2025 William Ritchie Lecture- Radical Chorality: Herodotus’ Scythian Swarms

'Radical Chorality: Herodotus’ Scythian Swarms'

Professor Leslie Kurke | University of California, Berkeley

Wednesday, May 28 | 5:30pm doors for a 5:45pm start

This talk is part of a larger project considering the different ways the chorus could be used as an image or model for other corporate institutions in ancient Greek prose texts of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE—simultaneously capable of modeling both hierarchy and radical equality. I will focus specifically on Herodotus’ narrative of the Persian King Darius’ invasion of Scythia in Book 4. Scholars have detected significant contradictions between Herodotus’ geography and ethnography of Scythia and the campaign narrative proper. Not only does Herodotus’ campaign narrative contradict his own earlier account of Scythian geography; it also progressively represents the Scythians as a leaderless swarm, in contrast to the focus of much of the Scythian ethnography on the king as central to their social and political organization. 

Following François Hartog, I would contend that the peculiarities of the campaign narrative derive partly from Herodotus’ representation of them as quintessential nomads and of nomadism as a deliberate strategy. And yet, Herodotus’ portrayal of the Scythians as a leaderless but unified corporate body and effective political force is unique within a tradition of political theorizing that includes Thucydides and Aristotle’s Politics. I will argue that, in order for Herodotus to imagine the Scythians as a pre-civic multitude acting in concert, he turns them into an Old Comic chorus, a “democratic swarm” as Page duBois has described it.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Leslie Kurke has spent much of her research life working on ancient Greek literature and cultural history-especially archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus, the ideology of form, and various interactions of word and world, literature and its “others” (the economics of literature, poetry and/as ritualization, text and popular culture, the dialectic of performed song and place/monuments). She is currently completing a book, co-authored with Richard Neer, entitled Pindar’s Sites: Song and Space in Classical Greece.

She has taught at UC Berkeley in Classics and Comparative Literature since 1990, and has also taught as a visitor at Princeton University, Wellesley College, and the University of Chicago. Her teaching in two departments ranges across much of archaic and classical Greek literature, gender and sexuality in Greek and Victorian cultures, literary theory, Elvis, detective fiction, and psychoanalysis.



Images: courtesy of Leslie Kurke