Thomas Harrison - Interpreting Herodotus

This volume originated in a conference, The Past in the Present: Interpreting Herodotus after Charles W. Fornara, held at Columbia University in September 2013. For support during the original conference, and in the conversion of papers to print, we are indebted to a number of individuals and institutions. For financial support, we are grateful to (at Columbia) the Stanwood Cockey Lodge Fund of the Department of Classics, the University Seminar in Classical Civilization, the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, and (at Liverpool) the John Percival Postgate Trust. For practical support and guidance, we thank William Harris, Gerry Visco, Selina Rivera, Joseph Keckler, Francesco De Angelis, Evan Jewell, Simone Oppen, Anna Conser, and especially Matthias Hanses and Max Leventhal. For their professionalism in seeing the book through production, we are grateful to Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, Tom Perridge, Tim Beck, and Gayathri Manoharan for OUP.

Finally, we should like to record our thanks to all those who were present at the original conference but whose contributions to the volume may not be immediately apparent. Above all, thanks are due to Charles Fornara himselfgraciously forbearing throughout, even as his Essay was picked apart as well as acclaimedand to our two invited respondents, John Marincola and John Moles. John Moles declined an invitation to speak at the conference on the basis that he had nothing to say. The reality, as we had safely predicted, was otherwise. References to Moles litter this volume perhaps more than any other works, bar Fornaras Essay itself; though Herodotus was just one author of very many on which John published, his work on the Histories is fundamental to the themes of this volume. Together with all the contributors to this volume, we join in recording our debt to John as a model of humane scholarship, and in mourning his untimely death.