The ancient historian’s privileged discursive position within the text depends upon the creation of a circuit of consent with the audience, one that establishes the narrator’s power and authority in detailing the unfolding of past events, their causes, and the agents animating them. The contract between the narrator and audience is brought about by the careful curation of the historian’s agency in and out of the process of textual production. In antiquity, the stakes for this curation were even higher than in modernity because of the widespread association of literary production with individual character. The struggle for authority was uniquely pressing for Greek and Roman historians, as their texts could not call upon the inspiration of the Muse as the poets could. As a result, the self-positioning of the historian was highly self-aware and charged with meaning, constructed in relation to the authority of the poets, but with a degree of distancing from these figures and their Muse in the development of a new mode of narrative.

‘At the very beginning of non-contemporary history there was myth.’1 Thus wrote John Marincola, in a much-cited section of Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography devoted to history and myth or, more precisely, the ways in which historians established authority by their exclusion, and occasional inclusion, of myth. One of the attractions of Marincola’s discussion is that he stresses not just the reaction against the ‘mythical’ that was one of the hallmarks of the historiographic tradition at least from Thucydides onwards, but also the continuing importance of myth for writers such as Diodorus Siculus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. ‘The charms of myth, like those of the Sirens’, he concludes, ‘were simply too great to resist.’2

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the role played by ethnography in perceptions of the opposition between Herodotus and Thucydides and of the development of Greek historiography. From a vast range of possible evidence, I have selected a number of writers, some influential in their own right, some simply representative of their age. I will focus in turn on the place of ethnography in narratives of the development of historiography, in views of Herodotus’s own work and in comparisons between Herodotus and Thucydides. This reception history will show how views of the ancient development of the genre of historiography were influenced by new conceptions of history in the modern world, in particular by the new forms of historicism that develop over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Besides its inherent intellectual interest, the story unfolded here is important for its continued influence on modern scholarship. In the context of this volume, it provides a firm basis for understanding the instances of Herodotean reception which are explored in subsequent chapters. From the chapter as a whole it will emerge not only that histories of historiography, as much as any other form of historical writing, are moulded by the concerns of the historian’s present but also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, that ethnography, a practice often criticized as a vehicle of demarcation and exclusion, has itself become a target of exclusionary rhetoric in modern accounts of historiography.