BMCR 2009.07.35: Flower on Baragwanath, Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford Classical Monographs

Emily Baragwanath, Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus. Oxford
Classical Monographs.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford University Press, 2008.
Pp. xi, 374.  ISBN 9780199231294.  $130.00.

Reviewed by Michael A. Flower, Princeton University
([email protected])
Word count:  2702 words
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[Table of contents is listed at the end of the review.]

Many years ago it had occurred to me that there was a need for a book
that dealt with the important topic of personal motivation in the Greek
historians, beginning with Herodotus.  The project that I envisioned
was something far less sophisticated than the treatment given in Emily
Baragwanath's provocative, stimulating, dense, and often brilliant
monograph.  This is not simply a book about attributions of motivation
narrowly conceived, but it deals in a highly original and illuminating
way with the relationship between ascriptions of motive and the larger
narrative strategies of the Histories.  The Herodotus that emerges is
not one who offers a single authoritative version of the past, but an
author who presents various possible motives and interpretations, who
wants his readers to realize how difficult it is to know about the
past, and who encourages them to weigh the evidence for themselves and
to reach their own conclusions.  To be sure, Baragwanath builds on the
work of other scholars who view Herodotus's historical project in
similar terms, but her conclusions are by no means derivative.  In many
ways she models Herodotus's own method in suggesting different ways of
interpreting various passages, while skillfully prodding readers in a
particular direction.  This is by far one of the most interesting books
on Herodotus that I have read, and, quite frankly, when it comes to
instilling enthusiasm in the reader to reread and to rethink even the
most famous of episodes in the Histories, I cannot think of a better
one.

This is not a book that one can just dip into.  It should be read in
its entirety, and several readings are really necessary to extract all
of its riches.  It took me a long time to read it through for the
simple reason that on almost every page there was some new idea or new
reading that made me stop and think, and often to take out my text of
Herodotus.  And in most cases I came away persuaded.  If one purpose,
indeed a primary purpose, of a work of literary criticism is to make
the reader eager to return to a text and to consider it afresh, then
this book is an unqualified success.  The argument assumes a very
detailed knowledge of the whole of the Histories on the part of the
reader (and of Homer as well in chapter 2).  Perhaps this is necessary
given the type of close reading that Baragwanath offers (and she is at
her best when demonstrating how the range of possible meanings of a
particular passage is conditioned by other parts of the narrative).
Yet it would be difficult to follow the arguments presented here
without first having read the whole of Herodotus very carefully.  This
book deserves a very broad audience, and one hopes that non-specialist
readers will have the patience to work through it.  So much ground is
covered in this book (much more in fact than the title alone indicates)
that it would be impossible to give an accurate account of everything
that it contains or to do justice to the sophistication of its
arguments, so what follows is necessarily selective.

Chapter 1 sets out the method to be pursued and the author's own vision
of Herodotus as a writer who empowers his readers, both contemporary
and future, to contribute to imputing meaning to his Histories: "His
frequent inclusion in his text of a range of versions, including those
with which he explicitly disagrees, furnishes others with the material
that they need, potentially to challenge his personal verdict" (p. 2).
Baragwanath employs Wolfgang Iser's theory of reader response as her
main interpretative tool.   But she also uses Plutarch as a touchstone
both for how an ancient audience would have reacted to the text and as
a means of revealing Herodotus's narrative strategies.  These prove to
be very fruitful methodological choices, and my only criticism concerns
what she does not do.  It would have been helpful to explain more fully
for the uninitiated how the terms "author", "implied author", and
"narrator" are used in the field of narratology (especially on pages
32-4).  So too, more of Plutarch's cultural and intellectual background
might have been filled in.

More serious perhaps is a lack of precision in defining the parameters
of Herodotus's contemporary audience (both oral and literate).
Although throughout Baragwanath asks how Herodotus's contemporary
audience would have read and reacted to the text, she does not indicate
just how problematic and controversial it is to fix that audience in
time.  On page 6, n. 1, she refers to the "original mid to late-fifth
century BC audience," but later we seem to be told that this audience
was pre-Peloponnesian War or 440s BC (pp. 307-8, 315-16).  It makes a
huge difference, of course, in terms of audience response (as well as
of authorial "intentions") whether the bulk of the Histories was being
written and performed in the years leading up to the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War or when that war was well underway, in the 420s or
even as late as the 410s.

The first chapter ends with a test case for the usefulness of a
reader-response approach.  She proposes that Herodotus is taking on the
authorial persona of an "unreliable narrator" in his rejection
(6.121.1) of the rumor that the Alcmaeonidae had used a shield to
signal to the Persian forces after Marathon ("it is a wonder to me and
I won't accept the assertion...").  Baragwanath gives an insightful
demonstration of how the narrative of the Alcmaeonidae's exploits,
beginning in Book I, casts doubt on the narrator's own verdict, and she
persuasively argues that Herodotus intended that his audience should
challenge that verdict.

