Herodotus Through Excerpts: Authorial Practices and Readers’ Tastes

The paper will address the presence of Herodotus’ Histories in Greek excerpt collections from Late antiquity to the early Palaiologan period. It will first focus on structured moral encyclopedias like Books 3 and 4 of Stobaeus’ Anthologion (5th century), and the collection commonly known as Ps.-Maximos Homologetes’ Loci communes, in the latter case reflecting on the differences between the redactions of the work, from the 9th to the 12th century, with reference to their context of production and circulation. It will then move to consider personal collections of excerpts featuring Herodotus in the early Palaiologan period, a time for which evidence of scholars’ personal notebooks is more readily available; it will concentrate on collections produced around Constantinople in the first half of the 14th century in the milieu of the ‘school of Planudes’ by Nikephoros Gregoras, Makarios Chrysokephalos, and other anonymous readers whose work ended up in codex Neap. II C 32 (around 1330) and in Darmstadt 2773. These collections will be compared with marks of attention and marginalia in contemporary direct manuscript witnesses of Herodotus’ work. The overall objective of the enquiry is to identify collectors’ criteria and techniques of selection, and to shed light on the evolution of the interest in Herodotus with relation to the availability of complete exemplars of the Histories.