On Atomics Onomastic and Metarrhythmic Translations in Herodotus

Erxies, wherefore musters again the unfortunate host?²

Archilochus fr. 62 Diehl

Herodotus was the first great parent of discovery, as between nation and nation he was the author of mutual revelation. . . . He was the first general interpreter, the common dragoman to the general college of civilisation that now belted the Mediterranean, holding up, in a language already laying the foundations of universality, one comprehensive mirror, reflecting to them all the separate chorography, habits, institutions and religious systems of each.

Thomas De Quincey, "The Philosophy of Herodotus," 1853.122–23

So runs the opinion of the English essayist and opium eater Thomas De Quincey on Herodotus' status as what he calls "the leader amongst philosophical polyhistors" (1853.120). François Hartog has more recently shown us that the "mirroring" De Quincey describes is not a simple matter of direct reflection; rather, it is achieved through the distortions and interferences which are produced by a "rhetoric of otherness," a set of preconceived categories this interpreter, inquirer, and historian uses for talking about foreign peoples.³ A central component of such a rhetoric is a confrontation with, and an interpretation of, the languages of other cultures—above all with their names for the things in their world (which are sometimes, though not always, things in the interpreter's world too);⁴ and whilst Hartog sketched out some of the complications to be found in this confrontation,⁵ much remains to be said and understood about the Herodotean attempt, in Derrida's terms, "to seek to know oneself through the detour of the language of the other."⁶ Our task here will be to take up this neglected but vital inquiry and to examine at length two particularly rich and revealing instances of Herodotus' representation of the language of the other: instances where the reader of Herodotus' text trips up on his interpretive rhetoric of names and translation.

These instances are passages where Herodotus' authority and qualifications as a "common dragoman" can be (and have been) called into serious question, dealing as they do with the fundamental logic of names, translation, and philological inquiry. Eduard Meyer set the tone for criticism in the last century and a half when he wrote that Herodotus took his Egyptian translations from Hecataeus, knew not a word of Persian or Scythian, and was in sum entirely dependent on his informers and interpreters for his knowledge of other languages.⁷ In this essay, I concentrate on two particularly perplexing instances of this apparent linguistic incompetence, using them to argue that, with a little rethinking, we can come to a better understanding of Herodotus' science of language; and I suggest that these passages are put forward by Herodotus as interpretive cruces for the reader, as moments when we have to make some important decisions of our own about how to read his text. The passages, each of which I read as something like a conundrum, are 1.139 and 6.98. The latter has, to my mind, been solved for some time now, but the solution is as puzzling as the conundrum and has therefore been largely ignored since its proposal ninety years ago. My task will be to explain how we can fit that solution (for it is the only one available) into a coherent understanding of Herodotus' work. To the former conundrum, the end of 1.139, still more complex and fascinating than the latter, no adequate solution has been put forward, though several acute readers have guessed at the significance of certain parts of the whole. The full answer, which we shall explore here, may strike the reader as yet stranger than the solution to 6.98, but it marks the path to a greatly enhanced understanding of the connections that obtain—for Herodotus and, in some senses, for us too—between prose narrative, scientific inquiry, and human history. It is, amongst other things, a partial answer to that point of Herodotean interpretation to which De Quincey himself made a vital if lately unacknowledged contribution: the question of what exactly historiê means in Herodotus' work.

Language is...