Interpreting animals in Herodotus: A case study in the poetics of Historie

Although Herodotus includes natural investigation as a topic in his Histories, the extent to which his natural research informs his historical account as a whole is perplexing. One difficulty lies in the work's composition, in that different subjects are often presented in different narrative modes---what we traditionally think of as narrative and description. Studying animals in the Histories allows us to explore Herodotus' presentation of a natural subject throughout his work against the backdrop of developments in natural philosophy and medicine and to evaluate how a topic with a tradition in poetry functions in a work whose narrator demonstrates investigative practices consistent with contemporary examples of natural inquiry.;In this dissertation, I examine animals in Herodotus' Histories by organizing animal references into the categories of metaphors, geographic indicators, and natural resources, and by analyzing their treatment in these categories from the perspectives of the narrator and others represented in the text (characters, reports, oracles, etc). I have explored in each case how an animal and its behavior is presented, what values it embodies, and how the animal reference interacts with its immediate setting, as well as with animal references elsewhere in the text. In terms of discourse and presentation, Herodotus as narrator of the Histories sets himself apart from reported material, such as characters' statements and local accounts, when he includes animals in his work, and he explores differences among animal species in the same way that he does human cultural differences. In structuring his narrative, however, Herodotus; uses animals in ways that point to their poetic heritage, employing animal motifs and images to mirror and prefigure events in the human sphere.