Epos as Authoritative Speech in Herodotos´ Histories

Abstract

E POS is one of several words used by Herodotos in his Histories to designate human speech. Others include: logos, ph6ne, rhema, rhisis, and mathos. Of these terms, logos is by far the most frequently found in the Histories (447 instances according to Powell's Lexicon to Herodotus) while epos occupies second place with some 81 instances. The other terms are far less frequent than these two, occurring 33 (ph6ne), 6 (rhema), 3 (rhisis), and 2 times (mathos). One can already tell from these figures something of the place that epos occupies in this spectrum: not the term most frequently used, but frequent enough to suggest that it functions as a substitute with narrower focus for the more common term, logos. This is in fact the thesis I will develop in this paper, that epos represents a term which carriers a greater "semantic weight" but which is more restricted in its range.' To use the terms of the Prague school of linguistics, I suggest that epos constitutes the marked member of the pair epos and logos, and designates speech that is somehow special, distinctive, and authoritative as opposed to speech in general. In what follows I will demonstrate that the marked nature of epos resides in its reference to authoritative speech, and, in conclusion, I will show how Herodotos' use of the term represents an interesting departure from the way it is used in Homer. Few have commented on the meaning of epos in Herodotos. When they do so, they tend to focus either on the meaning of epos as verse, or