Published
- American Journal of Philology 149: 349-80.
This paper argues that Cambyses’ treatment of Psammenitus in Book 3 of Herodotus’ Histories constitutes the adaptation of a punishment recorded in the Old Persian text of the Bisotun inscription. By outlining a typology for the practice, the article demonstrates the primacy of a Persian source, and proposes a series of specific, programmatically significant alterations made by Herodotus in the construction of the punishment. The resulting episode represents a complex engagement with questions arising from the Persian invasion of Egypt both in the Histories and in the wider historical record concerning Cambyses’ legitimacy as Egyptian ruler.
Forthcoming
“Perseid Wars and Notional Nostos in Herodotus’ Histories”
in Time, Tense and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature, E. Hall and C. Bloomfield (eds.). Oxford: Oxford UP.
This chapter establishes Xerxes’ westward travel in Herodotus’ Histories as a performative manipulation of time. Engaging a genealogical narrative that recasts the Persians as “Perseids,” descendants of the Argive hero, Xerxes frames his invasion of Greece as a grand loop resolving ancestral displacement by physical return (nostos). The eventual destination is a prehistoric past: Xerxes promises a Persian dominion coterminous with the sky (7.8), and thus the enactment of a cosmic order that is Hesiodic in its conception of a terrestrial plane contained and touched by the heavens alone. I demonstrate a consequent generic discourse of Persian invasion rhetoric in which topography, time, and Hellenic mythology are inextricably linked.
“Taming the Lion/Feeding the Beast: Homeric Fable and the Ethics of Epic”
in Et in cothurnis prodit Aesopus nouis: On the interaction between ancient fable and literary genres, U. Gärtner and L. Spielhofer (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter.
This chapter argues that Apollo’s comparison of Achilles to a lion in search of a feast at Iliad 24.39-45 constitutes a compressed fable narrative, which functions as an embedded ethical program within the epic. Previous scholarship has typically overlooked these lines or simply categorized them alongside the forty-one other similes involving lions in the Iliad, even as there has been renewed interest in Homeric metaphor more broadly. This classification is informed by a conception of generic hierarchy that relegates the beast fable to an inferior status relative to epic and accordingly reads animal content in Homer as belonging exclusively to simile. My paper looks beyond these limitations both to resolve the paradoxical relationship of beast and feast and to clarify the moral encoding of Apollo’s discourse. By establishing a complex engagement with the didactic fable, I locate not only an intergeneric dialogue with unique implications for our understanding of Homeric speech, but also a forceful glance back to the grisly feast (and notorious crux) of the poem’s opening.