Between East and West: Mobility and Ethnography in Herodotus’ Proem

Abstract

Herodotus' History opens with a remarkable proem where he sets forth his programme and offers competing narratives about the causes of war between the Greeks and barbarians. This article examines the proem and looks in particular at the stories about the abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen. Rather than see the proem as a light-hearted or parodic rejection of alternate histories, this article argues that Herodotus uses the proem to raise urgent questions of culture, identity, and historical meaning. Each of the four women gets entangled in complex cultural histories, and each challenges any simple relationship between the individual and cultural location. The fact that Herodotus associates each of them with displacement and dislocation implies that he is working with a dynamic understanding of history, in which movement and geography play a central role. If the proem points to cultural plurality, however, it still has to engage with the central polarity of Greeks and barbarians that underpins the History; this polarity, which remains in place from the first sentence, stands in counterpoint to the openness promised by the rest of the proem. Against the limitations imposed by the violent antithesis of Greek and barbarian, then, Herodotus begins his monumental history with an exploration of cultural plurality and contact.

Keywords:

• Herodotus
• History
• Proem
• Women
• Ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Surekha Davies, Neil L. Whitehead, and the journal's readers for their comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes

Translations of Herodotus’ History, adapted from A. D. Godley's version, 4 vols, 1920–1924 (revised 1926) in the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Battus was the founder of the Greek colony at Cyrene, in Libya, in about 630 BCE (Herodotus 4.150–59). Labda was the mother of Cypselus, the ruler of Corinth, ca. 657–627 BCE (Herodotus 5.92). Pausanias, who lived in the second century CE, was the author of a Description of Greece.

For good measure, it should be added that the Phoenicians themselves fought on the side of the Persians during the Achaemenid period, and that Phoenicia was the fifth satrapy of the Achaemenids.

It should be said that modern archaeologists are more apt to acknowledge a Phoenician archaeological presence in Lebanon as far back as the third millennium BCE and to date the dissemination of Phoenician settlements around the Mediterranean to the period extending from the eleventh to the eighth centuries BCE. See Meyers (1997), s.v. “Phoenicia” and “Phoenicians”. Asheri writes that “Phoenician civilization did not develop before 1000 BC” (Asheri et al. 2007: 75).

For the ancient references to the myth of Europa, see Brill's New Pauly, s.v. “Europe/Europa” and Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), s.v. “Europe I”. There was a cult of Europa in Gortyn, on Crete, where she was known as Europa Hellotis, and her worshippers celebrated the Hellotia there every year.