“Herodotus the historian of ancient Greece was a famous first, one-off whose complex work has continued to instruct and delight—and challenge—listeners and readers for some 2500 years. Ian Oliver’s approach to this literary megalith via epideixis—a rhetoric of ceremony, declamation, display and entertainment—is demonstrably and demonstratively fruitful.”

Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge

“In this thought-provoking study, Ian Oliver deploys an audience-based analysis of Herodotus’ major battle narratives to investigate their possible roots as performance texts. A tantalizing dimension of the text’s archaeology, the Histories’ diverse compositional contexts have left traces in the final, unified work in the form of implicit perspectives that recall distinct audiences and temporal moments, and oral rather than written modalities. As well as revealing further dimensions of the Histories’ remarkable multiplicity, Oliver deepens our understanding of Herodotus’ intellectual milieu, shedding important light on his connections with contemporary purveyors of wisdom including the praise poet Pindar, his place between oral and literate culture, and the nature of early Greek oral storytelling.”

Emily Baragwanath, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill