Reflexive Ethnography and a Herodotean locus amoenus

Jonathan T. Chicken (Indiana University)

The correlation of the eschatiai, the outer reaches of the world, with concepts of lush fertility in Greek literature has been ably documented by James Romm in The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought.  Likewise, these edges, far away from the civilized centers of the world, are populated largely by barbarians of various types, who are portrayed in Herodotus with varying degrees of connotation, including the range of "hard" and "soft" types.   As early as the Odyssey we may see something of this in the archetypal locus amoenus in the depiction of the island of Polyphemus (identified with Sicily only much later than the poem): "a fertile (lacheia) island" (IX.116), which "would bear everything in season (pheroi de ken hōria panta, IX.131), with moist meadows that might produce vines and plowland (IX.132-134).  The island is a paradise of natural resources, but alas inhabited by a "lawless, arrogant race" (huperphialōn athemistōn, IX.106). 

We may expect to see something similar in Herodotus regarding foreigners and the margins of the world. Indeed, we do find this trope among the semi-mythical Ethiopians, when Cambyses sends his spies to seek out the "Table of the Sun," (3.18) though this example of miraculous food-generation from the earth turns out, in Herodotus' estimation, to be from human agency, and so we are left with something less.  The Egyptian books are full of mentions of the fertility of the Nile's soil, since the Egyptians who live along the river "harvest a crop with less labor than any people in the world" (3.14, tr. David Grene); indeed, the land waters itself.  In Babylon, the watering must come from men, but even here, the land around Nineveh "is so fertile that it yields on the average two hundred fold, and at its best three hundredfold" (1.193, tr. Grene), and the "blades of wheat and barley are easily three inches wide" (ibid). 

Explicitly, Herodotus mentions that Greece, while it does not share the wild climates and fertility of the eschatiai, not the best of climates, has the best mixture of them all (3.106); it seems well established that the edges of the world seem to be the places where one finds the most fertile of lands. 

But what then are we to make of Herodotus' statement that the Ionians "have founded cities in the most beautiful setting of climate and season (tou men ouranou kai tōn hōreōn) of all mankind that I know" (1.142, tr. Grene)?  Perhaps more puzzling in this context, Mardonius claims that Greece must be punished for Marathon, not simply because of vengeance, but also because "Europe was a very fair land and bore every sort of cultivated tree, and was high in its fertility, and it was the Great King alone of all mortals who deserved to own it" (7.5, tr. Grene). 

I propose that we see here an intentional use of the trope of the cultivated, fertile, "foreign" land from the relative perspective of the foreigner.  Rosaria Munson has argued in her Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Works of Herodotus, that Herodotus is willing to make arguments against Greece by adopting "native" focalizers (in particular for the Babylonian logos).  I argue that Herodotus has done something similar here; he has stepped out of his Greek sandals to provide us not only with a foreign perspective, but perhaps an awareness of the fact that the topos of the "distant and fertile land" is in existence elsewhere.  Not only, then, is this a self-reflexive piece of ethnography, it is self-conscious in its awareness of the devices of ethnography.