Review by Choice Review
After centuries of overshadowing by Thucydides, Herodotus has finally begun to receive the appreciative, detailed treatment he so richly deserves. His wide-ranging cosmopolitanism, his willingness to see and record all sides of a problem, his interest in women, his strikingly modern use of ethnology and anthropological techniques: all these will strike a contemporary reader as ultra-modern in both method and attitude. Branscome's excellent, detailed, clearly argued study deals primarily with that elusive phenomenon, Herodotus's historiographical persona. Branscome (Florida State Univ.) speculates that Herodotus, in addition to highlighting his own role as investigator, sets up various characters--Solon, Demaratus, Aristagoras, Xerxes--to offer their own inadequate modes of enquiry, which he then, by direct or implied comparison with his own, proceeds to demolish. Refuting Detlev Fehling's influential thesis that Herodotus was merely a literary purveyor of invented tall stories, Branscome emphasizes his subject's honest quest for truth. However, he still comes near (as do many) to thinking of Herodotus as something other than a historian, which does less than justice to his invention, virtually ex nihilo, of those historiographical principles that have so strikingly come into their own today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. M. Green emeritus, University of Iowa
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
