A crucial intervention was that of Shimron (1973). Bibliography in Hunter
1982, 19, 44 n. 47; T. Harrison 2000a, 198. Besides Hunter and Harrison, important
recent discussions include Darbo-Peschanski 1987, 25 – 38; Asheri 1988, xxxvii – xliii;
Canfora 1991; Cartledge 1993, 18 – 35; Moles 1993b; Howie 1998, esp. 80 – 81; S. Horn-
blower 2001; Cobet 2002, 405 – 11; B. Williams 2002, 149 – 71; Moyer 2002, esp. 86, on
Herodotus’s creation of “a double past: one to which human chronology relates, and
another which is the time of divine origins and exists far away in the distant past”; Van-
nicelli 2003. The phrase spatium historicumis taken over from Jerome, who has a “his-
torical space” for recording events between his columns.
Translation and ellipses as in Moles 1993b, 97.
Shimron (1973) — though his overall argument is more nuanced than it is often
represented as being.
Pelling 1999, 333; T. Harrison 2000a, 201. Shimron (1973) knows these pas-
sages and has his own account of them.
Raaflaub 1987, 241 – 45, well demonstrates the justification for Herodotus’s
choice of Croesus as “first” within the economy of the causal narrative as a whole; cf.
the illuminating discussion of We‹cowski (2004, 149 – 55).
So, rightly, H. I. Flower 1991, 60; Vannicelli 1993, esp. 15 – 16. Flower’s general
argument for Croesus’s special significance to Herodotus is very compelling:
Herodotus thought he had information about Croesus of a kind he had about no one
before Croesus as a result of the rich oral tradition at Delphi that had grown up around
the magnificent monuments dedicated there by the king.
Pelling (1999, 334) calls attention to the “demythologizing and rationalizing” in
Herodotus’s accounts of Io and the others, but I take Herodotus to be poking fun at
Hecataeus’s rationalizing technique en passant,showing that rationalizing the myths
does not redeem them from the point of view of knowledge. Moles 1993b, 96, well
brings out how “Herodotus has it all possible ways” in his accounts of the women from
myth and Croesus, while still making “a distinction between myth and solid, verifiable
history.”
Knowledge and space are also linked. One of Herodotus’s two uses of the word
mu'qo"is in connection with Ocean, which is “not seen and not verifiable. I at any rate
know of no river Ocean” (2.23; cf. Wardman 1960, 404).
On Herodotus’s debts to Homer, see Huber 1965; Krischer 1965; Woodman
1988, 1 – 4; Moles 1993b, 91 – 98.
Clearly argued by Huber (1965, esp. 46); his insight has not passed into com-
munis opinioas it should have.
Clay 1983, 12 – 20; Ford 1992, 60 – 61. On the crucial importance of this distinc-
tion in the historiographical tradition from Herodotus on, see Marincola 1997, 63 – 86.
The other half of the Homeric antithesis has already appeared in the first sen-
tence of the work, when he announces his subject. There he says that he is writing so
notes to pages 72 – 74
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