I really enjoyed exploring Herodotus and Lucian in this course. I found it really fun to compare the writing styles of these two authors. When we first started reading Herodotus, I hated reading Ionic, and I found his style somewhat off-putting. However, it grew on me over time, and I found myself struggling a lot more than I anticipated when we switched to reading Lucian, even though I am generally more comfortable reading Attic. As we got further into reading True History, I started to notice more and more similarities between the ways Lucian and Herodotus chose to tell their stories. Although they wrote in different dialects and had vastly different stories, I became increasingly aware of the similarities between them, and it started to feel almost like I was reading two books in the same series.
I thought that the way both authors treated travel was very interesting. Most modern stories place a lot of emphasis on the journey from one destination to another and how it contributes to one’s development. Herodotus and Lucian, on the other hand, give extensive details about the preparations for travel and what happens at their characters’ destinations. However, the journey itself is often relegated to a sentence or two, if that. I’m not sure whether this style comes from the times that these works were written in or whether it is due to the ‘historical’ nature of the works.
While modern literature often uses character development to drive the story, it seems that Lucian in particular uses the events that occur to move the story along. Despite True History being written in the first person, the narrator feels almost as if he is not a part of his own story; almost everything is told in a matter-of-fact way, and Lucian rarely inputs his own thoughts other than to express the outrageousness of situation. I was surprised that, even though it was written in the third person, Herodotus’ telling of Croesus’ story felt more personal than the tale in True History due to the increased expression of emotion by the characters.
This makes me wonder whether the differences in the expressiveness of the characters comes from the different writing styles of the two authors or whether it is used to help reinforce the truth, or lack thereof, in these works. In the modern day, many marketing campaigns attempt to invoke emotion to help sell their products when they know that the truth is not convincing enough. Is it possible that Herodotus is using Croesus’ emotions in the same way? In one of the first classes where we worked with Herodotus, we explored the ways in which he embellishes the truth to push his ideals forward, and I wonder whether his use of emotion in his Histories was a way to both sell his point and hide places where he stretched the truth. Lucian, on the other hand, admitted to writing pure fiction in the beginning of his work, and he repeatedly drew the reader’s attention to the impossibility of his story. Even though he wrote with a very similar style to Herodotus and included references and allusions to real issues and events, he had no reason to try to convince readers that his words were truthful, which also gave him a way to comment on the state of the world in an environment where he could not safely speak freely.
