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MATHIEU DE BAKKER

University of Amsterdam

Every verbal utterance, whether oral or written, implies—apart from its author—the presence of an addressee. In the case of literary texts the addressee is better described as an audience, as the text is meant to be received by multiple addressees and its reception is not restricted to a particular moment in time. Furthermore, the term “audience” is appropriate for texts that, like the Histories, were performed or lectured from in front of an assembly of listeners (Latin audire = to listen) rather than read in private by individuals.

Research into ancient literature normally makes a distinction between its historical audience and the audience that the author had in mind when composing the work, the so‐called intended audience. Aspects of the historical audience can be studied thanks to references in the source‐material. Ancient literature itself provides clues about audience behavior, such as the tears of the Athenian audience upon seeing PHRYNICHUS’ Fall of Miletus, which led to the playwright being fined and forbidden to re‐stage his play (Hdt. 6.21.2). There are also vase‐paintings in which texts on scrolls are displayed, for instance in the hands of pedagogues teaching their students. Such artifacts testify to the—self‐evident—function of literary texts in EDUCATION. The response of the historical audience can furthermore be studied via references and allusions in other contemporary works of literature. If these are present they may reveal information about the immediate reception of the text within a network of authors who took notice of one another’s work (think, for example, of the Alexandrian poets).

Those who study the intended audience look for the ways in which authors address their audience within a work. Does the author talk to that audience explicitly, and if so, in what manner and tone? And which other signals, themes, and motifs reveal information about the audience or show that the author presented the material with a particular audience in mind? From a theoretical viewpoint, NARRATOLOGY and reader‐response criticism are useful heuristic tools to study the way in which the intended audience is addressed. By comparing their results with those of other contemporary sources and with what we know of the cultural‐historical background, it becomes possible to reconstruct at least the mindset, background, and KNOWLEDGE that authors imputed to their audiences. Finally, one can study the way in which later audiences responded to a literary text and used it for their own creative or scholarly purposes. Intertextuality and reception‐studies prove useful in revealing the impact that ancient texts have made on later generations and enable us to study the various traditions that have emanated from them.

Not much specific is known about the actual, historical audiences of Herodotus’ Histories. An anecdote recorded by Marcellinus has the young THUCYDIDES being moved to tears when he listened to a reading from the Histories (Vit. Thuc. 54), and LUCIAN refers to OLYMPIA as a venue where Herodotus performed, hoping to attract as large a Greek audience as possible (Her. 1–2). Possible allusions in the works of SOPHOCLES and ARISTOPHANES may suggest their presence in audiences that Herodotus addressed, although the evidence is far from convincing (Fornara 1971a; Cobet 1977). We can be more certain in the case of Thucydides, who, although he does not mention his predecessor, appears to have studied Herodotus’ work and alludes to his style, in particular in his digression on THEMISTOCLES and PAUSANIAS (Thuc. 1.128–39; cf. Flory 1980; Rood 1998).

More can be said about the intended audience that Herodotus had in mind when he composed his work. From a formalist point of view, it can be recognized in the text when Herodotus directly addresses his readers with the indefinite second person (Lateiner 1989, 30–33) and other devices such as rhetorical questions and interactional particles (de Jong 2004, 110–11). Reader‐response analysis reveals that Herodotus sought to actively engage his audience, for instance by presenting variant versions in his work and stimulating his audience to apply similar critical tools as he himself did to assess the historical value of his material (Baragwanath 2008). In doing so he also encouraged his audience to question commonly held assumptions, such as the dichotomy between Greeks and non‐Greeks (Pelling 1997). In particular, the ethnographic parts of the Histories, such as Book 2 on EGYPT, reveal a culture of competitive debate that can also be recognized in the writings of the Hippocratic schools of MEDICINE (Thomas 2000).

Herodotus specifically targeted a Greek audience, as appears from the way in which he matches the customs of non‐Greek peoples against those of the Greeks (Hartog 1988). The older belief that Herodotus directed his text to an Athenian audience (cf. Jacoby 1913) has been replaced by the view that he had a pan‐Hellenic audience in mind when he composed his work (Gould 1989, 15–17). Various subtle allusions to Athenian imperialism in his work allow us to place Herodotus’ intended audience in the second half of the fifth century BCE, and probably in the early years of the PELOPONNESIAN WAR (Stadter 1992; Moles 1996). He appears to use the events of his own time in various ways to interpret what happened in the past (Fornara 1971b) and, vice versa, to use the past to encourage his audience to actively reflect upon contemporary politics (Raaflaub 1987). Apart from his contemporary audience, he also wrote his work with a future audience in mind, as appears from the choice of words in his first sentence (Bakker 2002) and the references to his own time with the so‐called “prospective” imperfect (Naiden 1999).

Herodotus’ posthumous audiences generally praised the historian for inventing the genre of historiography and for his smooth style, but also criticized him for alleged unfaithfulness. In antiquity both attitudes were exemplified respectively by DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, who praised Herodotus in his Letter to Pompeius, and by PLUTARCH, who accused Herodotus of telling lies in his De Malignitate Herodoti. In the ancient and Byzantine Greek tradition, historiographers generally preferred the model of Thucydides, with fewer ethnographical DIGRESSIONS, to that of Herodotus, but the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE saw a revival of Herodotus in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople (e.g., Laonicus Chalcocondyles) and the discovery of the Americas (see Momigliano 1958). Nowadays Herodotus has found a wider audience than ever before thanks, for instance, to popular works of fiction (Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient) and non‐fiction (Tom Holland’s Persian Fire) that are inspired by the Histories.

SEE ALSO: Athens and Herodotus; Date of Composition; Medical Writers; Orality and Literacy; Prose; Reception of Herodotus, Ancient Greece and Rome