This project was completed by Professor Bill Barry’s fall 2017 advanced Greek reading class at the University of Puget Sound. The graph shows the architecture of digressions in Herodotus’ Histories Book VI and allows detailed exploration of the structure of the narrative, which is characterized by multi-level digressions on not only historical topics, but also genealogical, mythical, ethnographic, and linguistic concerns.
Herodotus’ Histories, written in the second half of fifth century BCE, chronicles great deeds done by both Greeks and Persians, mainly during the time of the Persian Wars. This text, often credited as one of the first historical texts in the classical tradition, contains a variety of episodes that diverge from the overarching account of the war. Although Herodotus does follow the chronology of the war over the main narrative itself, he chooses, as an author, to explore numerous other themes through side stories known as digressions.
These graphs were built using an open-source SigmaJS plug-in from the Oxford Internet Institute. The two graphs below provide different perspectives on the architecture of digressions in Herodotus' Histories VI. They are each color-coded by level of digressions, and allow you to filter by level of digression as well; the light green nodes are the main narrative, and other colors represent various levels of digression. The buttons on the top and bottom of the graphs will open the graphs in a new tab for more in-depth viewing.