Chapter 2 compares the ascription of motives in Herodotus and Homer
with an emphasis on how the former appropriates and develops the
latter's techniques.  In her epilogue Baragwanath briefly, and
tantalizingly, states that the treatment of motive in fifth-century
tragedy is comparable to that in Herodotus.  One wishes that another
chapter could have been added in which the similarities with tragedy
were explored.  Chapter 3 deals with the tension between the
historian's purpose in conferring kleos (fame) and his revealing of
motives that were more pragmatic than heroic.  The depiction of
Leonidas at Thermopylae stands as a case study of how Herodotus
sometimes juxtaposes idealizing and pragmatic explanations for
historical events.  The key difference between Thucydides and Herodotus
in attributing motive is well brought out in chapter 4.  Whereas in
Thucydides there is a high degree of congruence between human intention
and resulting action (sometimes too congruent to seem true), in
Herodotus there is more often than not a disjunction which highlights
the unpredictability of actions and their remoteness from intentions.
The two case studies are the thematically interlocking accounts of
tyranny on the island of Samos and of the Persian king Cambyses.  The
analysis of the latter's utter unpredictability is particularly
skillful.

Only once in chapter 4 did the argument seem to push this book's line
of approach a bit too hard, and I was less persuaded by the suggestion
that the presentation of Maiandrios, with its shifting and contrasting
perspectives, is intended to prompt the reader to question whether
Maiandrios was sincere in his initial offer to give up the tyranny over
Samos (p. 101, 105-7).  If Baragwanath's interpretation is correct, we
would then need to take Herodotus as yet again acting as an unreliable
narrator when he said of Maiandrios that "although he desired to be the
most just of men, he did not succeed."  Isn't this rather a clear case,
both for Herodotus and for his readers, of good-intentions being
altered under the "stress of circumstances" (a category of motivation
that is explored in chapters 6 and 7)?   The problem, of course, is how
and when to decide when Herodotus is giving a straightforward opinion
and when he is provoking his audience with an unreliable or ironic
authorial comment.  The only guidance that this book gives is in a
footnote (p. 34, n. 98): "An unreliable narrator is not evident in
cases where Herodotus did have better evidence--such as in the account
of Ephialtes' betrayal of the Thermopylae pass: 7.213-14."  It might
seem like a circular argument to posit that the Herodotean narrator is
only an unreliable narrator in those cases where Herodotus the author
did not have good evidence for an assertion.  How are we to know when
the evidence was good, or at least was deemed by Herodotus to be good?
Does the text itself provide the necessary cues in terms of congruence,
or lack thereof, between authorial intervention and surrounding
narrative?  Would it be simpler to assume that the Herodotean narrator
is always "unreliable"?

Alternative attributions of motive is the subject of chapter 5, leading
to the conclusion that high ideals play a more limited role than
personal advantage in motivating both individuals and communities, even
if rhetorical appeals to such things as freedom or Greek unity are
expected to be effective in persuading others to act.  After a very
interesting discussion of Athenian and Pelasgian motives in 6.137-9,
the chapter ends with a subtle and nuanced demonstration that the
Athenians, including the Alcmaeonidae, are depicted as willing to be
ruled by Peisistratus.  The next two chapters (6 and 7) deal with the
Ionian revolt and the decision of various Greek states whether or not
to medize in 481-79, which pursue further the tension between professed
high minded motives (especially the desire for freedom) and the reality
of acting from self-interest.  Herodotus is intent on revealing the
inadequacy of simple slogans to do justice to the complexity of the
messy reality of why people did what they did, and by presenting
alternative accounts he encourages his readers to sort out some of this
mess for themselves.  At the same time, he is aware that noble motives
may be corrupted over time by the pressure of circumstances and that
individuals may act out of a complex combination of motives.  So we are
not dealing with a simplistic distinction between motives that are
noble/selfless/openly professed and base/self-interested/concealed.

