Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus and the Writing of History in the Greco-Roman World

Abstract The essay, On the Malice of Herodotus, which has come down to us in the corpus of Plutarch, has often been considered a problematic work because of its hostile tone, the object of its attack, and the quality of its argumentation. This book seeks to set the work in the larger context of the standards and traditions of Greek and Roman historiography and classical criticism more generally as they had developed in antiquity. Individual chapters explore Plutarch’s place in the critical reputation of Herodotus in antiquity, the nature and importance of historiographical style, the ‘signs and tokens’ used by Plutarch to convict Herodotus of malice, the particular kind of polemic on display in the essay, its relationship to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Plutarch’s own attempts to rewrite the famous incidents narrated by Herodotus, and the importance ancient critics placed on determining the disposition of the historian. The book shows that throughout the essay Plutarch, although often revealing a distinctive take on his subject, is none the less working in a recognizable tradition using methods and approaches that many of his predecessors had employed and which are essential to acknowledge and understand in order to arrive at a more comprehensive evaluation of how the Greeks and Romans wrote history.