‘Very fine & Semitic’

This chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s annotations to his undergraduate copy of Herodotus in the light of contemporary debates about the trustworthiness of Herodotus as a historian. It relates Wilde’s annotations to the mid-nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries of the Near East and to the commentaries of William Mure, Karl Ottfried Müller, George Grote, George Rawlinson, John P. Mahaffy, and William Blakesley. It demonstrates that, in reading Herodotus, Wilde sought evidence that Hellenism was a dynamic cultural phenomenon in which both Greeks and non-Greeks could participate. It relates Wilde’s annotations to his account of Herodotus in his graduate essay ‘Historical Criticism’ and to his use of Herodotus in his critical dialogue ‘The Decay of Lying’ as an originary instance of the primacy of imagination over fact. Finally it considers what Wilde’s proposed translation of tales from Herodotus for the publishers Macmillan might have been like.