Chapter 7 is a lucid and deft exploration of the necessity that drove
many Greek states to medize.  Herodotus's intention, according to this
reading, is not to invite readers to join in accusing those Greeks who
sat out the war or joined the Persians, but to understand their
predicament, especially if they felt driven to take the actions that
they did.  At only one point in this detailed discussion did I feel
that the argument left out a vital piece of the puzzle.  Baragwanath
suggests (pp. 211-17) that in his complex analysis of Argive motives
Herodotus was concerned to demonstrate that the Argives were motivated
not by a desire for command, but by concern not to fall prey again to
Sparta, and that readers are being prompted not to criticize their
behavior but rather to understand it.  This reader feels no empathy for
the Argives, and Baragwanath has left out one telling detail.  She
summarizes Herodotus's account as follows: the Argives demand a share
in the command against Persia, the Spartans reply that in no way could
one of the Spartan kings be deprived of command, and in response
(quoting Herodotus 7.149.3) "The Argives say that they would not endure
the Spartans' pleonexie ('selfishness/greediness'), but chose rather to
be ruled by the Persians than to yield in any way to the Spartans."
Baragwanath then comments (p. 213), "This response is understandable:
the narrative has underlined the fact of Spartan obduracy."  My
difficulty is that she omits half of the Spartan response; to wit, that
they offered one third of the command to the Argives since the Spartans
had two kings but the Argives only one.  To me at least that detail
significantly alters how one is meant to read this passage, and it
makes the Argives look much less reasonable (and pardonable).

Likewise, I am not convinced that Herodotus's narrative actively
invites competing interpretations of Corcyrean motives for not joining
the Greeks at Salamis (pp. 220-222), (one of which, again, encourages
an empathetic understanding of their predicament).  But other readers
may well feel differently, and part of the excitement of this book is
that it arouses just these sorts of interpretative debates.

A highly nuanced discussion of Xerxes' motives and character is the
subject of chapter 8, and it is nothing short of brilliant.
Baragwanath shrewdly leaves aside the vexed question of Herodotus's
sources, and explains the double characterization of Xerxes in
Herodotus as being a function of dual Persian and Greek perspectives.
She gives a good deal of attention to the Council scene at the
beginning of Book 7, and sees it as being programmatic for the
interpretation of the scenes that follow.  She has made a very
compelling case for understanding Herodotus's account of Xerxes in
terms of Greek versus Persian explanatory paradigms (pp. 268-9, 280),
the one helpful in understanding the near success of the expedition and
the ideology that motivated it, the other in comprehending its ultimate
failure in terms explicable to Greeks, such as the concept of hubris.

The final chapter (9) is a reevaluation of Herodotus's depiction of
Themistocles.  The main thrust of this chapter is to argue that when
Herodotus gives his famous attribution of a self-interested motive to
Themistocles at 8.109.5-110.1, he is once again taking on the role of
an unreliable narrator. Baragwanath's Herodotus is too sophisticated a
writer to be subservient to sources that were hostile to Themistocles.
Rather, in his presentation of Themistocles, as elsewhere in his text,
he consciously presents the reader with various and shifting
perspectives on motivation, in an attempt to get them to evaluate the
narrative for themselves: "readers are prompted to engage with the
material and actively work to combine the different strands" (p. 318).
Historians who look for simplistic or straightforward evaluations in
Herodotus's account (e.g. Themistocles was always self-interested or
was a true patriot before Salamis and then became hubristic afterwards)
miss the subtlety of Herodotus's treatment; for the complexity of
Herodotus's narrative mirrors the complexity of the events themselves.
The chapter ends with a salutary warning against looking for "exclusive
readings--for keys that promise to unlock the 'true' interpretation, or
Herodotus's single and central 'message'" (p. 322).

I am well aware that this brief summary does scant justice to the many
and complex arguments that comprise this persuasive and many-faceted
study.  It is a book that constantly prompts one to rethink even long
held opinions, and this is far more important, and more interesting,
than whether or not one agrees with all of her readings of individual
passages.  Another admirable feature of this work is the way that it
engages with previous scholarship, displaying grace even when in sharp
disagreement with other opinions (a stance that younger scholars may
profitably take note of when writing a first book).  The highest
compliment that I can pay this book is a simple one: if told to teach a
course, whether undergraduate or graduate, on Herodotus, with the aid
of only a single work of secondary literature to accompany the reading
of the Greek text, without a moment's hesitation I would choose
Motivation and narrative in Herodotus.  A very brief Epilogue (only a
single page) ends the book, in which we are told that the meaning of
the Histories, like the meaning of the past itself, will always remain
contested.  This profound and engaging book is an important
contribution to that ongoing contestation of meaning, as well as a
model of how it should be conducted.

The book has nine chapters and a brief Epilogue.

1. The Histories, Plutarch, and reader response
2. The Homeric background
3. Constructions of motives and the historian's persona
4. Problematized motivation in the Samian and Persian logoi (Book III)
5. For better, for worse . . .: motivation in the Athenian logoi (Books
I and VI)
6. 'For freedom's sake . . .': motivation in the Ionian Revolt (Books
V-VI)
7. To medize or not to medize . . .: compulsion and negative motives
(Books VII-IX)
8. Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII-IX)
9. Themistocles: constructions of motivation (Books VII-IX)
Epilogue