The ancient historian’s privileged discursive position within the text depends upon the creation of a circuit of consent with the audience, one that establishes the narrator’s power and authority in detailing the unfolding of past events, their causes, and the agents animating them. The contract between the narrator and audience is brought about by the careful curation of the historian’s agency in and out of the process of textual production. In antiquity, the stakes for this curation were even higher than in modernity because of the widespread association of literary production with individual character. The struggle for authority was uniquely pressing for Greek and Roman historians, as their texts could not call upon the inspiration of the Muse as the poets could. As a result, the self-positioning of the historian was highly self-aware and charged with meaning, constructed in relation to the authority of the poets, but with a degree of distancing from these figures and their Muse in the development of a new mode of narrative.

In Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, his influential work of 1997, John Marincola examined various ways in which historians used tradition to claim and bolster their own authority, identifying five specific techniques: (1) reference to ‘gods and fortune’, (2) a ‘pretence of necessity’, (3) ‘commonness of action’, (4) ‘praise in the mouth of others’, and finally (5) ‘magnification of actions’. The dust jacket of the original volume features busts of Herodotus and Thucydides, fine historians both. As a biographer, Plutarch is not in the same league, but nevertheless he appears in the index locorum a satisfying thirty-seven times thanks to Marincola’s own authoritative and expansive view of historiography. About one third of Marincola’s Plutarch citations are to the Lives, and the rest to the Moralia, with the majority from De se ipsum citra invidiam laudando (hereafter De se laudando), the work that most Plutarchan scholars consult for Plutarch’s view on self-presentation in the form of praise. In that essay, Plutarch gives us multiple situations when it is appropriate to praise oneself, and various techniques to avoid incurring ill will while doing so since self-praise is a tricky thing. Marincola sums up Plutarch’s advice in De se laudando as ‘praise the audience too (542a–b), ascribe some success to chance or god (542e–f), use slight corrections or amendments (ἐπανορθώσεσι) to others’ praise of you (543a–b), throw in some shortcomings (543f)’.

This chapter revisits the issue of poetic authority, focusing on a selection of Pindar’s song-dances, mainly epinicians, paeans, dithyrambs, and hyporchemes. It responds to John Marincola’s introductory discussion of the background to historiographical authority in his Authority and Tradition in Greek Historiography.

If a scholar proposes to write on the subject of authority and tradition in ancient historiography, it is inevitable that he will pay particular attention to the prefaces of historical texts. Almost every ancient historian began his work with a preface in which he sought to establish his literary authority by deploying those elements of the tradition that were appropriate to his forthcoming narrative.1

Recognized as ‘father of ethnography’ as well as history, Herodotus is famous for his keen attention to human cultures and their diverse ways of life; accordingly, discussion of cultural differences has a long history in Herodotean studies.1 In his translation of the Histories, for example, George Rawlinson shares his impression of the Persians in that work (more recent scholars, needless to say, have discussed Herodotean ethnography from quite different points of view2)

Caesar is known as one of the most brilliant and successful generals in world history. In his commentarii he described two series of his wars. In the first, in Gaul from 58 to 50 BC, he extended the Roman frontier to the Atlantic, British Channel, and Rhine river. The seven books of his Gallic War, on which I focus in this essay, end with his victory over a pan-Gallic alliance under Vercingetorix in 52. The second series of campaigns was conducted in 49–48 in a civil war with Pompey in Italy, Spain, and the Balkan peninsula, culminating in Caesar’s victory in Thessaly and the death of Pompey in Egypt. These campaigns are described in three books of the Civil War, ending with the outbreak of a new war with the Egyptian king’s forces.1 Pieces written by some of Caesar’s officers provide additional information. The eighth book of the Gallic War, authored by Caesar’s adjutant Hirtius (consul in 43), covers Caesar’s last two years in Gaul, while the anonymous Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars describe a series of later wars and civil wars that took place from 47 to 45 in Egypt, eastern Anatolia, the Adriatic, the province of Africa (modern Tunisia), and south-western Spain.2

The quirkiness of the comment made by a character in Nabokov (quoted above) makes an apt beginning for an essay that will have much to say about meaningful coincidences. A reader who encounters Nabokov’s novel without knowing Herodotus’ story about Polycrates may be momentarily puzzled, though amused. Those who do catch the allusion will note the modernizing variant (a cuff-link, not a ring), and the added detail of its being the anniversary of the loss, a point that reinforces the unlikelihood of a parallel outcome; but above all such a reader will recognize that the climax has become an anti-climax: nothing happens, and the fish is just a fish. In a sense there is no story. Or rather, the story becomes effective here only through the contrast, because in Herodotus Polycrates did recover his ring from the belly of a fish. Nabokov’s outcome is, of course, overwhelmingly more plausible, but accustomed as we are to narratives in which loose ends are tied up, we feel that something is missing. In Herodotus, however, the general tendency is for items and episodes to connect, for links to be made, and for meaning to emerge from these connections. The following pages will explore how far that tendency extends, and the final section is intended to place Herodotean practice in a larger context.

John Marincola’s remarkable monograph Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (1997) was inspired by a simple question. What do ancient historians tell us about themselves?1 This culminated in a study illuminating the complex and evolving processes whereby historical writers sought to imitate and manipulate traditions established by their predecessors as a strategy to underpin their own authority – and ultimately to persuade their readers.

You do not hold an inquest into a book more than twenty years later unless it was a gamechanger. That is not just because John Marincola’s Authority and Tradition is where you go first to find out what the historians said about what they were doing. It is also because it ranged so surefootedly over such a wide range that it opened many new perspectives and corrected many old mistakes – whether Caesar’s use of the third-person in the Commentarii was just the sort of thing one did, for instance, or a bold unobvious choice (H. Flower,in this volume); or what difference Rome’s preoccupation with social status made to the way historians framed their projects.