that the klevo"of the great deeds of the Greeks and barbarians will be not be lost, and
the agent that will destroy the things he will narrate if he does not narrate them is, pre-
cisely, time (wJ" mhvte .Ê.Ê. tw'/ crovnw/ ejxivthla gevnhtai, mhvte .Ê.Ê. ajklea' gevnhtai).
- As Moles 1993b, 97, paraphrases 7.20.2 – 21.1; good discussions in Momigliano
1977b, 105; J. Gould 1989, 125. - T. Harrison 2002a, 203, 205, on 7.170 – 71. The deeper context for this report is
the same as the one we observed in chapter 2 (p. 46 above): Herodotus is reporting why
the Cretans did not join the alliance, after reporting on the failure of the Sicilians and
the Argives. I do not mean to associate myself with the view that reported speech is an
automatic sign of personal skepticism, a view well countered by Mikalson 2003, 145;
the issue here is the way in which Herodotus is setting out the terms for the technol-
ogy of his new form of rhetoric. - Pelling 1999, 334.
- For a compelling and lucid account of Herodotus’s perception of divine forces
at work in his historical account, see Munson 2001, 183 – 206; cf. Cartledge and Green-
wood 2002, 357 – 58: “Thus Herodotus claims to be able to infer divine involvement in
human events, but he achieves these inferences through a process of independent
inquiry based on the realm of human knowledge.” Mikalson 2003, a comprehensive
study of Herodotus’s representation of religion, is very much in accord with such posi-
tions: note esp. 146. - See Luraghi 2001, 146, for the variance in Herodotus’s view of how far back
knowledge of the past can be taken, depending on locality: “Not all communities are
thought able to perform this transmission of memory to the same degree.” - Shimron 1973, 49; Cobet 2002, 406; van Wees 2002, 334. Cf 2.44, where he
makes declarations about the antiquity of Heracles on the basis of information he sup-
posedly got from priests of Heracles in Tyre. Moyer 2002 is an interesting reexamina-
tion of the whole issue; Moyer shows how Herodotus rethinks the time of the Greek
past in the light of what he learns about Egypt. - Thucydides, as a careful student of Herodotus, is very clear about this issue of
time and knowledge. In 1.21.1 he says that what makes things “approximate untrust-
worthily to the status of the mythical (to; muqw'de")” is, precisely, time. Events in the
deep past are qualitatively harder to know about; it is not possible to find out anything
clear about events before roughly what we call 500 b.c.e., but it is possible to use
tekmhvria, “inferences drawn from evidence,” to get some trustworthy results:
Gomme 1945, 135 – 36, for the periodization and the translation oftekmhvria; cf. Nico-
lai 2001, esp. 245 – 47. On the vexed question ofto; muqw'de", see Moles 2001, 201 – 2. - B. Williams 2002, 155 (my thanks to Harriet and Michael Flower for drawing this
book to my attention). A parallel passage in Thucydides proves the point: when Thucy-
dides, in the course of his introduction to Sicily, first mentions the Laestrygonians and
Cyclopes, he says that he is not in a position to say what their genoswas (6.2.1). This
notes to pages 74 – 75. 243