the categories he needs in order to be able to formulate what iswrong with Minos:
is it our ignorance or is it Minos’s status as a real human being that is at issue?^35
Herodotus would incline to frame his answer in terms of knowledge and igno-
rance if pressed, since he does tend to see human time, or history, as being contin-
uous as far back as one can go, in the sense that people and events even in the dis-
tant past were not qualitatively different from “now.”^36 Still, Williams’s fine teasing
out of Herodotus’s problems with Minos highlights the variety of ways in which
demarcations could be made between “history” and “myth.” I have been concen-
trating on the problem of what may be knownabout myth, but the question of
Minos’s status shows that another issue is the potentially destabilizing discrepancy
between the nature of experience now and then, when demigods are said to have
walked the earth. As we shall see throughout this chapter and the next, the sense
of difference is what marks the boundary between history and myth, and that sense
of difference is a mobile one, depending on what is at stake for any particular
observer at any particular moment in stressing either likeness or unlikeness. Just as
the synchronism operates laterally like a simile to create a sense of identity or of
difference, so “the boundary between ‘history’ and the ‘fabulous’ can be taken to
be the point where simile breaks down and categorical unlikeness sets in.”^37
NEW KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS
FOR A NEW TECHNE–
It is important to see Herodotus’s knowledge claims for what they are, and for
what they are not. In the twenty-first century we can monitor fairly well what
Herodotus could in fact know or hope to know. From our vantage point at least
there is a well-defined spatium historicum,since Herodotus knows some things
worth knowing as far back as about 650 b.c.e., and for the period before that he
knows, in effect, nothing.^38 But much of what Herodotus asserts even about
Croesus or Cyrus, only a hundred years before his own time, does not count as
knowledge in our terms. The situation is very close indeed to what we can observe
in the contemporary worlds of medicine and science, so memorably evoked in the
work of Geoffrey Lloyd.^39 What we have in the new discourse of history, as in the
new discourses of medicine and science, which were evolving at the same time, is
not necessarily an increase in knowledge — what Lloyd calls an improvement in
“technological control”^40 — but a new kind of rhetoric, one founded in intellectual
demarcation disputes, where victory depended on skill in presenting “plausible
arguments and evidence” in a persuasive way.^41 Much of what Lloyd says about
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City