Chapter 2 - Creating Authorities

Summary

Herodotus thus focuses attention on his own critical faculties and the central role they play in the creation of an authoritative narrative from the material he has himself gathered. Herodotus’ intelligence and judgement are vital if the problems of unreliable or conflicting sources are to be overcome (although Herodotus also shows an acute awareness that sometimes sources present irreducible problems). This too is very different from the Homeric epics, where the problem of sources never arises, since the Muses are presented as having complete omniscience on which the narrator relies absolutely.⁷ The Homeric narrator never has to establish his own authority as a collector or judge of sources since the Muses’ stories do not require corroboration.⁸ But Herodotus’ critical attitude to his sources is found throughout the Histories and forms a key element of his distinctively historiographical discourse, thus marked as different in particular from the modes employed in Archaic epic poetry. Herodotus regularly indicates the limits of his knowledge or the boundaries of possible research, as in his statement about the territories inland of those he covers in his account of Scythia.