The Dark Age of Herodotus: Shards of a Fugitive History in Early Medieval Europe

The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485-425 BCE), one of the earliest known works of historiography in the Western tradition, were not read during the European Middle Ages. Writing in the Ionic dialect of Greek, Herodotus set out to explain why the Persian Empire went to war with the city-states of Greece in the early fifth century BCE. This article offers a case study of the reception history of the Herodotean echo preserved in Peter the Venerable's treatise against the Petrobrusians. After examining the ambivalent reputation of Herodotus's Histories among Greek and Roman readers, this study turns to the abbot of Cluny and works to unspool his tale of the vengeance of King Cyrus back through history from the 12th century to its sources in Roman Antiquity. The reception history of Herodotus, I argue here, is the history of the trajectory of these literary shards, how the whims and designs of late antique authors of historical epitomes and compendia carried them into the Latin Middle Ages, and how medieval readers redeemed them for purposes far removed from their ancient source.