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        The Significance of Herodotus .2.16 for Greek Editorial Practices     
        A Guest post by Hunter Rawlings 

In the early periods of Greek literary history, say 700 BCE to 400 BCE, authors wrote on papyrus with reed pens, both imported from Egypt. Papyrus was formed into rolls; codices came later.  Papyrus was a difficult medium with which to work since one could not easily erase what had been written and additions had to be made not where they might be properly inserted, but basically at whatever point the author had reached in his composition and decided to add something.  As a result, revision of texts was almost impossible:  as we shall see, “the first draft was always meant to be the last draft.”  I want to raise in this paper the real possibility that we can identify one of the earliest pieces of evidence, if not the earliest, for revision/editing in Herodotus’ History of the Persian Wars.  Jeffrey Rusten recently (see below) demonstrated conclusively that Thucydides revised the plan for a segment of his work at the end of the fifth century BCE.  My thoughts here were stimulated by reading his remarkable proof.
 
 
In 2.116 Herodotus begins a long and tortured argument that Homer knew the story, supposedly told to Herodotus by priests in Egypt [FN], that Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt, not in Troy.
 
[FN “The origin of Herodotus’ variant may well have been Hecataeus.”  Asheri, Lloyd, Corcella, Commentary, p. 323, summarizing Lloyd, Commentary 99-182, pp. 146ff.]
 
 
 This is a most significant passage for many reasons, among them the following:  
 
1) it constitutes an early piece of literary criticism and literary history.  Herodotus says the reason Homer did not relate the story of Helen’s Egyptian sojourn was because “it was not as fitting for epic poetry as the other one he did use:
 οὐ γὰρ ὁμοίως ἐς τὴν ἐποποιίην εὐπρεπὴς ἦν τῷ ἑτέρῳ τῷ περ ἐχρήσατο
 
 2) Herodotus is deeply invested in the Egyptian version because he knew it would be received skeptically by his Greek reading/listening audience—after all it overturned the core of Homer’s epic by rendering the Greek expedition to Priam’s city otiose, therefore hollow;
 
3) it offers a salient piece of evidence that Herodotus by his time, late fifth century BCE, regarded the “editing” of Greek texts as common practice. This paper will focus primarily on the third point, which has, to my knowledge, not been noticed before.
 
The key phrase, often put within parentheses, comes in 2.116.2:
 
（καὶ οὐδαμῇ ἄλλῃ ἀνεπόδισε ἑωυτόν）
 
The problem is the meaning of the verb.  Even Enoch Powell in his superb lexicon to Herodotus says about its use in 2.116  “the meaning is not clear.”  It is translated variously as “in no other passage did he correct himself, retract what he before said,” LSJ (1996) s.v.; “…he has nowhere else contradicted himself,” Rawlinson;  “(and nowhere contradicted),” Andrea L. Purvis in the Landmark Herodotus; “(…which he nowhere retracts),” Walter Blanco; “(and nowhere else does he return to the story),” A.D. Godley, in the Perseus Digital Library.
 
The semantics of ἀναποδίζω are, as Powell admits, difficult.  My colleague Alan Nussbaum at Cornell has helped elucidate this knotty problem and I owe what immediately follows to him.
 
ἀναποδίζω should probably mean “go/come up” or “go to again,” “return (to),” “revisit.”  The last three meanings clearly make sense here, a hypothesis that fits not only with οὐδαμῇ ἄλλῃ ἀνεπόδισε ἑωυτόν (2.116.2), but also with Herodotus' Θρασύβουλος ... ἐσβὰς δὲ ἐς ἄρουραν ἐσπαρμένην ἅμα τε διεξήιε τὸ λήιον ἐπειρωτῶν τε καὶ ἀναποδίζων τὸν κήρυκα κατὰ τὴν ἀπὸ Κορίνθου ἄπιξιν (5.92.ζ).  For this latter passage the key is that ἀναποδίζων is paired with ἐπειρωτῶν.  If the latter, inasmuch as it is a present participle, can mean ”repeatedly asking (the herald),” then ἀναποδίζων, also present, should mean “returning to (the herald) repeatedly.”  In 2.116.2 '”returned” (as Godley construes it) therefore seems correct.  In this context “nowhere returned” simply means that he “never went back to it” (sc. for purposes of revising).
 
