Herodotus and Ethnicity 349serve to establish ethnic links between barbarians and Greeks. The Iapygian–Messapians
are originally Cretans, just as the Cretans in Crete are a mixed population overlaid with
Greeks and non-Greeks (7.170.2, 171). In the East, the Heraclids of Lydia descended
from Heracles, as did Ninus, the founder of the Assyrian Empire, and Belus, who is
traditionally connected with Babylon (1.7.1–2). The dynasties of Lower and Upper Asia
are therefore presented as sharing their origins with the Spartan kings, the other Heraclids
of the Peloponnese, and the Argeads of Macedonia (Vannicelli 2001).
Herodotus shows that ethnic roots are more obscure or complicated than traditions
represent them to be, and people are often misleading or mistaken even on the sub-
ject of their own heritage. His purpose, however, is to explore constructed connec-
tions and boundaries, not merely to correct the historical record, so he uses all the
material at hand. The Carians, for example, claim that they are autochthonous to Asia,
and that they always had the same name, even though Herodotus believes the Cretan
version, according to which the Carians used to inhabit the Aegean islands and were
called Leleges (1.171). Similarly, he expresses the opinion that the Scythians were Asi-
atic nomads who were driven by the Massagetae to the territory previously inhabited by
the Cimmerians (4.11), but he also reports the story of autochthony that the Scythi-
ans tell about themselves as descendants from Targitaos, whom a daughter of their local
river god, Borysthenes, bore to Zeus (4.5). He even includes a tradition handed down
by the Black Sea Greeks, that the Scythians’ eponymous ancestor was Scythes, son of
a local snake-maiden and Heracles (4.8–10, esp. 10.2–3). Themixoparthenosof this
kinship myth is an embodiment of hybridity to begin with, while the Heraclid descent
adds a blood connection to the Greeks, even though it represents the fiction of out-
siders. Herodotus also tells us about the ethnogenesis of the Sauromatae, born from
Scythians and Amazons (4.110–17), and about the mixed ethnicity of the Geloni, who
inhabit the territory of the Scythian Budini, but were descended from Greek traders
(4.108.1–109). The common themes of these various passages are uncertain origins,
hybridity, unstable boundaries, and internal ethnic differentiation. Taken together, these
go well beyond the generalized and stereotypical notions of what the Greeks would
call, for example, “Scythian.” Here, somewhat as in his discussions of what is “Hel-
lenic” or “Ionian,” Herodotus both invokes historical research and exploits more or less
fantastic or more or less ideologically dishonest traditions as part of his comprehensive
project: to separate what current knowledge lumps together and to tie together what is
kept apart.
Custom King of All
The identification of a people’s real ancestral roots depends on establishing a reliable
narrative about the remote past. Cultural practices and attitudes, on the other hand, do
not need to be reconstructed: they are verifiable in the present. They show the same
degree of fluidity and variation as kinship narratives, but they do so in a more concrete
way. All the Greeks participate in the Olympic games, but only Ionians celebrate the Apa-
turia, although there are also Ionians who no longer do so because of a crime (1.147.2);
similarly, it was the violation of a religious custom that determined the exclusion of Hali-
carnassus from the sanctuary of Triopion (1.144). When the Macedonian kings were