Logos, Truth, and Concealment in Herodotus

Abstract

This essay seeks to come to a preliminary understanding of Herodotus’s conception of logos by studying the motifs of true and false speech as they are developed throughout the first books of the History. I begin by examining his account of what he takes to be the “Persian” understanding of truth-telling and how it is ultimately self-undermining, terminating in Darius’s affirmation that truth and lie are equivalent and only used pragmatically in the service of gain. The commitment to telling the truth, then, is grounded in but also conceals the fundamental human desire for the good. Next, I consider Herodotus’s understanding of Greek poetry’s “lies like the truth.” In Homer, Herodotus finds an understanding of logos that accounts for the interplay of truth’s disclosure and concealment. Homer’s poetry beautifies and so conceals the first things, but in so doing leaves clues that may be followed in order to uncover its concealed origin. Herodotus’s own logos follows Homer’s example by looking for those traces in all human logoi that point beyond their concealment to the truth of the first things. Herodotus’s unfolding of the play of truth and concealment in logos can be understood as a profound commentary on the thought of Heraclitus (especially his fragment B123) and suggests a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the tension between nomos and physis than is usually attributed to the historian.