Project Description
In the fifth book of his History, Herodotus describes a meeting between Cleomenes, king of Sparta, and Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, who has come to Lacedaemon to solicit support for a revolt of Ionian Greeks from Persian control. Having brought with him 'a bronze tablet on which a chart of the whole land was engraved' (5.49) and to which he repeatedly referred, Aristagoras was doing well until Cleomenes asked how many days' journey the proposed expedition would take his army from the sea. When the response came back 'three months', Cleomenes bade his Milesian guest depart Sparta before sunset.
The story raises several key issues relevant to the representation and conception of space in Herodotus' History. First, the example presents a decentred world: though the dialogue takes place in the Spartan heartland of Greece, the reader is invited to imagine a land far distant even from the Greek settlements in Asia Minor. Second, that distance is conceived in terms of a journey, three months from the sea; that is, space is portrayed as a phenomenon which is experienced rather an abstract notion. Third, the idea of space as something lived and relative lays emphasis on human agents as focalisers: the arguments of the worldly Aristagoras (tyrant of a city at the hub of trade routes on the margins of the Persian empire) fall on the deaf ears of the king of a land-bound people (whose very territory, the Peloponnesos, signifies an 'island'): different peoples have different conceptions of space. Fourth, in spite of the rival spatial perceptions of the two characters, Herodotus represents a horizon of networks, by virtue of which decisions made in one place reverberate through the whole region. Lastly, the role of the narrator in the construction of space introduces the issue of narrativity, particularly since Herodotus glosses Aristagoras' visual display of space with his own discursive representation of that space (5.52-4).
HESTIA interrogates Herodotus' narrativisation of space in the light of contemporary geographical theories of network, relation and flow, while using the results to critique modern notions of space and the media conventionally applied to represent it. More specifically, it addresses the following research objectives:
- To identify and detail the different ways in which Herodotus refers to space, and to investigate the function of spatial data within his text, in particular as explanatory for historical narrative.
- To explore new ways of understanding Herodotus' representation of space, rather than continuing the traditional approaches of searching for his sources or testing the accuracy of his description alongside modern maps.
- To locate Herodotus' representation of space in its cultural context, to consider the impact of writing down space on its conception, and to compare its narrativisation to other forms of representation, such as Homeric epic or the Hippocratic corpus.
- To identify and explore whether different peoples as represented by Herodotus conceive of space in culturally distinct ways, and to question the ways in which spatial representations relate to notions of identity.
- To investigate whether and to what extent Herodotus' narrative presents the notion of a centre, occupied by either Greece or Persia, and/or conceives of the represented world in terms of a network.
- To represent Herodotus' discursive model visually, using a geo-referenced database to plot Herodotus' spatial co-ordinates on a modern-day map and hyper-linking to the data Herodotus records.
- To use the Herodotean geography and this geo-database to construct a series of different topological representations of the spaces conceived in the text – based on the concepts of network, relation and flow – rather than the topographical-based maps to which we are accustomed.
- To introduce Herodotus' world-view to a new and wider audience via the internet.
Therefore, HESTIA aims to enrich the discussion of space that is ongoing in classical scholarship, as evidenced by a specialist panel at the 2007 Classical Association Conference dedicated to exploring the interactions of monuments, spaces and rituals in Delphi and Athens. Yet, while this example shows the interest in space within archaeology and History, there has been little recent work on submitting ancient Greek literary texts to spatial examination, which is all the more surprising for Herodotus given that over a generation ago Immerwahr (1966) demonstrated the importance of natural boundaries to Herodotus' conception of History. In fact a recent article by Harrison (2007) assigns the "search of geography and its place in the Histories" (44) the highest priority, yet fails to consider the potential for historical agents to offer differing views of space, the impact on conceptions of space when represented as discourse, or its performance within Herodotus' text. Hailing from the margins of the Greek world, composing his enquiry on the cusp of the shift from orality to literacy, and recording rival accounts from different peoples and individuals, Herodotus offers an excellent opportunity to catalogue, compare and analyse ancient Greek attitudes towards space. Indeed, not only Greek attitudes: Herodotus also represents the views of other peoples, notably those of the Persians as they expand their empire westwards. In this respect, the understanding of space in the binary terms of Greek versus barbarian, with other lands presenting a "mirror" of Greece (Hartog 1988), requires overhauling. Thus, reading space in Herodotus allows us to test the recent paradigm shift away from an 'East-West' conception of the ancient world in favour of locating ancient Greece in a Mediterranean-centred network (Horden and Purcell 2000).
The project also utilises, and seeks to nuance, contemporary trends in spatial theory. Given the prevalence of maps in our own culture, we tend to conceive of space in a two-dimensional, abstract fashion, replacing the "discontinuous patchy space of practical paths by the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry" (Harvey 1985, 253). Yet geographers argue that such 'taxonomic' forms of spatial representation – which have come to dominate understandings of space since the Enlightenment (Gurevich 1985) – have restricted our understanding of space, 'flattening out' multiplicity and multi-directionality (Fabian 1983). Until well into the fifth century BC, there were, however, very few texts and little prose literature to speak of (Thomas 1992); there were even fewer maps. Herodotus, then, stands as important testimony for the different ways in which space may be conceived of and represented, particularly because his keenness to record the views of historical agents produces a series of micro-narratives that potentially destabilise any one over-arching conception of space. Indeed, by representing space partly through the eyes of his historical agents as he travels around the Mediterranean, Herodotus offers important new stimuli for our own explorations into space as structured by human experience (Tuan 1978) or by flow (Rodowick 1997).
HESTIA intends to rely on the latest geo-referencing techniques in the e-resource Classics community, while contributing to their efforts to disseminate the latest research to a broader audience. The importance of space and time, and their representation, has emerged as a key area in the so-called 'arts and humanities e-science' agenda, co-ordinated by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre at King's College, London. The 'mashupping' technique, pioneered by the Pleiades project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill offers a methodology and potential collaboration for the digitalisation of spatial data in Herodotus.