HECATAEUS OF ABDERA : HYPERBOREANS, EGYPT, AND THE INTERPRETATIO GRAECA
1998; Franz Steiner Verlag; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2365-3108
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Architectural Studies
ResumoIn examining the work of a historian whose subject is the history of a culture not his own, questions inevitably arise concerning the limitations inherent to his enterprise. How, for instance, can a Greek writer of the Hellenistic period acquire and transmit genuine non-Greek information without intentionally or unintentionally shaping it in such a way as to 'erase' or irretrievably deform it? Most scholars seem to employ a model of interaction between Greek and non-Greek that is essentially unidirectional: although the Hellenistic historian often manages to transmit a not insignificant amount of 'local/barbarian' knowledge to his putative Greek audience, the manner of presentation and the framework of interpretation is necessarily Greek, rendering the entire production fundamentally Greek in outlook. In the following paper I would like to complicate this view by looking at the work of one such Greek historian/ ethnographer, Hecataeus of Abdera. I will focus in particular on Hecataeus as a writer of utopias. At first glance I think it is fair to say that with utopias we encounter an articulation of ideals and hopes that is specific to the culture from which the author comes; there may well be borrowings from other cultures that help with the fashioning of certain ideas, but the chief and determining concern is with the reconstruction or even neutralization of the world that the utopian writer inhabits. 1 Hence, when Hecataeus attempts the description of an emphatically Greek ideal polity, it would seem a place where we would want to rule out the possibility that a more than superficial non-Greek orientation is present in his work; and yet, I believe that it is precisely in this area where a case can be made that Hecataeus relied heavily on a non-Greek culture to help with the mobilization of his utopian aims. Hecataeus (floruit end of 4th BC) is a figure of extraordinary importance for the study of Greek and non-Greek in the Hellenistic period. Testimonia consider him a 'philosopher who was also called in addition a critical grammarian' (Tptkoo(po; og e Knelckn iai KpXtTto; ypaggaatic6q, FGrHist 264 T 1).2
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