...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...