This collection of articles views Herodotus through the lens of Charles W. Fornara. It grew out of a September 2013 conference at Columbia University entitled ‘The Past in the Present: Interpreting Herodotus after Charles W. Fornara’, which took as its starting point Fornara's brief (98-page), but influential, monograph Herodotus: an Interpretative Essay (1971). Providing the main focus of the edited collection (as evidenced by the conference's title) is Fornara's contention that Herodotus ‘is interpreting the past by the present’ (1971, p. 88): Herodotus’ historical account of the Persian Wars and Persian imperialism was directed primarily at his contemporaries, says Fornara, who were themselves living through the Peloponnesian War and the effects of Athenian imperialism. In the words of the editors, Harrison and Irwin, the ‘volume seeks to extend the insights of Fornara's Essay and subsequent work by examining different aspects of Herodotus’ engagement with his contemporary world, and through a wider range of lenses’ (p. 10). On these counts, the collection succeeds splendidly.

Of the fourteen chapters (along with bibliography, index locorum and general index), Harrison and Irwin's introduction serves as Chapter 1. Their stated goal for the collection is ‘to bring different approaches and interpretative skills (those of literary critics, philologists, political, cultural, or intellectual historians, as well as scholars of the Near East) into dialogue with one another’ (p. 2). By weaving discussion of the volume's thirteen articles throughout the introduction, Harrison and Irwin enact this dialogue from the very beginning of the collection.

Each subsequent article begins with a nod to some aspect of Fornara's book. Chapters 2–4 all take issue with Fornara's argument that Herodotus Book 2 is so heavily ethnographic and geographic because it was the product of an earlier time in Herodotus’ development as a historian ([1971], pp. 1–23). J. Dillery (Chapter 2) sees Herodotus Book 2 as ‘a manifesto on writing history in a new way … that has moved on from Hecataeus’ (p. 49); Herodotus criticises both Homer and Hecataeus for possessing more accurate knowledge about Egypt (such as the source of the Nile flood), but failing to report it. E. Bowie (Chapter 3) disagrees with Fornara's assertion that Book 2 has no ‘moral or philosophical element’ ([1971], p. 18). Ethnographic and geographic accounts (as in Book 2) ‘harmonize very well’ (p. 63), says Bowie, with the moral themes of the rest of Herodotus’ work (e.g. divine punishment for wrongdoing in 2.120.5). Similarly, R. Bichler (Chapter 4) shows how Herodotus joins Book 2 with other books not only in terms of references to geography, chronology, ethnography, religion and the behaviour of autocrats, but also in terms of allusions to (more or less) contemporary events, such as the Athenians’ disastrous intervention in Egypt from the late 460s to the early 450s bce (2.140.2; cf. 3.160.2).

Chapters 5–14 leave Book 2 to delve deeper into the ways Herodotus navigates contemporary Greek and Near Eastern realities. C. Tuplin (Chapter 5) admits that his analysis of Herodotus’ few allusions to contemporary Persian Egypt is largely ‘aporetic’ (p. 99 n. 1); Tuplin cannot explain why Herodotus proposes some things (Persians adopting Egyptian breastplates, 1.135) or stays silent on others (the Egyptian revolt in the early reign of Darius I [DB §21]) that do not mesh with outside evidence. R. Rollinger (Chapter 6, one of the best articles in the collection) explicates the story of how Darius secured the Persian kingship when his groom Oebarus made sure that Darius’ horse neighed before any of the fellow conspirators’ horses (3.84–9); Rollinger holds that Herodotus may have taken Near Eastern traditions about an omen with a horse predicting a (usurping) king's reign and transformed them into an implicit criticism on Herodotus’ part of Darius the usurper. According to K. Ruffing (Chapter 7), Herodotus in 3.89 pointedly comments on contemporary politics by associating Cyrus II, who merely received ‘gifts’ (dôra) from his subjects, with the Peloponnesian League-leading Spartans; at the same time, Herodotus associates Darius, who received ‘tribute’ (phoros) from his subjects, with the imperialistic, tribute-collecting Athenians. E. Greenwood (Chapter 8) argues that Herodotus uses the magnitude of geographical expanse as an analogy to the magnitude of geopolitical power over time; cities become big or small again (1.5.4) and, by implication, so too do geographically or temporally extensive empires like the Persian Empire. In another outstanding article in the collection J. Skinner (Chapter 9) elucidates the shared thought world of Herodotus and his audience, an audience that was cosmopolitan and multi-political; was interested in Greek, as well as barbarian, customs; and was used to many contacts (and intermarriages) between Greeks and non-Greeks. For J. Grethlein (Chapter 10), Herodotus’ focus is not (as Fornara would have it) on the present, contemporary world, but on ‘looking to the end’ (as in Solon's dictum, 1.32.9). This is why Herodotus alludes only obliquely both to the ongoing Peloponnesian War and to the still developing Athenian Empire; he could not yet view either in hindsight. W. Blösel (Chapter 11) considers contemporary Spartans as a primary audience for Herodotus’ accounts of earlier Spartan history. When viewed in the light of the Archidamian War (where the Spartans aid the Thebans in razing Plataea to the ground in 427), the Spartans’ advice to the Plataeans in 6.108 to ally themselves with Athens (as a way of embroiling Athens in wars in Boeotia) is the most damning example of Spartan perfidy. Through an examination of words and expressions that Herodotus uses to refer to democracy and other forms of government, P.J. Rhodes (Chapter 12) comes to a twofold conclusion: first, Herodotus favoured constitutional government (like democracy) over despotism and monarchy, and second, when he contrasts democracy with monarchy, Herodotus is telling us little about how ‘democratic’ the government is, just that it is in some way constitutional. Irwin (Chapter 13) maintains that Herodotus is setting out to correct Thucydides’ tendentious account of Pericles’ (mis)deeds and their legacy. Just as Pericles’ father Xanthippus inflicted the Persian-style punishment of crucifixion on the Persian satrap Artaÿctes in 479 (9.120), a barbaric style of punishment strongly rejected by the Spartan Pausanias just a few chapters earlier (9.79), so Pericles was reported by Plutarch (Per. 28.2) to have crucified leading Samians (the Athenians’ own allies and Ionian kin) behind the Samian revolt in 439. By relating that Artaÿctes left the safety of Sestus and was crucified near Aegospotami, Herodotus looks ahead to the Athenians’ defeat in 405 at Aegospotami, after they themselves had left the safety of Sestus. Finally, Harrison (Chapter 14) responds to Fornara's statement that ‘[h]istory became moral and Herodotus didactic’ ([1971], p. 23) by looking for the moral message(s) of the Histories. Harrison posits two primary morals: the instability of human fortune and the humility people should have in the face of the divine, both of which are voiced by Solon (in his dialogue with Croesus, 1.29–33) and are echoed throughout Herodotus’ work.

