How The Histories drew on The Odyssey
A documented line of influence: Herodotus demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Odyssey
Homer · c. 725 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Histories
Herodotus · c. 430 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
7/10
On The Histories’s page
- The Histories runs on Homer — Herodotus fuses the Odyssey's travel-narrative with the Iliad's warfare into a new thing: inquiry as voyage
- His ethnographic digressions, the long detours into Egypt and Scythia, are Odyssean wandering turned into method
- Read the Odyssey first and you'll hear why antiquity called him 'most Homeric' — he names Homer, echoes him, and even cites the poem as evidence in his Helen-in-Egypt argument
On The Odyssey’s page
- Herodotus is the most Homeric of the historians — antiquity said so (Longinus, Dionysius), and he names and echoes Homer throughout
- The Odyssey's wandering-and-inquiry mode — a man crossing strange lands, gathering what he sees — becomes the template for Herodotus's ethnographic digressions
- He even argues with Homer: in his Helen-in-Egypt investigation, he marshals lines from the Odyssey as documentary evidence