TIL: impossible to return Helen

[timelets]

...the Herodotean narrator defines the genre he is practising in an implicit and oblique fashion, pointing to ways of dealing with the past that are acceptable in other genres, but not in his.

Based on gno ̄me ̄, it is incredible that Priam and the Trojans might have chosen to be massacred by the Greeks rather than return Helen (2.120); if they did, it means that returning Helen was impossible and the Egyptian priests are right to say that she had been kept in Egypt by their king Proteus, and Menelaus had found her there after the war (2.113–19). Homer, according to Herodotus, had known the true story, but preferred the other one – that is, the Iliad! – because it was more appropriate for epic poetry (2.116). This, we are expected to understand, is the kind of liberty the author of the Histories would not claim for himself. The statement that Aeschylus had ‘stolen’ a story from the Egyptians (2.156.6) may have similar implications, pointing indirectly to the Herodotean narrator’s practice of letting the audience know where his stories originate.


...In Greek culture, the past had been for centuries the province of poetry, especially but not only epic poetry, and the discourse of authority that traditionally applied to the past was based on privileged access to knowledge by virtue of what we might call acharismatic predisposition, that is, direct inspiration from a superior entity, the Muse(s).42 Establishing a new way of dealing with the past implied the creation of a new kind of authority.

Nino Luragshi, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052183001X.006

Here we can see applications of different logics, depending on the genre of narration. cf Shiller's Narrative Economics.