The parenthetical statement accepts on its face that Herodotus saw “revisiting” a text for the purpose of revision as nothing unusual.  That is, of course, an absurd argument for Homeric practice, but it is clear that Herodotus here conflates Homeric practice with that of his own day.  This comment tells us something quite important about Herodotus’ time.  When Jeff Rusten proved that in 1.97.2 Thucydides explicitly says he “discarded his plan” and began on a fresh path in his Pentekontaetia, it is the first such proof for that author and for prose writers in general in the fifth century BCE.  It came at the very end of the century, probably some 20 years after Herodotus composed his work.
 
Yet Herodotus says, blandly and parenthetically, that Homer did not correct himself elsewhere in his work, suggesting that it would have been perfectly possible for him to have done so.  Now we know about editorial insertions in Herodotus such as the “correction in stride,” the “addition in stride,” and “dislocated additions”  [see R. Lattimore, in CP 53 (1958) 9-21], but these do not constitute revision of the type Herodotus envisions in 2.116.  Instead, they are part of what Lattimore calls his “always forward, never back,” “point to point,” or “progressive” style that does not stop to correct the text explicitly but simply adds new corrective text “in stride,” a useful descriptive term.  Lattimore adds of Herodotus’ text, “…the first draft was always meant to be the final draft” (p. 309).  The import of the comment in 2.116 is that Herodotus can envision explicit, specified correction, as in Thucydides 1.97, revision that interrupts the narrative in overt fashion.  This is true revision, that is, acknowledged alteration in the process of composition.
 
[FN I take no position on Lattimore’s claim that Herodotus composed orally, except to say that it can only be true to a minor degree because he had no musical accompaniment, used no formulas or epithets, worked under no metrical constraints characteristic of oral poetry, if one accepts the Parry/Lord thesis. That said, correction and addition in stride are certainly features of oral, not developed written composition, so it is fair to say that Herodotus retained some aspects of oral composition while writing a lengthy prose work.]
    
 
Why is this statement of Herodotus important?  Because it precedes the developed form of Attic rhetoric in the fourth century BCE, when revision was common and openly discussed.  Note what Alkidamas, (On the Sophists, 4) grumpily points out:   “On the contrary, to write after long premeditation, and to revise (ἐπανορθῶσαι) at leisure, comparing the writings of previous Sophists, and from many sources to assemble thoughts on the same subject, and to imitate felicities cleverly spoken, to revise (ἐπανορθώσασθαι) privately some matters on the advice of laymen and to alter and expunge (ἀνακαθῆραι καὶ μεταγράψαι) other parts as a result of repeated and careful excogitation, verily, this is an easy matter even for the untutored.”   
 
Herodotus’ History is an Ionic work “published” about 420 BCE, so far as we can tell.  He is probably the first author of a prose text to regard revision as a normal, accessible part of composition.  Thucydides appears to be the second when he tells his readers openly that he is about to alter his plan for his text.  Then Athenian rhetoricians made revision a core part of their teaching and writing in the next century, much to the disgust of men like Alkidamas, who regarded such written techniques as facile compared to the hard work of delivering speeches extemporaneously in front of large audiences.  It would take a long while for written composition to take over almost completely from oral composition, and revision remains a necessary feature of it right up to today, as every college freshman knows.
 
In doing the research for this paper I have been struck by how subtle are the seemingly offhand comments of ancient writers to us, their interpreters.  It is impossible for us to know everything a Greek author conveys in a text because of the long interval of time between us and the decidedly different conventions we use as a matter of course.  Too much is taken for granted, context is lost in the long centuries of literary history.  The best we can do is to read closely with as few preconceived notions as possible.  That is not easy, but it is remarkably enjoyable.
 
Hunter Rawlings
Cornell University