Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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ancient Greek texts: Herodotus of Halicarnassus’s fifth-century BCE Histories and Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE Library. Herodotus’s Histories chronicles the events of the Greco-Persian wars and their backstories and investigates the non-Greeks who were either involved in the conflict, conquered in the course of Persian expansion, or brought to Herodotus’s attention in the course of his inquiries. These include a vast array of peoples, but I focus on those called Persians, Babylonians, Scythians, and Ethiopians in what is now Iran, Iraq, Russia, and east Africa, respectively. The passages I consider dominate books 1 through 4 and the beginning of 5, although details about other places and peoples appear throughout, and I consider the resonance of these passages when I discuss later books of the Histories.1
Diodorus’s Library has a much wider scope, aiming to encompass the history of the known world from its beginnings until Diodorus’s own time, ending around 60 BCE. Although only fifteen of forty books have survived intact, Diodorus’s work is still the longest extant from Greek and Roman antiquity. I focus on the first three books of non-Greek history, especially Diodorus’s descriptions of people living in what is now Egypt, India, and Sudan, but passages from book 5, which describes the Greek islands and parts of northern Europe, also make an appearance, and I consider book 12, Diodorus’s life of Alexander the Great, in chapter 6.2
Throughout the book I treat static descriptions of people’s customs alongside narratives of their actions in time, especially in the course of Persian conquest (Herodotus) and Egyptian and Babylonian conquest (Diodorus). I have subtitled this book “Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography” because this term is more evocative than “historiography,” which encompasses the many modes Herodotus and Diodorus write in. When I talk about ethnography in this book, I am referring to Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s portrayals of non-Greeks, and when I call them ethnographers I do so to emphasize this focus of their writings.3
I have chosen to anchor this study in Herodotus and Diodorus because their works loom so large in the history of Greek writing on other peoples and because, as bookends of the Greek world before Rome, they allow me to trace significant similarities and differences across four centuries.4 Since Diodorus is an heir to the tradition Herodotus founded, their juxtaposition also provides opportunities to see Herodotean calls and Diodoran responses. Diodorus’s reception of Herodotus, often mediated through lost Hellenistic authors, comments on the Histories, often critically.
Although Herodotus may himself have been indebted to earlier writers, especially Hecataeus of Miletus and Skylax, his success so thoroughly eclipsed his predecessors’ that he often appears entirely original.5 We know that Herodotus’s mode of writing about other peoples was very popular in later periods. As Oswyn Murray has demonstrated, the Histories had a sustained impact on the Hellenistic geographers, ethnographers, and historians who succeeded him, whether or not they acknowledged that impact or had a favorable view of their predecessor.6 Yet the majority of these successors’ works do not survive, except as they are embodied in later writers such as Diodorus.
Some of the work on Herodotus’s ethnographies has considered the relationship of other peoples to their environments, often focusing on the stereotype of the “noble savage.” Stewart Flory has said that “the story of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians is also the story of the conflict between nature and culture . . . in which a man of culture, whom I call the ‘prosperous aggressor,’ attacks a man of nature, the ‘noble savage.’ ”7 Flory uses these terms as shorthand for a complicated, shifting dynamic between peoples in Herodotus, but the shorthand itself has come to dominate scholars’ sense of environmental patterns in the Histories. Flory’s dichotomy between “noble savage” and “prosperous aggressor,” along with James Redfield’s distinction between “soft peoples” and “hard peoples,” has encouraged scholars of Greece and Rome to see Herodotus through the lens of early modern anthropology and political theory, from which these terms derive.8 It is better to understand the “noble savage” as a reception of Greek and Roman ethnography than an idea that would be familiar to Herodotus’s first readers. The reception has been so powerful because it reveals something true and distinct in Greek and Roman ethnographies, namely their persistent interest in environmental cultures. But as compelling as these terms are, noble savage, prosperous aggressor, soft peoples, and hard peoples are reductive and limiting.9
Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus has been largely ignored as a writer. While his Library is regularly mined for its adaptation of now-lost Hellenistic histories, Diodorus’s text has received only a handful of book-length treatments.10 His use of lost texts is both immense and difficult to evaluate. Other scholars have painstakingly compared the “fragments” of these authors across their transmitters or “cover texts,” including Diodorus. Nevertheless, scholars have also shown that Diodorus exercised considerable authorship in the selection and adaptation of his sources, as did Herodotus before him. In placing Diodorus’s text alongside Herodotus’s, I hope to contribute to scholars’ growing appreciation for the Library as a historical work in its own right.11 For this reason, I do not wade into ongoing debates about where Diodorus has modified his sources and where he has transmitted them more or less intact. I leave to others the important work of distinguishing the environmental discourse of lost Hellenistic historians from the larger background I detail in this book.
Although “Herodotus” has been championed as a great artist, the author of the entire Histories, while “Diodorus” is often credited only with certain passages of the Library, ancient readers probably did not make this distinction, and so I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” in parallel. At the same time, I note instances when Herodotus and Diodorus break out of the stream of narration to speak to the reader in their authorial personas. Otherwise, following a reader-centric rather than author-centric approach, I use the names “Herodotus” and “Diodorus” more or less interchangeably with their texts, the Histories and Library. I have presented Herodotus, his Histories, Diodorus, and his Library as showing, arguing, and implying things to readers.12
Focusing on the Library rather than its Hellenistic sources has several benefits. First, it allows me to describe the experience of Diodorus’s readers, who had access to his continuous narrative, rather than confining my arguments to individual passages extracted from the Library and confirmed as Diodorus’s original work. Second, preserving the layers of Diodorus’s words and those of his sources will remind us that Herodotus’s text is layered as well. Although many ethnographic writers claim to have seen some of what they record, most depended either in part or in full on the observations of others.13 When modern editors publish the “fragments” of these lost authors out of the context in which we find them—that is, embedded as quotations or adaptations in later authors—readers lose sight of the fact that ethnography was a tradition that covered its tracks.14 Direct observation, although one original source for ethnographic writing, became less important over time as other kinds of sources, especially the tradition of ethnographic writing itself, came into circulation. Over the centuries ethnography became an accretive, scholarly genre; these later ethnographers were not opposed to new evidence or eyewitness accounts but increasingly concerned with reading previous ethnographers and integrating their research.
The heterogeneous tradition of ethnographic writing gives the environmental discourse I describe its unique texture. Ethnographic texts are polyvocal and sometimes fantastic, not committed to achieving a smooth, realistic synthesis or single forensic argument but rather composed of interpenetrating layers that give rise to multiple meanings. Ethnographers are interested not only in what they have seen or heard from eyewitnesses or even what they have read in previous histories, but also in what they can theorize themselves. These writers believe, as T. P. Wiseman once said, that “some credible things are not worth relating, and some incredible ones are.”15 Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s observations, adaptations of previous writers, oral histories, and creative extrapolations are the discursive material from which the environmental cultures I describe emerge. As I demonstrate, this discursive environment creates a fertile field for readers, who are encouraged to experiment