Rosaria Vignolo MUNSON Ananke in Herodotus

Words of the ananke family in the Greek historians tend to be connected with issues of freedom, responsibility and the causality of events, especially war. M. Ostwald's Ananke in Thucydides (1988) provides a foundation for examining the more restricted application of these terms in Herodotus (88 occurrences, vs. 163 in Thucydides):

1) Unlike Thucydides, H. never applies--or allows his speakers to apply-- anank - words to circumstances that motivate someone to initiate an aggressive action. (This holds true also for the exclusively Herodotean category of divine compulsion.)

2) In H. (more frequently than in Thucydides) énãgkh tends itself to be an act of aggression by a despotic agent against a weaker party.

3) Victims of this despotic ananke are partially excused, but those who resist it earn H.' (and not Thucydides') moral praise.

4) In H. psychological ananke only includes cases of moral compulsion to do the right thing (unlike in Thucydides, where people are 'compelled' to act by fear and many other psychological factors).

Points 1-4 cumulatively reveal a more moralistic concept of ananke than in Thucydides, consistently with H.' unwillingness to justify imperialism, with his self-imposed task to assign responsibility (Nagy 1990), and with the high value he elsewhere attributes to nomos on the one hand and freedom on the other. The last point is an index of the histor's personal involvment in these principles:

5) In H. anank - occurs 5 times in metanarrative (as it never does in Thucydides), twice in the proximity of narrative despotic anank- (7.99.1, 7.139.1 and 4). Through this use the narrator of the Histories clearly represents himself as the opposite of an imperial subject and analogous to the most admirable of his characters on the receiving end of compulsion. He is a free agent, who disregards political pressure, and is exclusively compelled by the requirements of his history and the nomos that applies to him as researcher, recorder, adviser to his audience and arbitrator of their differences: relevancy and piety (2.65.2, 7.96.1, 99.1), fairness and respect for truth (7.139.1).