The birth of literary criticism (Herodotus 2.116–17) and the roots of Homeric neoanalysis*

Abstract

This chapter intends to pay homage to Margalit Finkelberg’s Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece. It also fixes on a text, Herodotus 2.116–17, that Professor Finkelberg has discussed in an important paper on the “problem of multiformity” in early Greek epic. The chapter focuses on a different area of Homeric scholarship, again one that has occupied our honorand: Homeric neoanalysis. It shows how Homeric criticism in its earliest attestation is vitally in dialog with modern-day Homeric criticism: specifically, that Herodotus’ thinking in this snapshot may be seen as a curiously ambivalent precursor of the modern neoanalytical method. The chapter considers the implications of such convergences and divergences on the question of putative Near Eastern or Egyptian sources of Homer. Herodotus’ contention that the Homeric poems have been informed by Egyptian sources finds further elaboration in Diodorus, whose first book repeatedly cites the Egyptian priests as opining that various features of Homeric poetry are mythologized reflections of actual Egyptian practices.