In March 1921, when the Graeco-Turkish War in Western Anatolia was at its height, a journalist for The New York Times commented: ‘[t]his is another campaign, perhaps the final one, in a war three thousand years old – the war to drive Asia out of Europe and to keep it out’ (NYT 26/03/1921, p. 11). During this war Herodotus’ Histories proved a popular reference point in the British and American presses, until modern history diverged from ancient with the Greek defeat in September 1922. The Graeco-Turkish War represents a fascinating chapter in the history of Herodotus’ reception, and it is one that the editors of the volume under review have chosen to include in their ‘long nineteenth century’, which they stretch beyond its usual end point of 1914, defining the period as ‘broadly speaking from the French Revolution until the aftermath of the Great War’ (p. 2).
The volume is a welcome, important and extremely well-edited addition to scholarship on the reception of Herodotus after antiquity. It provides the first extended treatment of Herodotean reception for this period. (Other recent studies on Herodotus’ reception include: J. North and P. Mack [edd.], The Afterlife of Herodotus and Thucydides [2019]; J. Priestley and V. Zali [edd.], Brill's Companion to the Reception of Herodotus [2016]; A. Ellis [ed.], Histos Suppl. 4 [2015]; S. Gambino Longo [ed.], Hérodote à la Renaissance [2012]). The volume has a dominant – but not exclusive – focus on western Europe, and especially Britain (which the editors acknowledge). In their excellent introduction Harrison and Skinner evoke the richness and variety of responses to Herodotus in the long nineteenth century, going well beyond the examples discussed in the essays themselves. They sensibly resist any attempt at a ‘single overarching narrative’ of Herodotus’ reception (p. 2); such a narrative would belie the complexity of the Histories’ reception in the period. But they discuss the broader intellectual currents that impinged on how the Histories were used and read, including the sense that the Graeco-Persian Wars were significant as a victory of the West over the East (a view that was already being challenged); the emergence of nationalism; the development of historical criticism; and the decipherment of hieroglyphs and cuneiform script. Even as challenges to the authority of Herodotus grew louder through the course of the century, it would be an oversimplification (the editors argue, and the essays demonstrate) to say that such challenges indicated a declining trust in Herodotus.
T. Rood's opening chapter, ‘From Ethnography to History: Herodotean and Thucydidean Traditions in the Development of Greek Historiography’, has a chronological scope considerably broader than the long nineteenth century. Rood examines ‘the place of ethnography in narratives of the development of historiography, in views of Herodotus's own work and in comparisons between Herodotus and Thucydides’ (p. 20). Rood starts with the towering figures of A. Momigliano and F. Jacoby, whose works have been so influential on how Herodotus’ place in the history of historiography is understood, before looking back at how their perspectives were foreshadowed in earlier writing (in antiquity and from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century). The essay provides a useful companion piece to N. Morley's 2016 chapter, ‘The Anti-Thucydides: Herodotus and the Development of Modern Historiography’, in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Herodotus.
E. Hall uses the story of Arion (Hdt. 1.23–4) to explore Herodotus’ ‘pervasive nineteenth-century association with poetry’ (p. 48), a revival of links drawn in ancient criticism between Herodotus and verse (‘“Romantic Poet-Sage of History”: Herodotus and His Arion in the Long Nineteenth Century’). Hall also documents how Herodotus was perceived as particularly suitable for women and children (albeit with ‘a thick veil [thrown] over the dark vices of the ancient world’, to use the words of J. Talboys Wheeler, quoted on p. 47). Hall ends the chapter with an engaging account of burlesque (which dominated British popular theatre from the mid-1830s to the 1870s), and in particular a burlesque show performed at London's Strand Theatre in 1872, punningly called Arion; or, the Story of a Lyre. The chapter draws much-needed attention to Herodotus’ reception beyond academics and elite social groups.
S. Marchand's insightful contribution, ‘Herodotus as Anti-classical Toolbox’, aims ‘to pose questions about the structuralist “othering” model as it relates to modern scholars and scholarship’ (p. 74). Marchand collects examples of modern Europeans (predominantly British and German scholars) who did not view the Orient as a completely alien place, inferior to European culture, and highlights ‘how crucial he [Herodotus] was in undermining, as well as in supporting, nineteenth-century Graecophilia’ (p. 99). Herodotus’ Histories thus provide what she calls ‘an anti-classical toolbox’ (although other tools were also wielded) in scholarly attempts to dismantle the intellectual edifices of the ‘all-too-smug West’ (p. 98).
M. Molesky's chapter, ‘George Grote and the “Open-hearted Herodotus”’, focuses on ‘Grote's appraisal of Herodotus … as a way to explore Grote's views on an array of additional topics, including the early history of Greece, the interpretation and meaning of myth, the development of Greek religion, the use of ethnography and the beginnings of science’ (p. 105). Although this essay sacrifices depth for range, it is successful in giving a sense of Grote's intellectual connection to and admiration for the Histories. The essay adds to recent work on Grote in the edited collection of K. Demetriou (Brill's Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition [2014]).
