2 research outputs found
Historiography of Space in Homer and Herodotos
The Homeric poems and the Histories of Herodotos are crucial to
our understanding of the intellectual life of the ancient Greeks.
They are the earliest extant poetry and the earliest extant
prose; they have never been lost and have always been read.
Knowledge of the external world and of other peoples, though far
from formalised as the study of ‘geography’ in this period,
is prominent throughout the poems and the Histories: most readers
of the Iliad get a very strong impression of place from their
interaction with the text: the plain before the great citadel of
Troy where the battle is fought, and the homes of the Trojan
allies. Similarly, the Odyssey persuades many that they know and
can recognise Ithake and surrounding islands. The Histories are
an encyclopaedia of geographical knowledge of fifth-century
Greeks which, conspicuously, includes knowledge of Skythia, Egypt
and Persia as ‘other’ lands. In spite of this strong
impression of place enduring even into the modern world it is not
easy to know exactly why and how it arises and what narrative
structures and strategies create it.
The Homeric poems and the Histories are fundamentally about
people and places (not cosmologies, or plants, or machines).
Their completeness and length make it possible to study the
spatial concepts held by their creators in detail. The thesis
offered is that there have been three largely independent
approaches to understanding the thinking about space in these
texts and that by studying these approaches we can learn more
about what categories of space are presented, thus avoiding a
petitio elenchi.
The three approaches discussed with this purpose in mind are
autopsy, or retracing of steps, graphic demonstrations, and
linguistic analyses (for which I present a number of case
studies)