Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature: Criticism, Imitation, Reception

Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature is the first monograph devoted to the reception of Herodotus among Imperial Greek writers. Using a broad reception model and focused largely on texts outside of historiography proper, the book analyzes the entanglements of criticism and imitation in select works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Dio of Prusa, Lucian, and Pausanias. It offers a new angle on Herodotus’s intellectual afterlife, focused on evocations both explicit and implicit in literary criticism, the moral essay, public oration, satire, and periegetic literature.

This monograph moves beyond the study of reputation only-what ancient authors explicitly had to say about Herodotus-to examine the interrelation between Herodotus’s reputation and his often implicit reworking across genre and mode. It demonstrates how Herodotus was strategically construed as fabulist, classicist, moralizer, and evasive intellectual, and how Herodotean presences played to the wider purposes of Imperial writers. Ultimately, the book examines how attention to the presence of Herodotus in various texts unveils new layers of meaning in those works, while also showing how ancient receptions offer insight into the Histories.