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CATHERINE DARBO‐PESCHANSKI

Centre Léon Robin, CNRS/Université Paris–Sorbonne

Autopsy, or the action of seeing with one’s own eyes, is counted among Herodotus’ means of obtaining information and for a long time even stood out as being the essential one, for the etymological reason that ἱστορίη (HISTORIĒ) derives, as one of its possible origins, from the stem *wid/weid/woid just like the Latin verb video or οἶδα (accordingly translated as “I know because I have seen”) in Greek (Snell 1924; Benveniste 1948; Nenci 1955; Schepens 1980). At the same time, scholars deemed the inquirer’s autopsy to be disappointing because it intervenes rather scarcely in the Histories (and mostly in Book 2). Then, they alleged that Herodotus set as the main topic for the Histories the past—which escapes that direct experience. In this line of thinking, Herodotus would have been firstly interested in “GEOGRAPHY” and “ethnology” (avant la lettre), where autopsy could operate, but would have lost his privileged informational resource when, supposedly urged by the trauma that Greece had suffered from the PERSIAN WARS, he began dealing with the past. Thus, historiography would be born within the Histories (Jacoby 1913), but at the price of a constrained change in the ways of obtaining information. Instead of his own autopsy, the inquirer into the past resorts to eyewitness accounts, that is, an autopsy of second or nth degree, and for want of anything better, to traditions (whether oral or written: akoē), sometimes hardly verifiable (Thomas 1992). Even a “geographical” matter, the inquiry about the source of the NILE (2.29–32), offers an outstanding example: Herodotus’ autopsy up to ELEPHANTINE is associated with several narratives of past expeditions beyond that point and finally one which states that young men, one day, personally saw a great river full of CROCODILES, assumed by their king (when he heard the report) to be the Nile.

Despite that adaptation, in ancient Greece, any KNOWLEDGE (Snell 1924)—and especially the ideal historical knowledge—is supposed to have remained fundamentally or originally based on autopsy (Drews 1973), so that “serious historians in the ancient world tended to concentrate on the history of their own time” (Thomas 1992). On that point, scholars perhaps have in mind CANDAULES’ Heraclitean‐like phrase (1.8), when the Lydian king urges GYGES to see for himself how beautiful the naked queen looks: “ears turn out to be less reliable than eyes.” Eyes (in that instance, Gyges’ autopsy) would be more accurate than hearing (everything that the king, as the first eyewitness, could report). However, regardless of the fact that some scholars (even the same ones later on: Thomas 2000) now seem reluctant to rest on etymology alone (Schepens 2007), and that others have put forward another etymology for historiē (Floyd 1990: ἵζειν, “to seat”), in more recent literature, the complexity of the actual use of autopsy in Herodotus’ inquiry and narrative has come to the fore.

First it has been noticed (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987) that throughout the Histories, Herodotus, as the main inquirer, does not privilege seeing (ὄψις, opsis) as such (and thereby autopsy) over hearing or reading (ἀκοή, akoē). Only direct or indirect information is at issue, regardless of its perceptive nature. It rather depends on whether what is to be registered is visible or not (2.104: the COLCHIANS’ origins; 2.5: Egyptian territory).

Moreover, autopsy is no longer considered the core of historiē (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987, 2007; Bakker 2002; Schepens 2007) but rather one among other activities encapsulated in it (2.99): collecting traditions (akoē), forging one’s own judgment (γνώμη, gnōmē), and asking questions (historiē). The inquirer (histōr) rather would play the role of a warrant than of a witness (Sauge 1992) and, when he practices historiē, Herodotus would look far more akin to a magistrate such as the mnemōn than to an eyewitness (Darbo‐Peschanski 2007, also for the Iliadic histōr as a JUDGE who was not necessarily a witness). Finally, the autopsy issue is open to different interpretations that take into account the diverse layers of enunciation in the text (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987, 2007; Marincola 1997; Shrimpton 1997) and structural narrative echoes from literary and narratological approaches (Marincola and Dewald 2006; Baragwanath 2008; Grethlein 2013). Thus, it is noticed that Herodotus does not have a monopoly on autopsy; many informers that he refers to claim such an experience. Moreover, the inquiries sometimes conducted by characters of his narrative have reflective effects on his own historiē, providing it both with a contrastive background and a foil. This is especially the case with the kings and TYRANTS who either go to see things themselves or resort to eyewitnesses and even to “eye‐spies” (κατάσκοποι, κατόπται) (3.17–25, 134; 5.12–13; 7.146–47, 183, 208; 8.21, 23: Bakker 2002, Demont 2009). Therefore, autopsy not only contains many degrees in tradition, but also entangles many textual levels of the Histories.

Secondly, autopsy is not assumed to directly lead to TRUTH. Even if an informer has personally attended the spectacle at issue or seen such‐and‐such aspect of it—even if this informer is Herodotus himself—his testimony does not prevail. It is rather added as one opinion among others (visual or not) so that, at the end of the collection, the readers/listeners may form their own judgment in the silence of the text (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987, 2007; Bakker 2002). An example can be found in the inquiry into how far Egyptian territory stretches and especially about the DELTA (2.10–19). There, Herodotus portrays himself as an eyewitness, but he also debates with other IONIANS, only saying: “if our opinion is right …” (2.16). Furthermore, a visual experience may be variously interpreted, as Herodotus suggests about the account of the scribe at SAIS (2.28). Generally, the testimony of many informers, even though they are not actually proved to have been eyewitnesses, is worth more than that of an isolated one, even if it comes from a supposed eyewitness.

Thus, when studying autopsy in Herodotus’ inquiries, one cannot avoid asking the wider anthropological and historical questions of what experience means for a Greek in the fifth century BCE and what kind of truth it aims at. A situation where the voice of a group prevails over that of an individual, and where truth comes from consensus rather than an experimental control, must be pictured with very peculiar colors.

SEE ALSO: Evidence; Historical Method; Narratology; Orality and Literacy; Proof; Sources for Herodotus