ABSTRACT
It is a topos nowadays that an author does not just construct his text but also encodes into it a narrative contract: he writes into the. text the rules by which his audience is to read it, how we are to understand his performance as author and our own responsibilities and legitimate pleasures as readers. 1 Judged by the standards of later historical prose, the narrative contract that Herodotus establishes between himself, the author, and ourselves, his readers, is a peculiar one. Its rules are very odd indeed. Here I would like to explore two aspects of those rules: the construction of the narrative surface and of the authorial “I” within it. Both these aspects of Herodotus' rhetoric have generally been evaluated against the standard practices of history writing. But if we look at Herodotus' narrative surface and authorial voice on their own terms, the contract they suggest is not (at least in some essentials) a historical one. The Herodotus I would like to propose here is a heroic warrior. Like Menelaus on the sands of Egypt, he struggles with a fearsome beast — and wins. The antagonist that Herodotus struggles with is, like many mythic beasts, a polymorphously fearsome oddity; it consists of the logos, or collection of logoi, that comprise the narrative of the Histories. What Herodotus, like Menelaus, wants from his contest is accurate information. The Histories Herodotus has given us are the record of his heroic encounter: his exploits in capturing the logoi and his struggles to pin them down and make them speak to him the truths that they contain. 2
