Abstract

This paper explores the exploitation of autochthony topoi in Herodotus and Thucydides. Autochthony-thinking was so familiar to the historians' audiences that such allusions could be implicit, and the word itself is often not used. Both historians develop the themes thought-provokingly and paradoxically: for instance, in Thucydides' case in broadening the horizons so much that the land of Attica may be regarded as a dispensable "little garden," yet the failures in distant Sicily come back to endanger that homeland; in Herodotus, in allowing the Athenians to show that love by being prepared to abandon that land to the invader.

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