Philip S. Peek

The International Society for the Study of Narrative

Pamplona, Spain
30 May - 1 June 2019

Herodotus’ Margins

The neuroplastic brain evolved in ambulatory beings who ranged around the world, always having to explore unknown territories. In other words, the brain evolved to learn (Doidge, Brain’s Way of Healing, 2015).

In the Brain’s Way of Healing Dr. Norman Doidge writes that central vision blinds one to the margins where danger and opportunity lie. The margins play a critical role to the health and plasticity of our brains. Likewise Herodotus gives them a central, though disputed, role in the western world’s first attempt at offering a historical account focused on the time period of 560-479/78 B.C.E., when the Greeks found themselves at odds with barbarians and eventually with a foreign empire ruling some 40% of the world’s population.

Writing in about 450 BCE, using a mixed Ionic dialect, and born on the near margins of Greece in a land inhabited by Dorian and Carian races, Herodotus, a Greek, wrote a prose account that researched why the Greeks and barbarians fought and also researched the lands and people living on the margins far and farther from his own city of Halikarnassos and country, Hellas. These lands, inhabited by the other, captivated the curious and capacious intellect of a thinker born to explore the unknown. In travelling and obtaining and verifying the many data points of what was to become his life’s work, the Histories or Researches, Ηerodotus sought information that challenged his audiences’ beliefs and perceptions, asking them to think and perceive in unfamiliar ways. His emphasis on the margins gave context and insight to his main narrative thread, the why of the fighting between barbarian and Greek. This peripheral focus did not lead him to the truth but rather to the creation of a dialectic designed to destabilize the neat and tidy mindset of his contemporary audience.