Herodotus and the Heroic Age: The Case of Minos In the fifth
century, traditional myths about gods and heroes of a remote age
still constituted a shared cultural language for speaking about
a variety of more or less specific current issues of a
philosophical, ethical, social, and political nature. Other than
tragedy and epinician poetry, we should especially remember the
role of myth in Thucydides, whose ‘Archaeology’ sets down his
fundamental, and ideologically charged, view of history. It is
time to reassess Herodotus' participation in this contemporary
coded discourse and examine the ways in which he uses the
mythical past as well as the cases when he appears to signal his
choice not to use it. One dismissive passage in Herodotus
(3.122) confirms the significance of Minos — the focus of this
chapter — in fifth-century discourse as a precursor or rival of
Athenian thalassocracy (Thucydides and Bacchylides). But two
additional mentions, in Books 1 and 7 respectively, connect
Minos in more interesting ways to