Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-12(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Emily Greenwood.

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This dissertation examines Herodotus' literary afterlife among Greek writers of the Roman Empire with a special focus on non-historiographic texts. Departing from the usual method of studying Herodotean reception among later historians, I examine works of literary criticism, the moral essay, satire, fiction, and travel literature. Four chapters, devoted to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Lucian, and Pausanias, respectively, argue for the "productive paradox" of Herodotus' insider-outsider status within antiquity. Through close philological readings, I explore both commentary on and imitation of Herodotus. I argue that these varied receptions open windows onto topics of broader interest to Imperial Greek writers, including ancient mimetic theory, aesthetic and ethical criticism, the relationship between historical narrative and fiction, and the construction and contestation of the classical canon. This dissertation thus provides a new understanding of how Herodotus' Histories was debated and repurposed in antiquity, shedding light on both the authors who responded to it and on Herodotus himself.

Chapter One studies Herodotus' ethics and authorship as represented in the essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Studying Dionysius "biographical style," I demonstrate Dionysius' unique construction of Herodotus' authorial persona and his "ethics of representation." Dionysius, I argue, assumes as a fundamental premise a certain kind of ethical life that Herodotus already possessed and from which his text flows as a consequence. The Herodotean ethos that emerges is self-reflexive for Dionysius. His adoption of an Herodotean persona grounds his own ethically conscious self-portrait as a critic, through the practice of "submerged imitation," fusing the critical tenor of Dionysius' treatises with Herodotus' own narratorial techniques.

Chapter Two studies Plutarch's On the Malice of Herodotus and argues that the Malice should be contextualized not just within the streams of ancient thought on history-writing but also within the wider patterns of Plutarch's thought on mimesis and literary production more generally. I also argue that the essay should be read as a work of quasi-biography, of a piece with, if ultimately different from, Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch uses Herodotus to develop in his readers a literary-critical hermeneutic focused on the ethopoetic, connecting the quality of one's ethical life with the quality of one's (literary) deeds and productions. Herodotus' text is conceived as a deed (pragma , 855D), and Plutarch wants his readers to evaluate that pragma just as they would historical and political pragmata (and their doers) in the Lives.

Chapter Three argues that Lucian was an acute reader of Herodotus, specifically on questions of irony and identity. I show how Lucian parlays the traditional view of Herodotus qua charming fabricator while also repurposing Herodotus' style, content, and persona. Lucian's Herodotus and Aetion frames issues of Herodotean reception at a meta-literary level and demonstrates Lucian's awareness of "receiving" Herodotus. Lucian's True Histories, I argue, represents Lucian's reification of historiography's affinities with fiction. I contend that the True Histories' elements of fantasy consist not only in ludicrous ethnographies, but also in what I call its narrator-protagonist's cultural "participations." Lucian uses the True Histories to navigate the elasticity of Herodotean narrative roles as they shade into fiction. Finally, close reading of the dialogue Anacharsis, alongside comparative examination of Herodotus' own stories of Solon and Anacharsis, leads to new insights about how Lucian receives and revives certain strands of Herodotean thought on cultural mobility, change, and identity. Lucian identifies and embodies a slipperiness already evident, I suggest, in Herodotus.

Chapter Four, the final chapter, treats Herodotean presences in Pausanias' Periegesis. I argue for a fuller presence of Herodoteanism in Pausanias' text than prior scholarship has claimed, exploring Pausanias' reception of Herodotus' views on human happiness, fortune, and divine justice. It will be seen that Pausanias' text aligns with Herodotean patterns and enunciates those patterns with specific verbal and thematic allusions to Herodotus. I also demonstrate how both Herodotus and Pausanias balance scientific inquiry with strong asseverations about the role of the divine. In addition, the chapter considers the topic of space in Herodotus and Pausanias, with emphasis on how Pausanias negotiates the tensions between and among hodological, cartographic, and "textual" spaces. It closes with a brief examination of how Pausanias appropriates Herodotus' rhetoric of wonder, steering his readers away from awe at the foreign and toward awe at Greece. For Pausanias, Greece is a thaumastic site, and a sense of pervasive thauma harmonizes with Pausanias' focus on the divine and the ineffable.