motivation (Books VII-IX)

Epilogue