The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus by Carolyn Dewald, John Marincola

174 PHOENIX There is a Glossary (348-352) and a Concordance of name spellings (e.g., "Greek / variant forms ... Name in this volume"), which uses the Latin alphabet. A useful addition tothis Concordancewould be a list of individualsincludedbyBerve andomittedby Heckel, and vice versa. The bibliography(359-374) iswide ranging,but not complete. There are sixteenstemmata(376-389), whichwould be improved by includingsome indication of date. On occasion, in the interests of simplification and clarity, they assert as certain that which the main entries suggest as "probable." For example, in Stemma XIII (288) Tauron is clearly indicated as the brother of Philip and Harpalus, but in the entries for Harpalus (129) and Philip (5,p. 212) thisis "probably"therelationship, and for Tauron (260) "apparently." A frequent failing in the book is inadequate or missing cross-references, some ofwhich are serious. For example, in discussing M50, a "common Macedonian soldier who ... seated himself on Alexanders chair" (282), Heckel points out how similar the story of M50 is to that of "Dionysius ofMesene, the 'Substitute King "; the entry on Dionysius, however, does not mention M50. Another more common, less serious but nevertheless irritating, problem occurs when the reader is directed, for example, to "Philip," with no note ofwhich of the sixteen entries ismeant. Some of these problems probably reflect the compilation of the entries over a number of years. This may also account for some changes in emphasis or even in apparent fact. For example, in the entry forAda of Halicarnassus (3), we are told that Pixodarus (her brother-in-law) had died, "leaving Orontopates (his son-in-law ...) in charge of Caria." But in the entry for Pixodarus himself (223), we learn that after he died, "Darius (my italics) had entrusted the rule of Caria to Orontopates." Despite these problems, I found the book useful, and a pleasure to read. Heckel says in the preface that his purpose is to "[do] something to make the work of others ... easier and more enjoyable" (viii). He has certainly achieved that purpose. Langara College Gwyneth Lewis The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Edited by Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xv, 378, 5 maps. "Herodotus' Histories is a work of startling originality." So begins the contribu tion by Egbert Bakker, and this statement neatly encapsulates the leitmotiv of this volume, which offers an unapologetically literary approach to Herodotus, particularly in view of the recent direction of modern scholarship. While the papers do cover the diversity of topics that one would naturally expect in a volume devoted toHerodotus, their common recognition of the complexity and originality of his narrative offers an internal consistency not always found in the proliferation of "companions" now on the market. The volume opens with an introduction by the editors, consisting in large part of a succinct survey (with appropriate recognition of the fundamental RE article of Felix Jacoby) of various trends of twentieth-century Herodotean scholarship: the so-called compositional question (influenced by current debates about the Homeric poems), the relationship between Herodotus and Athens, Herodotus' reliability, and the influence of methodologies imported from other disciplines. All in all, the introduction provides a useful focus for the twenty richly varied articles which follow. The first two papers (groupings here and henceforth identified by me, not the editors) examine the relationship between Herodotus and his predecessors, both poetic (John BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 175 Marincola) and prose (Robert Fowler). Both correctly emphasize Herodotus' debt to his predecessors, especially Homer, an insight unexpectedly confirmed by the recent discovery of an inscription inHerodotus' native Halicarnassus lauding him as "the prose Homer," tellingly mentioned in passing by a good number of the contributors to this volume. Both papers equally correctly emphasize the uniqueness ofHerodotus' grandiose and pioneering achievement. The next two papers, which discuss Herodotus in light of his intellectual milieu, come to similar conclusions. Jasper Griffin demonstrates that while parallels certainly exist between Herodotus and tragedy, the historian's canvas ismuch larger and more complex. Rosalind Thomas examines the influence upon Herodotus of contemporary (or near contemporary) natural philosophers, medical writers, and sophists, who offered him a theoretical and conceptual framework for his (much larger-scale) narrative, although he maintained

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