ABSTRACT
The elusive nature of Herodotus’ historico-literary persona has generatedincreasingly vigorous debate in recent years. The difficulty lies ultimately in his liminal position in the evolution of Greek narrative literature. At one level he is the heir to a long oral tradition which is preserved only in a partial, distorted and somewhat intangible form in written material. On the other hand, his conceptual world is deeply imbued with the philosophical and scientific work of the fifth and sixth centuries BC. The ambiguities inherent in this situation not infrequently make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define the precise nature of statements in his work. To what extent are they logographic embellishment? To what degree do they demand the credence of scientific statement? Faced with such dilemmas, it must be incumbent upon us to examine with great care the relatively few elements in Herodotus’ History where external controls can be applied and where, in consequence, unequivocal progress can be made in defining the parameters within which he operated. Since his accounts of Egyptian buildings are an obvious case in point, I propose in this chapter to submit those accounts to a detailed analysis in an attempt to establish the underlying principles which appear to operate in determining both what is discussed and the manner in which the discussion is conducted.
