Sites of Memory, Strategies of Power: Herodotus and the Byzantine Memoryscape

Herodotus’ Histories have long shaped the imagination of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds. From poetry and rhetoric to history and oratory, countless texts echo and recast Herodotean episodes to meet shifting rhetorical, political, and ideological needs. Yet one dimension of his enduring influence remains less explored: the ways in which his narratives helped construct Byzantine landscapes and identities. Drawing on the notion of lieux de mémoire, I first show how Byzantine elites preserved celebrated ancient sites of memory, such as Apobathra, where Xerxes allegedly crossed into Greece. More strikingly, they also reinterpreted their own urban memoryscapes through Herodotus’ lens. For example, they arguably discovered in the Hippodrome’s serpent column Delphi’s tripod commemorating the Persian Wars, creating a symbol of Constantinople’s programmatic self-fashioning as a new Athens and Rome, a city of victory and empire. This logic extended beyond monuments to political ritual. When the Seljuk sultan Kılıç Arslan II visited Manuel I Komnenos in 1162, I argue that planners deliberately avoided the direct Roman roads and instead ferried the sultan across the Hellespont. The court orator, Euthymios Tornikes, seized the moment to ask whether the sultan feared the strait would avenge his ancestors’ hybris. Here, Byzantines recast a state visit as a conscious reversal of history: a “new Xerxes” crossed Greek waters not in aggression but in submission, legitimating Byzantine authority. Such examples reveal that Herodotus’ legacy in Byzantium was not confined to textual imitation. His Histories could inspire a performative mimesis enacted in the very fabric of the city and in the choreography of diplomacy. Through these appropriations, Byzantines fashioned themselves as heirs to the Greeks who triumphed over Asia’s tyrannical kings, recasting the past as a resource for their present.