Mythistory of the Persian Debate (Herodotus, III, 80-82)

Abstract

A predominant thesis is that the Persian debate speaks Greek and expresses the historical reality of the polis according to the mental horizon of the Hellenic logos. However, the Herodotean logos has raised perplexities that call for a better understanding of the text. These perplexities point at the existence of indefinite issues, ambiguities and even inconsistencies, which the critics attempt to solve by means of (un)certain analytic makeshifts. Considering that the antithetical narrative development that is rhetorically constructed by the Debate works with oppositions of the political forms according to an argumentative strategy of cumulative significations, this article has the proposal of bringing its conceptual semantics closer to a mythos-based narrative. Under this light, in which the Debate is seen through the mythical semantics, it is proposed that the hermeneutics of the Herodotean text presupposes the complementary duality of a semantic game: the affirmation of the language’s dominant logos, in which it finds its expression, would conceal the memory of the myth-language, imperceptibly suppressed, as a recessive memory.