ABSTRACT
The word ethnos or an inflected form appears some 138 times in Herodotus’ Histories. But what qualifies a community as an ethnos in Herodotus’ eyes? And how does that definition affect our reading of the Histories? This paper undertakes to examine precisely these questions, beginning with the analysis of several famous features common throughout Herodotus’ various cultural excurses. This paper examines the factors that qualify one group as merely a subset of a population to Herodotus, but marks another as a distinct and separate ethnos unto itself, especially as these criteria pertain to Herodotus’ preferred behavioral headings. The oscillations in Herodotean ethnic descriptors parallel tensions in his historiography over the coherence of cultural groups as biological and as cultural constructs. This is particularly important because biological homogeneity is not cultural determinism.
