Chapter 10 - Authority, Experience, and the Vicarious Traveller in Herodotus’ Histories

Summary

John Marincola’s research has thoughtfully explored the negotiation of authority in Herodotus’ Histories, revealing the extent to which the narrator is a highly intrusive one who organizes and steers the reader’s progression through the text.¹ In Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, he demonstrated how Herodotus’ first-person verbs mediate historical memory for his audience and in doing so draw upon the authority of performers of wisdom evident in fifth-century intellectual culture.² This work also gestured toward the alternative means by which the Histories could generate expertise effects but did not have the scope to go beyond the narrator’s self-representation. This chapter will contribute to this project by surveying the rhetorical function of the narratee through the second person and impersonal ‘one’, and I will argue that its embedding of virtual experience into the text contributes to the work’s construction of authority.