Herodotean Journeys: Diversity and Political Judgment in Herodotus’ Histories

In his Histories, the ancient Greek Historian Herodotus posits that to mock other cultures is sure proof of madness, for “If there were a proposition put before mankind, according to which each should, after examination, choose the best customs in the world, each nation would certainly think its own customs the best.” (Histories, 3.38). Herodotus thus suggests how difficult it is to judge across cultures; even ‘after examination, judgment is constrained by conventional boundaries. Yet in his Histories, Herodotus himself continually examines other cultures; he is able to genuinely engage with the diversity of his world. In this dissertation, I argue that Herodotus therefore models a way of engaging with diversity, precisely because he attends to the affective attachments that often impede such investigation. His work therefore offers a therapy of judgment for his readers, one accomplished through the way Herodotus’ artful narrative inserts his audience into his story; the spectating audience is led to inquire into difference, to feel the excitement of inquiry, and, occasionally, to suffer a chastening recognition when such looking goes awry. The inquirer can be heroic, like Herodotus, wrestling with competing logoi and saving them from the ravages of time. But Herodotus uses textual foils to demonstrate some of the pitfalls that can befall inquiry. The inquirer can be a mere voyeur; hobbled by conceptual errors; a mad imperialist; or one’s inquiries can be barren, kept private and to oneself, offering no aid or insight to one’s community. Herodotus’s example transcends these foils. Yet Herodotus does not merely show these errors; he lets the audience ‘feel’ them, and so be implicated in these marred inquiries. These painful recognitions lead his audience to suffer vicariously with others, and so to gain insight usually won too late. His method, which recruits and thus rehabilitates the attachments of his audience, thus helps to communicate the substance of his inquiries. To rehabilitate the attachment of his audience, Herodotus must spark the desire to inquire for its own sake. To do this, Herodotus reveals that attending to diversity matters because the multiplicity of cultures reveals the complexity of nature. Attending to diversity allows us to understand ourselves as human beings. Herodotus, the first historian, suggests that the purpose of history - in Greek, inquiry - is not simply to determine the facts and dates of what happened, but rather to inquire into what mankind has brought into being: not only what happened, but our stories about what happened: customs, traditions, and songs. His inquiry is into what these phenomena reveal about who we are.Ph.D