Sean Sheehan

A Guide to Reading Herodotus' Histories (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Modern scholarship judges Herodotus to be a more complex writer than his past readers supposed. His Histories is now being read in ways that are seemingly incompatible if not contradictory. This volume interrogates the various ways the text of the Histories has been and can be read by scholars: as the seminal text of our Ur-historian, as ethnology, literary art and fable. Our readings can bring out various guises of Herodotus himself: an author with the eye of a travel writer and the mind of an investigative journalist; a globalist, enlightened but superstitious; a rambling storyteller but a prose stylist; the so-called 'father of history' but in antiquity also labelled the 'father of lies'; both geographer and gossipmonger; both entertainer and an author whom social and cultural historians read and admire.

Guiding students chapter-by-chapter through approaches as fascinating and often surprising as the original itself, Sean Sheehan goes beyond conventional Herodotus introductions and instead looks at the various interpretations of the work, which themselves shed light on the original. With text boxes highlighting key topics and indices of passages, this volume is an essential guide for students whether reading Herodotus for the first time, or returning to revisit this crucial text for later research.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. April 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781474292689
• Artikelnr.: 52448439

Autorenporträt

Sean Sheehan is an independent scholar, having previously taught in the UK and abroad. His publications include The British Museum Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Ancient Greece (2002), Socrates: Life and Times (2007), Zizek: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Sophocles' Oedipus the King: A Reader's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Inhaltsangabe

List of Boxes Approaches A literary historian The form of the Histories
Herodotus the ethnographer The Histories as literature Themes and patterns
Commentary Book One: Croesus and Cyrus Book Two: Egypt Book Three:
Cambyses, Samos and Darius Book Four: Darius, Scythia and Libya Book Five:
The Ionian Revolt: Causes and Outbreak Book Six: The Ionian Revolt: Defeat
and Aftermath Book Seven: The Road to Thermopylae Book Eight: Showdown at
Salamis Book Nine: Persia Defeated Notes Bibliography Index of Passages
General Index