Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus

Herodotus is the epochal authority who inaugurated the European and Western consciousness of collective identity, whether in an awareness of other societies and of the nature of cultural variation itself or in the fashioning of Greek self-awareness – and necessarily that of later civilizations influenced by the ancient Greeks – which was perpetually in dialogue and tension with other ways of living in groups.

In this book, 14 contributors explore ethnicity – the very self-understanding of bel...