Thucydidean usage is actually a counter to Williams’s argument that Thucydides intro-
duces a distinctively new concept of an objective historical past, for Thucydides’ stance
here is in fact very close to Herodotus’s. In general, it seems to me that Williams does
not appreciate what Herodotus achieved, and claims too much for Thucydides. For a
good account of how much Thucydides owes to Herodotus in “his method of enquiry
and in the temporal scope of his work,” see We‹cowski 2004 (quotation from 158).
The uncertainty here is very similar to the kind of indeterminacy that Lloyd
1979 suggests for Herodotus’s attitudes to physisand illness: see 29 – 32, esp. 32 n. 108:
“What must remain in some doubt is the extent to which Herodotus saw nature as a
universalprinciple, and allnatural phenomena as law-like” (emphasis in the original).
Von Leyden 1949 – 50, 93; Hunter 1982, 103.
I quote from a communication from Bob Kaster, whom I thank for discussion
of this issue.
As argued by O. Murray (2001 [1987]); cf. Finley 1975, 18; R. Thomas 2001,
Esp. Lloyd 1987; cf. the confessedly undeveloped but highly suggestive com-
ments on the connection between historiography and science in Hunter 1982, 283 – 84.
R. Thomas 2000 makes many important connections between the intellectual and per-
formance environments of Herodotus and his peers in medicine and science.
Lloyd 1979, 235; 1987, 27 – 28.
Lloyd 1979, 250; cf. 1987, 99; R. Thomas 2000, chaps. 6 – 9.
Lloyd 1987, 258.
Lloyd 1987, 266.
Lloyd 1987, 70. For “prominence of authorial ego” in Herodotus as a marker of
difference from Homer, see Huber 1965, 46.
Cf. H. White 1978, 103, on the Lévi-Straussian view that “allsciences... are
constituted by arbitrarydelineations of the domains that they will occupy.... This is
especially true of a field such as historiography.”
Von Leyden 1949 – 50, 94 – 96; Poucet 1987, 73.
I misunderstood this point about the mobility of the demarcation line in Feeney
1991, 256 – 57, and as a result very much underplayed the importance of chronology in
the demarcation of history.
48.FGrH70 T 8 = Diod. Sic. 4.1.3.
49.FGrH70 F 9 = Harp. s.v. ajrcaivw".
50.Thes.1, following the translation of Pelling 2002, 171.
On such histories, see, conveniently, Pearson 1975. Without the actual texts, it
is impossible to know how they represented this material; after all, as we have seen,
even Herodotus’s very careful and intelligent procedures continue to be regularly mis-
understood, when his text survives intact. On the important fragment of Theopompus
about his strategy concerning myth (FGrH115 F 381), see the decisive arguments of
notes to pages 76 – 78