Themistocles as a trickster in Herodotus

Abstract

Herodotus’ Histories is the first extant work documenting the lives of the politicians who took part in historical events. Although Herodotus’ historiosophical concept is mainly religious, it draws the attention to the importance of the individual within history; therefore, most of the time it is exactly the individual that determines a certain end of events. The main source of information on wars and, especially, on the Greek politicians who took part in them, for Herodotus, was the oral tradition, which was sometimes authentic, but mostly it had already been perceived as a legend. I am going to show that in his Themistoclean logos Herodotus employs the poetics of oral tradition, and the character of Themistocles in Herodotus bears the traits of an archetypal cultural hero, usually called the trickster. [excerpt]