My main criticism of the collection is that nearly all the contributors shy away from dealing with the issue of Herodotus’ historical reliability or lack thereof. Tuplin and Rollinger are notable exceptions: Tuplin (pp. 103–5) does suggest that Herodotus at times skews his material to fit preconceived patterns (such as letting Darius’ failure to conquer the European Scythians – much as the Persians would later fail against the Greeks – overshadow Darius’ successful conquests in Thrace), while Rollinger (pp. 137–8) at least broaches the subject of Herodotean invention, as he joins D. Fehling (Herodotus and his ‘Sources’: Citation, Invention, and Narrative Art [1989], p. 109) in taking as suspicious the dovetailing of Herodotus’ two accounts of how Darius’ horse was induced to neigh. By contrast, other contributors hesitate to associate Herodotus with invention. Dillery is the most forthright in this regard: ‘It could be argued that these are false assertions by Herodotus, made by him at several points in Book 2 to create the impression that he went to places he says that he did. But once that interpretative genie is released, we come perilously close to having to call into question every one of Herodotus’ authorial claims, and that is something I cannot do’ (p. 42). Rhodes is less committal: regarding the Constitutional Debate (3.80–2), he asks: ‘How could Herodotus have perpetrated, and have insisted on the authenticity of, what seems to us patently incredible?’ (p. 269). Besides quoting D. Asheri on the subject, Rhodes leaves the question unanswered. Irwin repeatedly stresses Thucydidean bias and unreliability (pp. 303 n. 51, 304 n. 52, 309 nn. 64–5, 328 n. 118, 329, 331), and she also accuses Plutarch of bias in de Herodoti malignitate (pp. 333–4). Only once, however, does Irwin bring up the possibility of Herodotean invention (on the historicity of the conversation between Pausanias and the Aeginetan Lampon, 9.78–9), but she undercuts it by noting twice that the invention may be ‘by others [emphasis added] or by Herodotus’ (p. 284 n. 10). It is not that this collection should be something it never set out to be; for example, there is already a recent collection that treats Fehling's notions on the fictitiousness of Herodotus’ source citations (B. Dunsch and K. Ruffing [edd.], Herodots Quellen – Die Quellen Herodots [2013]). But in a collection such as the present one devoted in large part to exploring the relationship between Herodotus and his contemporary audience, contributors’ reticence to explore how that audience would have viewed Herodotus’ historical reliability represents a missed opportunity. If there are passages in Herodotus that are clearly not true, whether in more historical passages or in ethnographic or geographic passages (such as the topsy-turviness of Egyptian customs, 2.35–6), how would his late fifth-century Greek audience have responded to this? How would Herodotus have expected his audience to respond? These are difficult questions, to be sure, but for contributors to simply refuse to ask them (much less to answer them) certainly takes us no closer to getting at the truth.

Overall, though, Harrison and Irwin and the contributors are to be commended for producing an excellent collection. The articles not only build upon, but also develop further Fornara's innovative ideas about the dialogue Herodotus himself engaged in with his original audience (or multiple audiences for oral readings of his work), especially concerning the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian War.