01. Harrison, Herodotus' Conception Foreign Languages 1-45



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1998.01HarrisonHerodotusConceptionForeignLanguages145

 
might mean something 
more 
than ‘name’, but it is hard to see how it 
can mean anything less: ‘if Herodotus means to tell us that the Pelasgians 
derived from Egypt everything about the gods 
except 
their names, he is delib-
erately emphasising the most misleading of possible terms’.

Linforth’s solu-
tion of a ‘technical sense’ of the word 
οὔνοµα
also has the effect of making a 
nonsense of a number of nearby passages. In his account of the Pelasgians’ 
discovery of the names of the gods, Herodotus says that they had ‘not yet 
heard’ the names (
οὐ γὰρ ἀκηκόεσάν κω

..). Before they heard the names 
of the gods, the Pelasgians simply called the gods ‘
θεοί
’. If we were to assume 
that the Pelasgians merely called them the Pelasgian for 
θεοί

Herodotus’ 
etymology of the term (unless he were to assume that the Pelasgian term for 
θεοί
 
somehow had a parallel etymology?) would be difficult to explain.

It is 

See esp. Linforth, op. cit. (n. ) - (foreshadowed by Linforth at 
UCPClPh 
 
() , and restated in his ‘Greek and Egyptian Gods (Herodotus II. and )’, 
CPh 
 () -), Rudhardt, op. cit. (n. ) -, W. Burkert, op. cit. (n. ). 

See esp. R. Lattimore, ‘Herodotus and the names of the Egyptian Gods’, 
CPh 
 
() - and Lloyd II.-, but also Diels, op. cit. (n. ) , Meyer, op. cit. (n. ) 
. A full discussion of the arguments will form an appendix to Harrison (n. ). 

Lattimore, op. cit. (n. ) -. 

Similar difficulties arise in trying to reconcile Linforth’s theory with Herodotus’ dis-
cussion of the name of Heracles (..-): see Harrison (n. ). 


 
Thomas Harrison 
also possible to make out a very good case that, at least in the case of some 
gods, Herodotus really does believe that the Greek names derived from 
Egypt. The case is especially strong in the cases of Dionysus and of Heracles 
where Herodotus offers precise contexts for the introduction of their cults 
from Egypt to Greece (.-, ); in both cases, interestingly in the light of 
his argument that the Greek alphabet derived from the Phoenicians, the 
middlemen in the introduction of these cults are Phoenician.

We are still left with the original contradiction, however. How can He-
rodotus believe both that the name ‘Dionysus’ derived from Egypt, and that 
Dionysus is the Greek name for Osiris (..)? Richmond Lattimore sug-
gested that the solution lay in the fact that gods can have more than one 
name. However, Herodotus’ manner of making equations suggests a transla-
tion of equivalent names, not that the Egyptians or Scythians have, as it 
were, another name tucked away. His translations of gods’ names are per-
formed in precisely the same way as his translations of more humdrum 
pieces of vocabulary, for example his observation that 
πίροµις
is ‘in the 
Greek language 
καλὸς κἀγαθός
’ (..). (Are we to assume in these cases 
that the Egyptians in fact used the term 
καλὸς κἀγαθός
alongside 
πίροµις
, or 
that they were all bilingual?) For a brief moment, I fantasized recently that 
another, similarly bold, solution might exist. If the names of the Egyptian 
gods, for example Horus ‘the lofty one’, were in fact taboo names,

might 
Herodotus have thought that the Greeks’ names were the real, unmention-
able, Egyptian names? However, we should, I think, resist solutions which 
presume that Herodotus knew much more than he wanted to disclose. He-
rodotus repeatedly mentions the name of Osiris despite a considerable dis-
play of reluctance to do precisely that: surely, then, he would at least have 
mentioned the existence of other names, had he known them.

Ultimately perhaps we should not struggle too officiously to make He-
rodotus consistent. There are, however, some ways of softening, or helping 
to understand, the contradiction: and these lie in his understanding of the 
nature of language. To begin with, despite the impression of his discussion 
of the Pelasgians that the Greek language was born fully-fledged, and de-
spite the success of the surviving Pelasgians in ‘guarding’ their original lan-
guage, Herodotus knows that language changes. This is implicit, of course, 
in the idea of the Pelasgians’ preservation of their language. It is also evident 

See Harrison (n. ). 

See, e.g., S. Morenz, 

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