In his Histories, Herodotus records a number of accounts about the foundation of colonies. One of the most elaborate such accounts is about the foundation of Cyrene in modern day Libya. By the second half of the 5th century BCE when Herodotus was writing, this settlement had grown into a powerful polls and in chapters 150-159 of Book 4 the historian offers a number of different versions of its founding. Read these chapters and respond considering some of the following questions: when he recounts the Theran and Cyrenean versions of Cyrene’s foundation, what evidence is Herodotus relying on? How and why do the two versions he recounts differ? In what ways does Herodotus question the accounts he has been told? In what ways do these accounts seem to try and rationalize various features of Cyrene?
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