Ethnography and Empire: Homer and the Hippocratics in Herodotus' Ethiopian Logos, 3.17-26

Abstract

This article examines Herodotus’ famous and exotic Ethiopian logos from three perspectives that derive from a close reading of the text: in Part I, as a meditation staged at the ἔσχατα γῆς on the profound relationship between ethnographic interest and expansionist desire in which the preoccupations of Hippocratic texts will be seen to play an important role; in Part II, as a piece of extensive engagement with Homer’s own logoi of travel and inquiry; and in Part III as a narrative about the historical context in which Herodotus’ Hippocratic and Homericising logos—its ethnography and ‘history’—was produced and consumed, one in which the expansionist ambitions of the Athenian demos find themselves mirrored in the mad campaign of the Persian king.