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ROSARIA VIGNOLO MUNSON

Swarthmore College

Analogy, a mental process that allows us to perceive similarities among events, agents, or objects belonging to different times and places, represents an important tool by which Herodotus understands reality; from our viewpoint, it provides a fundamental instrument for interpreting the texture of the Histories. Even glosses by which Herodotus underlines uniqueness—e.g., by a superlative (see Bloomer 1993)—are often markers of quantitative rather than qualitative difference and indirectly identify classes of similar phenomena. The counterpart of analogy is polarity, but objects that are opposite in one way are likely to be similar in other respects (Lloyd 1966; Corcella 1984).

Analogy is “horizontal” when it binds parallel facts. But it also works “vertically” across different levels of reality, as in inductive PROPHECY (see e.g., the Delphic reference to CYRUS (II) as a MULE, 1.55.2) or in other symbolic associations elicited by the text (see examples in the entry on THŌMATA). Simultaneously, we distinguish analogy that is diachronic, among events belonging to different points in the CHRONOLOGY of the historical narrative, from synchronic, when ethnographic or geographic descriptions create a comparative field extending not in TIME but in space (Munson 2001, 45–133).

In the historical narrative, Herodotus may draw attention to similarity (or polarity) by an explicit METANARRATIVE comparison, as when he opines that the democratic reforms of the Athenian CLEISTHENES imitated policies of his homonymous grandfather, the tyrant of SICYON (1.67.1). Occasionally speakers, too, compare and contrast. When either the narrator or his speakers discuss circumstances of their present in the light of events of their past (see e.g., 7.10.γ, ARTABANUS’ recollection of DARIUS I’s Scythian expedition on the eve of XERXES’ expedition against Greece), they encourage Herodotus’ AUDIENCE to apply to their own present the same or other parts of the work. Most frequently, in fact, historical analogy impresses us silently, by the resemblances that transpire from the theoretically endless variety of Herodotus’ world.

Concatenations of analogies create overlapping and concentric patterns throughout the work. This phenomenon has been most influentially examined by HENRY IMMERWAHR (1966; 1956) following the lead of Bischoff (1932), Hellmann (1934), and Pohlenz (1937). On the historical/diachronic side especially pervasive is the monarchical model, represented by the actions and features typical of individuals who hold power or aspire to it. This pattern tends to subsume many others to itself: rise and fall (Immerwahr 1966, 149–98); imperialism (Immerwahr 1956; Evans 1991; Dewald 2003), including the crossing of natural BOUNDARIES, symbolic of a violation of NOMOS in a broader sense (Immerwahr 1954, 19–28 and 1966, 325; Konstan 1983; Lateiner 1989, 126–44; Stadter 1992, 785–95; Payen 1997, 138–45); the failure of a superpower (a "soft culture" in anthropological terms) to conquer a primitive ("hard") opponent (Hellmann 1934, 77–98; Cobet 1971, 172–76; Redfield 1985; Flory 1987, 81–118); the ignored or misunderstood prophecy (Corcella 1984, 160); the figures of the unheeded tragic warner or the successful practical ADVISER (Bischoff 1932; Lattimore 1939; Dewald 1985), or of the exiled individual as informer at a king’s court (Boedeker 1987, 191–92). The typical monarch, for his part, repeatedly pursues inquiry for his own purposes, in a role that both by analogy and opposition meta‐historically throws light on the activity of Herodotus himself (Christ 1994).

Synchronic analogy in Herodotus is less dependent on the reader’s interpretation and very much on the surface of the text. In a geographical and ethnographic context, where difference is expected and often underlined (see e.g., 2.35.2), similarity needs explicit advertisement (Hartog 1988, 225–50; Munson 2001, 82–110). Statements that establish that something is like something else in certain respects are frequent and varied. The narrator explains foreign objects by “putting them together” (verb συμβάλλειν, 2.10.1, 4.99.5) with familiar realities, just as he “conjecture[s] on the things that are not known on the basis of those that are apparent” (verb συμβάλλεσθαι, 2.33.2, 34; cf. Anaxagoras DK 59 B21a, with Lloyd 1966, 337–44; Thomas 2000, 200–11). The NILE is unique but also similar to other RIVERS, since they all conform to the same physis (Corcella 1984, 74–84; Thomas 2000, 135–38). Faraway sites reproduce the outlines of Greek landmarks (4.99.4–5, 156.3, 182, 183.1); exotic animals, fruit, and plants each combine aspects of different domestic species (e.g., 2.71, 92.2–4; 3.102.2). Foreign foods, fabrics, clothing, buildings, and utensils resemble products from one region or another of the Greek world (1.195.1; 4.61.1). Comparisons of this kind make the exotic familiar (Hartog 1988, 225–30; Corcella 1984, 69), but are also a manifestation of Herodotus’ ideology of a patterned unitarian world.

In the sphere of customs, the frequent similarities Herodotus points out between different ethnic groups result from common origin or mutual contact and diffusion (2.104.2–4), or emerge as unexplained "wonders" (2.79). They all represent additional signs that, in humankind as in the environment, opportunities for variation, although great, are nevertheless limited. Even radical divergences can be analogized in terms of equivalence, as when the text indicates that burning, embalming, or eating the dead all constitute a funeral (3.38.3–4). Like the far less numerous glosses of similarity in the history, metanarrative comparisons in the ethnographic sections cooperate with the effects of implicit analogy Herodotus achieves by narrative means, as when he plants familiar Greek–like features in his descriptions of alien customs (2.158.5). Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Babylonians, and other ethnea, hard or soft, are grouped in shifting clusters, distinct as well as mutually same when each is considered in relation to different others. The analogies Herodotus establishes among peoples’ practices and beliefs explain the actual or projected similarities in their diachronic development and historical outcomes. In both history and ETHNOGRAPHY analogy makes it possible to infer what is not known from what is apparent.

SEE ALSO: Extremes; Geography; Historical Method; Philosophy; Science; Symbols and Signs