Agamemnon in Herodotus and Thucydides: Exploring the historical uses of a mythological paradigm
This paper explores the use of the myth of Agamemnon in Herodotus and Thucydides. I argue that the deployment of Agamemnon in their works is shaped by, and sheds additional light on, the historians’ attitude toward myth (and its use in rhetoric), their narrative aims and historical outlook. Herodotus’ readiness to embrace myth in both narrative and speeches, his representation of complex motivation, his description of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians, and his panhellenic outlook, influence the function of Agamemnon: as king of Sparta and the leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War, he reflects the idealistic and pragmatic motivation of the Spartans in the context of the Persian Wars. Agamemnon’s function in Thucydides is different since it is affected by the general avoidance of mythological argument – especially in rhetoric – and its merely relative significance, the description of a war between the Greeks, Thucydides’ pragmatism, and his writing for posterity: aptly replaced by Sparta’s Dorianism in the context of the war against Athens, Agamemnon becomes a contemporary tyrant king who may represent any city or individual yearning for power and empire.
Thucydides And Myth: A Complex Relation To Past And Present
Thucydides’ no-fiction contract with his readers is the strictest among prose writers down to his times (cf. Morgan 2011, 559). He intends his history to be a “possession for ever” for those who want to know the past and deliberate about the future. But in order for a report of world events to be useful, it needs to be vetted for accuracy {to saphes) and must exclude the muthodes—that is to say, the mythical and fabulistic in a broad sense (1.22.2-4).* Thucydides will narrate a war that occurred during his own lifetime, for the painstaking research of which he can count on himself as a participant and on the inter­ rogation of others who witnessed both events and speeches (1.22.1-2). Thucydides, however, paves the way for his statement of this methodological pro­ gram with a survey starting from a remote past, accessible through poetic traditions that represent the most disheartening repository of whatever is distorted, unverified, exceedingly magnified, embroidered, or merely entertaining—in a word, muthodes. One of the reasons for undertaking this survey is no doubt to demonstrate that it can­ not be done in a satisfactory way (1.13; 20.1; 21.1) and to discredit previous attempts. But the formal manner in which Thucydides attaches the excursus to his initial statement of purpose gives a better clue: he needs to de-provincialize his war. The conflict between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians was the greatest in history, he announces (1.1). This claim should be taken seriously, in spite of the fact that people always claim that the war they personally experienced was greatest, at least until they forget, at which point they revert to the celebration of past deeds (1.21.2). Thucydides’ “Archaeology”—as we conventionally call it^—intends to demonstrate that in fact things were smaller in the past: from rude and brutish beginnings, societies grow to be more prosperous and
Phase diagram and magnetic properties of the diluted fcc system NipMg1-pO.
Starting from Ni and Mg nitrates, about 20 samples of ${\mathrm{Ni}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Mg}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$O samples (with 0.06\ensuremath{\le}p\ensuremath{\le}0.86) were prepared and x-ray-diffraction studies showed the samples to have the NaCl structure with the lattice constant fitting the expression a(p)=4.2115-0.0340p \AA{}. Temperature-dependent magnetic-susceptibility (\ensuremath{\chi}) studies of the samples were carried out between 1.8 and 600 K using a superconducting-quantum-interference-device magnetometer and N\'eel temperatures ${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{N}}$'s were determined from the peak in \ensuremath{\partial}(\ensuremath{\chi}T)/\ensuremath{\partial}T. The variation of t=${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{N}}$(p)/${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{N}}$(1) vs p is compared with that of ${\mathrm{Co}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Mg}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$O. For both systems, the variations for pg0.31 are found to fit the predicted values for a simple-cubic Heisenberg antiferromagnet and a theoretical basis for this anomalous result is advanced. The experimental percolation threshold ${\mathit{p}}_{\mathit{c}}$=0.15\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.01 and for ${\mathit{p}}_{\mathit{c}}$p0.31, \ensuremath{\chi} below ${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{N}}$ shows irreversible behavior for the zero-field-cooled and field-cooled cases, suggestive of spin-glass-like behavior also observed in other diluted fcc antiferromagnets, such as ${\mathrm{Co}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Mg}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$O and ${\mathrm{Eu}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Sr}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$Te. It is suggested that the differences in the t-vs-p variations for p0.31 in ${\mathrm{Ni}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Mg}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$O, ${\mathrm{Co}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Mg}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$O, and ${\mathrm{Eu}}_{\mathit{p}}$${\mathrm{Sr}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{p}}$Te may be related to the differences in the ratio of the next-nearest-neighbor to nearest-neighbor exchange constants in these systems.