Free Republic 3rd Qtr 2025 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $687
0%  
Woo hoo!! 3rd Qtr 2025 FReepathon is now underway!!

Keyword: lucretius

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Herodotus On The Origins of Language

    06/02/2025 11:31:11 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 26 replies
    Society for Classical Studies ^ | 2025 (?) | Rachel Wong
    ...the account may best be understood as a form of conjectural history. This genre is a particular kind of narrative strategy which, as Christopher Pelling suggests, '[analyzes] the logical presuppositions of a functioning system and transposing them, for expositional clarity, into a historicist register.' Herodotus' narrative strategies interrogate the very same presuppositions on which Psammetichus' experiment is built: the primacy of language in human development, and the analogy between childhood and the world's first humans.Reading Herodotus' passage alongside Lucretius' De rerum natura and Plato's Cratylus, I argue that Herodotus exploits an ambiguity in terms φωνή and ἔπος in order to...