Table of Contents

1: The Histories, Plutarch, and reader response
2: The Homeric background
3: Constructions of motives and the historian's persona
4: Problematized motivation in the Samian and Persian logoi (Book III)
5: For better, for worse . . .: motivation in the Athenian logoi (Books I and VI)
6: `For freedom's sake . . .': motivation in the Ionian Revolt (Books V-VI)
7: To medize or not to medize . . .: compulsion and negative motives (Books VII-IX)
8: Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII-IX)
9: Themistocles: constructions of motivation (Books VII-IX)
Epilogue

About the Author

Emily Baragwanath is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Reviews

`Review from previous edition Emily Baragwanath's study of motivation in Herodotus provides a reading of the text that is attentive to detail and subtle, but never loses a sense of empirically plausible processes of composition and reception.'
Malcolm Heath, Greece and Rome
`provocative, stimulating, dense, and often brilliant monograph... it deals in a highly original and illuminating way with the relationship between ascriptions of motive and the larger narrative strategies of the Histories.'
Michael A. Flower, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
`a subtle, meticulous, and very original study.'
Carolyn Dewald, Hermathena