Jeremy G. Taylor, University of Michigan How to Use a Genealogy: A Literary Interpretation of Herodotus 1.7.2-4

Early in his Lydian logos Herodotus supplies some rather dry genealogical and chronological data about the Lydian royal dynasty of the Heraclids (1.7.2-4). This paper examines not the historical question of the accuracy of Herodotus' information, but the literary or historiographic question of how Herodotus used the source material available to him. The paper aims to show that the details in 1.7.2-4 are more than just background for the Lydian history, and that Herodotus exploits his source material for three specific purposes. Firstly, the names listed in chapter 7 are part of a larger framework around which the entire Lydian logos up to chapter 92 is built (a modification of an idea of T.E.V. Pearce, "Epic Regression in Herodotus", Eranos 79, 1981, 87-90); secondly, the technical and recondite nature of some of the details serves to underline Herodotus' own authority as a practitioner of the new science of historia; and thirdly, the historian specifies the duration of the Heraclid dynasty not so much to give a precise date as to reinforce a crucial distinction already drawn in the opening chapters between the knowable realm of human affairs (the subject of the Histories) and the shadowy world of gods and heroes (on which his literary predecessors concentrate). The passage shows Herodotus' ability to shape even the barest of source material for his own ends and reminds us that he was at one and the same time the father of history and of Greek literary prose.