In ‘Imagining Empire through Herodotus’ Skinner offers an important contribution to the growing literature on the interaction between Classics and imperialism. First, he draws attention to the great volume of Herodotean material circulating in Britain in the long nineteenth century: in schools (predominantly private and grammar schools), children's periodicals, at universities, in editions, translations, commentaries, oil paintings, poetry, fiction and journals of learned societies. Skinner also argues that the Histories informed the British imperial present and that the British experience of empire in turn affected the way in which the Histories were read. For example, in school classroom exercises ‘peoples who populated the Histories were drawn into modern debates surrounding race’ (p. 152), and passages in G.S. Farnell's 1892 Tales from Herodotus were presented in ways that reinforced British values such as stoic fortitude and a sense of civic duty.
In another rich contribution, ‘Two Victorian Egypts of Herodotus’, D. Gange explores the impact Herodotus had on how Egypt was portrayed in Victorian Britain. He charts the journey from a hostile presentation of Egypt in the 1820s and early 1830s (influenced by the biblical presentation of an oppressive Egypt) through to 1900, when major archaeological work was opening up a very different vision of Egypt to British audiences. Theological debate often lurked behind nineteenth-century scholarly approaches to the Histories. But the growing interest in Herodotus was not just confined to scholarship. Following the bestselling publication of John Gardner Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians in 1837, interest in Egypt also gathered pace in more popular forms of culture, such as novels, plays, operas and paintings. It was illegal to present a biblical figure on the stage, but there were productions staged that approached the Bible ‘sideways through texts such as Herodotus’ (p. 160).
P. Vasunia's essay ‘Of Europe’ considers Herodotus’ place in nineteenth-century scholarly discussions on Europe. The question of Europa's identity was of considerable interest. Taking a stance came and can still come with ideological baggage: the cultural theorist Stuart Hall has suggested that denials of the Phoenician origin of Europa can be tied to racist or anti-Semitic ideas, but accepting it can buy into notions of violent patriarchy and Orientalism. Readings of the Europa myth, Vasunia suggests, ‘raise thorny questions about nineteenth-century understandings of myth, identity, race, gender and other issues’ (p. 195).
C. Meyer's chapter, ‘From Scythian Ethnography to Aryan Christianity: Herodotean Revolutions on the Eve of the Russian Revolution’, represents a move away from the book's dominant focus on western Europe to Russia. For much of the nineteenth century accounts of Russian history avoided drawing connections between Russia's Slavic and pre-Slavic pasts, but Meyer outlines how three authors of three generations leading up to the 1917 Revolution were key to overturning this avoidance: Ivan Egorovich Zabelin, Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov and Michael Rostovtzeff. These scholars all explored resonances between Herodotus’ Book 4 and Scythian archaeology. Rostovtzeff's work in particular had an enduring legacy for Russia's cultural imagination: ‘[a]s primordial mystics, the Scythians were Christian enough for Russian self-identification but not Slavic enough to exclude non-Russian subjects from the millennial dream of imperial rebirth’ (p. 221).
N. Mac Sweeney's lucid contribution, ‘Herodotus and the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War’, mentioned at the start of this review, focuses on scholarly and popular press sources in Britain and the USA to gauge the impact of Herodotus on presentations of the Graeco-Turkish War as well as the impact of the war on Herodotean scholarship. Mac Sweeney argues convincingly that there were shifting trends in scholarship relating to the portrayals of Greeks (ancient and modern) and ‘Orientals’ (Achaemenid Persians, Ottoman Turks and Turkish Nationalists) that should be linked to the war, although she is careful not to claim that this was the only cause.
Harrison considers Herodotus’ reception through the study of Greek prose compositions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, written in the style of Herodotus’ Greek (‘Herodotus's Travels in Britain and Beyond: Prose Compositions and Pseudo-ethnography’). Nearly all the examples considered were composed for the Oxford Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose (except two, written at Trinity College Dublin and Eton College). As Harrison admits, these texts are productions of ‘a fantastically narrow, contained and privileged’ group (p. 246). There were many opportunities for humour in Herodotean-style accounts of new contexts (for example, Sir John Beazley's Herodotus at the Zoo [1907] described the chameleon as a lion at the front and a camel at the back, the dodo giving its name to the Oracle at Dodona, and an ancient prophecy that the camel is better left unmoved). Harrison demonstrates that these compositions reveal ‘a sophisticated understanding of Herodotus's authorial persona, his rhetoric of proof, or the “discourses of othering” reflected in his work’ (p. 268). The texts do not reveal any serious reflection on British customs, however, except for a couple of isolated examples.
The essays in this volume are always stimulating. Time and again they show how Herodotus’ Histories could be exploited for multiple, varied and even contradictory purposes. The essays do not generally enter into explicit dialogue with one another, but they include some helpful cross-references in the footnotes. Greek and Latin is almost always translated, and both a detailed general index and an index of Herodotean passages cited are included. The volume is valuable reading for Herodotean scholars with an interest in reception as well as for those interested in nineteenth-century classical scholarship and the nineteenth-century reception of classical antiquity more generally.
