Campus eBookstore Logo

Skip Navigation LinksEBook Details

The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Major Battle Narratives

The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Major Battle Narratives
Author: Ian Oliver
Price: $94.50
ISBN-10: 1666936219
ISBN-13: 9781666936216
Edition:
Get It!:
Delivery: BibliU Reader
Duration: Lifetime

Note:
Copy Selections To Clipboard: Copying content to the clipboard is completely disabled
Printing Pages: Printing pages is completely disabled

Description

By recognizing the pervasive influence that Herodotus&rsquo;s career as an oral performer had on his composition of the <i>Histories</i>, <i>The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Battle Narratives</i> argues that the <i>Histories&rsquo;</i> versions of the three most important battles in the Persian Wars&mdash;the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea&mdash;persistently and disproportionately advance the interests, biases, and political agendas of distinct audiences in the mid-fifth century, well before Herodotus assembled his famous work of history as it survives to us. The Salamis and Plataea narratives reflect a mid-century audience of Athenians and their allies; the Thermopylae narrative reflects an Amphictyonic audience gathered at the Pythian Festival. Ian Oliver concludes that, as a participant in a culture of wisdom performance (<i>epideixis</i>), Herodotus originally composed short, ideologically motivated performance pieces that he intended to promote tendentious reinterpretations of these momentous events, then relied on these narratives when he composed his final text: the unitary <i>Histories</i>.