their city on the verge of the Battle of SALAMIS and treat their 200 manned ships as their homeland (8.61) is one of the best illustrations of the point. The nomadic way of life of the BUDINI (4.109.1), one of the neighboring tribes of the SCYTHIANS, who had claims to autochthony, is a non‐Greek example. There is an autochthonic aspect in the serpentine figure in one of the stories about the origins of the Scythians, NOMADS par excellence, but it is challenged by Herodotus (4.8–11, with Corcella in ALC, 579–80).
A claim to autochthony also meant a claim to purity from ethnic admixtures, which was often demonstrated by means of the community’s cultural symbols and mythologies (Smith 1986), such as language, customs, cult, ethnic names, and myths of origins. In a demonstration of his critical enquiry, Herodotus uses all of these cultural indexes when he grapples with the question of the autochthony of the Carians (southwestern Anatolia) and the Caunians, one of the cities of CARIA. As a Carian authority (a native of HALICARNASSUS), he is in a position to test the different versions; each time he opts for a different version than that of the community’s self‐perception. The Carians think of themselves as landlubbers and autochthonous, but Herodotus thinks, together with the Cretans, that they were originally Ionian and Dorian islanders (1.171.5–6). On the other hand, the people of CAUNUS are according to his view autochthons, who however think of themselves as originally from CRETE (1.172.1).
SEE ALSO: Api; Athenian Empire; Colonization; Ethnicity; Genealogies; Migration; Panhellenism
REFERENCES
1 Blok, Josine H. 2009. “Gentrifying Genealogy: On the Genesis of the Athenian Autochthony Myth.” In Antike Mythen: Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen, edited by Ueli Dill and Christine Walde, 251–75. Berlin: De Gruyter.
2 Fragoulaki, Maria. 2013. Kinship in Thucydides: Intercommunal Ties and Historical Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3 Hornblower, Simon. 2011. The Greek World 479–323 BC. 4th edition. London: Routledge.
4 Isaac, Benjamin. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
5 Loraux, Nicole. 1993. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, translated by Caroline Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
6 Parker, Robert. 1986. “Myths of Early Athens.” In Interpretations of Greek Mythology, edited by Jan Bremmer, 187–214. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
7 Pelling, Christopher B. R. 2009. “Bringing Autochthony Up‐to‐date: Herodotus and Thucydides.” CW 102.4: 471–83.
8 Rosivach, Vincent J. 1987. “Autochthony and the Athenians.” CQ 81: 294–306.
9 Shapiro, H. Alan. 1998. “Autochthony and the Visual Arts in Fifth‐Century Athens.” In Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth‐Century Athens, edited by Deborah Boedeker and Kurt A. Raaflaub, 127–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
10 Smith, Anthony. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
11 Zacharia, Katerina. 2003. Converging Truths: Euripides’ Ion and the Athenian Quest for Self‐definition. Leiden: Brill.
FURTHER READING
1 Detienne, Marcel. 2003. Comment être autochtone: du pur athénien au français raciné. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
2 Loraux, Nicole. 2000. Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, translated by Selina Stewart. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
3 Roy, James. 2014. “Autochthony in Ancient Greece.” In A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Jeremy McInerney, 241–55. Chichester: Wiley‐Blackwell.
AUTODICUS (Αὐτόδικος, ὁ)
CHRISTOPHER BARON
University of Notre Dame
Patronymic, father of CLEADES of PLATAEA (9.85.3). Since his son was a PROXENOS of the Aeginetans, it is possible that Autodicus also performed this often‐hereditary role, but nothing more is known of him.
SEE ALSO: Aegina
AUTONOÜS, see PHYLACUS (2)
AUTOPSY
CATHERINE DARBO‐PESCHANSKI
Centre Léon Robin, CNRS/Université Paris–Sorbonne
Autopsy, or the action of seeing with one’s own eyes, is counted among Herodotus’ means of obtaining information and for a long time even stood out as being the essential one, for the etymological reason that ἱστορίη (HISTORIĒ) derives, as one of its possible origins, from the stem *wid/weid/woid just like the Latin verb video or οἶδα (accordingly translated as “I know because I have seen”) in Greek (Snell 1924; Benveniste 1948; Nenci 1955; Schepens 1980). At the same time, scholars deemed the inquirer’s autopsy to be disappointing because it intervenes rather scarcely in the Histories (and mostly in Book 2). Then, they alleged that Herodotus set as the main topic for the Histories the past—which escapes that direct experience. In this line of thinking, Herodotus would have been firstly interested in “GEOGRAPHY” and “ethnology” (avant la lettre), where autopsy could operate, but would have lost his privileged informational resource when, supposedly urged by the trauma that Greece had suffered from the PERSIAN WARS, he began dealing with the past. Thus, historiography would be born within the Histories (Jacoby 1913), but at the price of a constrained change in the ways of obtaining information. Instead of his own autopsy, the inquirer into the past resorts to eyewitness accounts, that is, an autopsy of second or nth degree, and for want of anything better, to traditions (whether oral or written: akoē), sometimes hardly verifiable (Thomas 1992). Even a “geographical” matter, the inquiry about the source of the NILE (2.29–32), offers an outstanding example: Herodotus’ autopsy up to ELEPHANTINE is associated with several narratives of past expeditions beyond that point and finally one which states that young men, one day, personally saw a great river full of CROCODILES, assumed by their king (when he heard the report) to be the Nile.
Despite that adaptation, in ancient Greece, any KNOWLEDGE (Snell 1924)—and especially the ideal historical knowledge—is supposed to have remained fundamentally or originally based on autopsy (Drews 1973), so that “serious historians in the ancient world tended to concentrate on the history of their own time” (Thomas 1992). On that point, scholars perhaps have in mind CANDAULES’ Heraclitean‐like phrase (1.8), when the Lydian king urges GYGES to see for himself how beautiful the naked queen looks: “ears turn out to be less reliable than eyes.” Eyes (in that instance, Gyges’ autopsy) would be more accurate than hearing (everything that the king, as the first eyewitness, could report). However, regardless of the fact that some scholars (even the same ones later on: Thomas 2000) now seem reluctant to rest on etymology alone (Schepens 2007), and that others have put forward another etymology for historiē (Floyd 1990: ἵζειν, “to seat”), in more recent literature, the complexity of the actual use of autopsy in Herodotus’ inquiry and narrative has come to the fore.
First it has been noticed (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987) that throughout the Histories, Herodotus, as the main inquirer, does not privilege seeing (ὄψις, opsis) as such (and thereby autopsy) over hearing or reading (ἀκοή, akoē). Only direct or indirect information is at issue, regardless of its perceptive nature. It rather depends on whether what is to be registered is visible or not (2.104: the COLCHIANS’ origins; 2.5: Egyptian territory).
Moreover, autopsy is no longer considered the core of historiē (Darbo‐Peschanski 1987, 2007; Bakker 2002; Schepens 2007) but rather one among other activities encapsulated in it (2.99): collecting traditions (akoē), forging one’s own judgment (γνώμη, gnōmē), and asking questions (historiē). The inquirer