348 Rosaria Vignolo Munson
to Herodotus (1.144). The real reason may have been that it was not sufficiently Dorian
(How and Wells 1936: I.121). Its diverse population included Persians, Lydians, and
especially Carians (the Lydians had been close to the Carians at least since the time of
Croesus; see Hdt 1.92.3). The occurrence of Carian names (Pisindelis) as well as Greek
(Artemisia) in the dynasty that ruled Halicarnassus until the middle of the fifth century
suggests intermarriage, as do the names of Herodotus’ parents given by the biograph-
ical tradition, Lyxus and Dryo or Rhoio. The name of another relative of Herodotus,
Panyassis, is also non-Greek (Suda s.v.
,
Hρo ́δoτoς; s.v.Πανυασις́ ; Matthews 1974: 6).
Plutarch, who finds Herodotus’ denunciation of Ionic “purity” offensive (De Malig.
Herodot. 19–20/859 a–b), in turn insinuates more than once that Herodotus himself,
as an Halicarnassian, was of mixed blood (Kurke 2010: 391–2, especially onDe Malig.
Herodot. 35/868a and 39/871a).
Herodotus’ first-hand familiarity with ethnic diversity and perhaps his own mixed back-
ground arguably help to explain his pluralistic outlook as an historian as well as his attitude
toward issues of “blood,” birth, and genealogy. Unlike Hecataeus, talking to the Egyptian
priests, he did not (could not?) claim descent from a Greek god as the ultimate guarantee
of Greek nobility of birth (ευ’γενειά ) (2.143). On the other hand, as he shows multiple
times, nobody can. Hence, the genealogy of the Heraclid kings of Sparta on one side
of the family has to stop at Perseus because only a god, Zeus, is mentioned as Perseus’
father. If one does what one can and follows the human line—that of Perseus’ mother,
Danae—it turns out that the Spartan kings are Egyptians by direct descent (“true-born,”
[
,
ιθαγενεες́ ], 6.53.2). Herodotus calls Thales of Miletus a “Phoenician from way back”
(1.170.3). He is unable to tell precisely the ancestry of the Athenian Isagoras, but knows
that his family sacrifices to Carian Zeus (5.66.1). And, regarding the Gephyraeans, the
family of the famed Athenian tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Herodotus says
that, although they claim to have come from Eretria, he “has discovered through inquiry
that they were actually descended from Phoenicians, part of those who came with Cad-
mos to the land now called Boeotia” (5.57.1) (on ancient Greek ideas about hybridity,
see also Chapter 8 by Gary Reger in this volume).
The Ethnicity of Non-Greeks
To return to the case of contested ethnicity with which we have begun our discussion
(5.22), Alexander of Macedon is a monarch at the margins of the Greek world of the
polis. He rules over a population that most of Herodotus’ contemporaries regarded as
non-Greek (Hall 2001). He has contracted a marriage alliance with the Persians (5.21.2)
and, if one wants to relate ethnicity and behavior, as the Athenians do at 8.144.2, his
allegiance to the Greek cause is dubious, to say the least (Badian 1994). Why would
Herodotus, who is fond of hybridity and often points out hybrid strands in the ancestry
of Greek individuals or families, let him off so easily, accepting without condition his
claim to be Greek? These are, I would suggest, all facets of the same ideological prism:
self-proclaimed pure Greeks are not as Greek as all that, while controversial Greeks are
Greek. Moreover, non-Greeks are often related to Greeks.
If we examine Herodotus’ discussions of ancestry on the barbarian side of the Greek–
barbarian boundary line marked by Alexander, we notice in fact that they frequently