The Lydian logos is indebted to tragedy for many features: its large-scale narrative structure and (in its constituent stories) small-scale episodic structure, narrative motifs and themes, even vocabulary. However, Herodotus also diverges from his tragic sources in ways that clarify the nature of his own inquiries. The source of the constraint under which Gyges makes his fateful decisions is not divine (as in Aeschylus), but the will of his king and queen, highlighting a characteristic feature of Eastern monarchy. In the final sentence of the Atys/Adrastus story, the distinctive ethnographic formula that describes Adrastus’ suicidal thoughts marks him as a uniquely Herodotean tragic hero. Croesus’ pyre scene contains both an echo of the Aeschylean Cassandra (the king’s dramatic breaking of his silence) and a defining feature of Herodotean historiē: the citation of a Lydian source for Apollo’s epiphany demonstrates the critical attitude that Herodotus brings to popular and poetic traditions.

The aim of the translation is to provide an English text that is both scholarly and accessible. The referencing system resembles the familiar biblical chapters and verses; sections are provided with titles that identify their key theme and bring to light the structure of a work often regarded as diffuse and repetitive.

In his prologue Herodotus establishes a complex relationship with his poetic predecessors and contemporaries. He presents his narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars as simultaneously indebted and opposed to a network of poets, whose Panhellenic cultural prestige he challenges in the innovative medium of prose. Homeric epic is tacitly acknowledged as a model of primary importance: Herodotus adopts the martial subject matter of the Iliad and projects the persona of the peripatetic hero Odysseus. In perpetuating the kleos of fully human warriors rather than their heroic forebears, Herodotus implies that his own medium of prose historiē, committed to writing, will surpass poetry’s ability to perform its traditional function of public commemoration. Herodotus constructs the entire prologue as an ingenious prose priamel, a poetic rhetorical structure that enables him to emphasize important points of contact with and departure from Homeric epic, Sappho’s fragment 16, and the portrayal of Croesus in epinician poetry.

Chapter 3 reveals how the Secret Book of John uses John’s apostolic authority and continues the story of the apostle John (who is probably thought of as the beloved disciple). It discusses how the Secret Book serves as a kind of prequel to John’s prologue and how the Acts of John gives a good sense for the apostle John as a literary character in the late second century.

Aeschylus’ Persae is an important antecedent for the account of Xerxes’ Hellenic campaign in the Histories, serving as both a source of phrases, images, and themes and a poetic foil for Herodotean inquiry. The tragedian’s presence is palpable in the staging of the king’s decision to attack Greece, although Herodotus shifts the causal emphasis from Xerxes’ personal flaws to coercive political and religious forces. Herodotus’ insistence on the contingency of Greek victory at Salamis marks a telling departure from Aeschylus’ vision of the battle as a great Panhellenic victory, vouchsafed by the gods and undisturbed by the conflicting interests of the poleis allied against Xerxes. In their presentation of Greco-Persian conflict both Aeschylus and Herodotus partially deconstruct the polarity between Hellenes and Persians, encouraging their respective audiences to look beyond cultural differences to common human traits that shaped the course of events before, during, and after the Persian invasion.

As the Gospel of Truth is read on its own terms, and not through the lens of Irenaeus’s hostility, points of contact come to light with other early gospel literature. The most extensive parallels are with Johannine theology, but echoes of the Gospel of Matthew are also perceptible along with thematic links to the Gospel of Thomas.

The Notes on the Text and Translation focus on key issues important for understanding the Secret Book of John (especially in Codex III), which could not be addressed in the preceding chapters.

Epic poetry contains evidence of historical consciousness (the perception of human change over time) in the distinctive characterization of three different temporal frames. Homer contrasts the generation of Trojan War heroes with both their antecedents in the epic plupast and their (merely) human descendants who comprise the poet’s audience. Hesiod too in his Myth of Races articulates a tripartite division of human history, chartacterized by diachronic decline, in his Bronze, Heroic, and Iron generations. Both poets emphasize but do not explain the disjunction between the human present and the heroic past. The greater generational continuity that is characteristic of the Histories is reflected in Herodotus’ portrayal of heroes as liminal figures who bridge the gap between the remote and the recent past – like Orestes, whose super-sized skeleton befits his semi-divine status, but also plays a crucial causal role in Sparta’s rise to Peloponnesian power in the sixth century.

The Gospel of Truth is an early Christian homily in which an anonymous and independent-minded teacher communicates his understanding of the core Christian message to his own immediate circle and a wider audience elsewhere. For this author, the gospel is the good news that in the person of Jesus, the divine Father has made himself known to his elect, calling them out of a nightmare-like existence in ignorance and illusion into the knowledge of himself. In this volume, Francis Watson provides a new and accessible translation of this text, along with a thorough analysis of it, both in its own terms and in its reception by later readers. He argues that its closest affinities lie with New Testament texts such as the Gospel of John and the Pauline letters. Watson also demonstrates how the Gospel of Truth is a work of literary quality and theological originality and why it deserves the attention of all students and scholars of early Christianity.

Chapter 6 shows how Irenaeus’ summary in Against Heresies 1.29.1–4 goes back to an earlier document (the Barbelo treatise), and not the Secret Book of John specifically. It shows how the Secret Book is different from the Barbelo treatise, and presents a theory of how the Secret Book emerged in both its shorter and longer versions.

Extant Greek tragedy contains several instances of choral division, scenes when the chorus appears either to split into individual performers (as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) or, more commonly, to divide into small groups (semichoruses). As these scenes involve the (always temporary) disintegration of tragedy’s emblematic collective, a collective that is customarily conceived of as a unified group, this chapter frames such scenes in terms of fragmentation. These various states of fragmentation illustrate not only the way in which tragedians play with the chorus’ ability to slide towards and away from uniform collectivity but also the assumptions about wholeness which have implicitly informed critical and editorial approaches to both tragedy and the chorus. In addition to examining these divisions in tragedy, the chapter analyses similar divisions in satyr play, comedy and Rhesus, the only surviving example of fourth-century tragedy, demonstrating how the divisions of the comic and satyric choruses are more readily accepted by critics.

Herodotean speeches serve the same basic functions (dramatization, characterization, and interpretation) as their Homeric counterparts, modified to address the wide-ranging concerns of Herodotean inquiry – foremost among them, the relationship between Greek and Persian cultures in their political, military, social, and religious institutions and behaviors. Homeric speech types adapted by Herodotus include the exemplary ainos that evokes past precedent at a moment of crisis; the warrior’s challenge of his opponent to battle; and the commander’s parainesis or speech of encouragement to his soldiers. This same adaptive procedure is visible in Herodotus’ treatment of speech scenes like the Persian crown council, which lays bare the nature of Persian court culture while exploring historical causation on both the human and divine levels. The many “wise advisor” scenes in the Histories also have deep roots in Homeric epic, especially the series of confrontational conversations between Hector and Polydamas in the Iliad.