Herodotus’ Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naïve and ‘archaic’, the Histories are now seen as very much a product of the intellectual climate of their own day - not only subject to contemporary literary, religious, moral and social influences, but actively contributing to the great debates of their time. Their reliability as historical and ethnographic accounts, a matter of controversy even in antiquity, is being debated with renewed vigour and increasing sophistication. This Companion offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of all these current approaches to Herodotus’ remarkable work.

Egbert J. Bakker is Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Cornell 1997) and is currently preparing a book on problems of time from Homer to Herodotus.
Irene J.F. de Jong is Academy Professor of Classical Greek Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on drama and Homer, most recently A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (Cambridge 2001). She is currently editing a History of Ancient Greek Narrative.
Hans van Wees is Reader in Ancient Greek History at University College London. He is the author of a book on Homeric society and editor of Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (1998) and War and Violence in Ancient Greece (2000).