Herodotus and his Sources of Information

Abstract

The study of sources, for which the word Qyellenforschung has established itself in languages other than its native German, is not a fashionable activity at the beginning of the twenty-first century AD. This chapter is an attempt at the looser rather than the stricter enterprise; it is concerned with what is now known as 'intertextuality' rather than Qyellenforschung : in fact, with Herodotus' relationship to his literary sources and to his oral sources. It is very difficult to know where it is proper to speak of Herodotus' 'use of sources of information' and at what point we should stop talking of 'sources' and talk instead of general occupancy of a shared intellectual milieu. Herodotus' cheerful march across the intellectual disciplines takes him across a wider territory and his footprints are that much harder to trace. Keywords: German; Herodotus; Qyellenforschung ; sources of information