Papers by Thomas Harrison
B. Forsen and A. Lampinen (eds.), Oriental Mirages. Stereotypes and Identity Creation in the Ancient World (Franz Steiner), 99-133., 2024
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Syllogos, 2024
This paper re-examines Herodotus’ account of the marriage contest held by Cleisthenes, tyrant of ... more This paper re-examines Herodotus’ account of the marriage contest held by Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, for the hand of his daughter Agariste. It focuses less on the episode’s historicity or its literary antecedents than on the story’s position in the Histories more widely, and the background knowledge of leading Athenian families that might be taken for granted by Herodotus in his readers/audience. The paper suggests a cynical perspective on the historian’s part towards both the development of Athenian democracy and aristocratic sporting competition, and argues for the importance of patterns of prefigurement across the Histories as a whole.
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Ivan Matijašić (ed.) Herodotus - the Most Homeric Historian (Histos Suppl. vol. 14), 2022
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Electrum, 2022
This paper reviews the different models commonly used in understanding Herodotus' evidence on the... more This paper reviews the different models commonly used in understanding Herodotus' evidence on the Achaemenid Persian empire. It suggests that these approaches-for example, the assessment of Herodotus' accuracy, of the level of his knowledge, or of his sympathy for the Persians-systematically underestimate the complexity of his (and of the Greeks') perspective on the Persian empire: the conflicted perspective of a participant rather than just a detached observer.
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Syllogos, 2022
This paper explores Herodotus' account of 'silent trade', the phenomenon whereby two parties (in ... more This paper explores Herodotus' account of 'silent trade', the phenomenon whereby two parties (in this instance, the Carthaginians and an unnamed Libyan people) exchange goods without any wider social contact. Drawing on parallel accounts of silent trade, it first explores the distinctive features of Herodotus' version, and the question of its historicity. Secondly, it examines the story against the wider background of the Histories, in particular Herodotus' model of human contact and his use of the marketplace as an analogy. Finally, it looks at one striking reworking of this episode of the Histories in the closing stanzas of Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy.
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The Classical Quarterly, 2019
Herodotus’ fateful tale of the seven Persian emissaries sent to seek Earth and Water from the Mac... more Herodotus’ fateful tale of the seven Persian emissaries sent to seek Earth and Water from the Macedonian king Amyntes has been the subject of increasingly rich discussion in recent years. Generations of commentators have cumulatively revealed the ironies of Herodotus’ account: its repeated hints, for example, of the Persians’ eventual end; and, crowning all other ironies, the story's ending: that, after resisting the indignity of his female relatives being molested at a banquet, and disposing of all trace of the Persian ambassadors and their party, Alexander of Macedon then arranges his sister's marriage to the leader of the search party sent to investigate his disappeared compatriots (Hdt. 5.21.2). More recent readings have gone further in uncovering the mythological archetypes for the logos, or in tracing its exploration of a number of themes: revenge, guest-friendship, the equation of sexual and military conquest, or the ‘explosion of violence resulting from the contact o...
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Classical Antiquity
This paper draws upon analogy with better documented slave societies (the medieval Islamic world,... more This paper draws upon analogy with better documented slave societies (the medieval Islamic world, and the 18th-century Caribbean) to argue, first, that the institution of slavery was a major factor in fostering a discourse on the differences among foreign peoples; and secondly, that Greek ethnographic writing was informed by the experience of slavery, containing implicit justifications of slavery as an institution. It then considers the implications of these conclusions for our understanding of Greek representations of the barbarian world and for Greek contact with non-Greeks.
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Papers by Thomas Harrison