Fehling v Pritchett on Herodotos

[daivid]

Having completed Detlev Fehling Herodotus and his 'Sources': Citation, Invention and Narrative Art, I have just got started on W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Liar School of Herodotos.

I will admit that I really liked Fehling's book so Pritchett has a hard job convincing me that Fehling is wrong. To me it is obvious that Herodotos is full of tall stories. But even tall stories are useful if you know who made them up and who was the intended audience. If Fehling is right that whenever Herodotos had a gap in his knowledge he made up a story then that to me makes Herodotos more useful rather than less.

Fehling's arguments is that Herodotos' sources display a suspiciously regular pattern. He seems to have simply always asked 'if what I say were true, who would be the most likely people to have told me'. Real research doesn't produce such a tidy pattern.

I shall try and stick to the bit of Herodotos that I have actually read in the Greek, that is to say the introduction when a series of kidnappings culminates in the Trojan war.

Pritchett goes to great pains to argue that Persians could be familiar with Greek legends. However, Fehling's argument is what we have in Herodotos is not what a Persian might say if he decided to rework the Greek legends to give it a Persian spin. Rather it is written to appear as if the Persian's had access to independent records of real historical events.

Significantly the Persians don't know it was the Cretans who kidnapped Europa from Tyre. A Persian who knew Greek legends would know that Europa ended up in Crete and so would be able to supply that detail. However, if these were real historical events them what is more natural than for the Asiatics when subject to a raid by people from the sea to be able to do no more than recognize them as Greeks of some sort.

And why would the Phoenicians come up with a story of their own in which Io is not forcibly kidnapped but came of her own accord? Why wouldn't they simply say that nothing of the sort ever occurred? Unless the kidnapping really happened and the Phoenicians knowing it to be true, hence being unable to deny it, attempted to bend the truth.

In short Herodotos by the very effort to portray these legends as real events exposes his own hand.