Historiography of Space in Homer and Herodotos

Abstract

The Homeric poems and the Histories of Herodotos are crucial to our understanding of the intellectual life of the ancient Greeks. They are the earliest extant poetry and the earliest extant prose; they have never been lost and have always been read. Knowledge of the external world and of other peoples, though far from formalised as the study of ‘geography’ in this period, is prominent throughout the poems and the Histories: most readers of the Iliad get a very strong impression of place from their interaction with the text: the plain before the great citadel of Troy where the battle is fought, and the homes of the Trojan allies. Similarly, the Odyssey persuades many that they know and can recognise Ithake and surrounding islands. The Histories are an encyclopaedia of geographical knowledge of fifth-century Greeks which, conspicuously, includes knowledge of Skythia, Egypt and Persia as ‘other’ lands. In spite of this strong impression of place enduring even into the modern world it is not easy to know exactly why and how it arises and what narrative structures and strategies create it.

The Homeric poems and the Histories are fundamentally about people and places (not cosmologies, or plants, or machines). Their completeness and length make it possible to study the spatial concepts held by their creators in detail. The thesis offered is that there have been three largely independent approaches to understanding the thinking about space in these texts and that by studying these approaches we can learn more about what categories of space are presented, thus avoiding a petitio elenchi.

The three approaches discussed with this purpose in mind are autopsy, or retracing of steps, graphic demonstrations, and linguistic analyses (for which I present a number of case studies). Show more