Norms of authorship in ancient Greece: Case studies of Herodotus, Isocrates, and Plato.

摘要

The following question guides this study: Why and to what extent and in what contexts did authorship issues matter during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in ancient Greece? I examined all writings attributed to Herodotus, Isocrates, and Plato; I arbitrated among competing English translations of relevant passages and proposed emendations in others; and I consulted secondary sources. I argue that Herodotus' Histories abounds with authorship issues. Herodotus stipulates for himself an ethical obligation to cite source material, and he makes many allegations of unethical authorial attribution, which encompass verbal and written discourse as well as prose and poetry. I conclude that Herodotus stipulated his own ethical obligation in such a way as to cite himself repeatedly as the ultimate source of the Histories. Isocrates' texts repeatedly describe discursive originality as a virtue and discursive unoriginality as a vice; moreover, Isocrates indicates that audiences expected originality from orators. I argue that for Isocrates originality consists of seizing the opportunity to say something new and better about something significant. I conclude that Isocrates' own obsession with originality coincided with his desires for fame, fortune, and secular immortality. Plato's texts indicate his awareness that authorial attribution was considered an issue and that producing discourse could garner fame and an everlasting name. I argue that Plato challenges this state of affairs in several ways: Socrates emphasizes the importance of what was said instead of who said it, and he repeatedly professes his own lack of originality. Additionally, for Plato knowledge comes about not by learning something new but by recollecting what the soul once knew, so the authorship issues in Herodotus' and Isocrates' texts are irrelevant in Platonic texts. While acknowledging the limitations of a case-study approach, I argue that these texts refute statements asserting that concerns about authorship issues began during the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or the Romantic Period. Conversely, I do not argue that my analyses establish the real beginnings of such concerns. Rather, I provide an example of historical research about authorship issues that does away with a quest for their origins entirely.