Bulgaroctonus

Gunnut,

Herodotus is the oldest surviving Greek narrative historian, and the oldest surviving narrative historian for that matter. It is almost certain that there were other accounts of the battle, probably even eye-witness accounts from the other Greeks present. However, none of that material has survived, although Herodotus does reference several authors in his works. I am not aware of any surviving texts that would corroborate or detract from Herodotus' tale. However, I am not an expert on the period or its accompanying textual evidence, so I encourage you to make an inquiry of your own.

This is from the introduction to my edition of the Histories. The introduction is by Donald Lateiner, editing G.C. Macaulay's 1890 translation:

Herodotus names many sources, literary, documentary, oral, and material. His accounts of Persian tribute and the Persian royal post (3.89-97 and 8.98-words of the latter are recorded in the stone architrave of Manhattan's old main Post Office), and the battle numbers and lineup of the Greeks who fought the Persians (8.43 for Salamis, 9.28 for Plataia) seem, because of their unexpected detail, to be based on written records. These documents can be archival records from Dareios' and Xerxes' palace at Persepolis; inscriptions on stone records and dedications (twenty of these-for example, in 2.106 and 4.91); legends and types on gold, silver, and other coins; some archaeological remains, such as extant and ruined structures (8.53); and more recent commemorative monuments (see 7.228 and 9.81; the latter describes the Serpent Column, still extant and for millennia on display in Istanbul). Some inscriptions were written in Greek and others in languages presumably unknown to Herodotus, including Egyptian, "Assyrian," as he styles them, and old Persian, the latter for the account to Dareios' rise to power, if Herodotus knew anything of the Behistun inscription (a massive rock-cut inscription and set of bas-reliefs extant still in Iran; relevant at 3.68-87) and did not merely hear it from an oral informant. His literary sources include prose writers and poets. Among the first we count the geographer and mythographer Hecataios and perhaps the explorer and geographer Skylax (compare 4.44; see Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History, and Luraghi's collection of essays The Historian's Craft in the Age of Herodotus). Among the second are Sappho, Pindar, and Aeschylus, the tragedian, who perhaps fought the invader at Marathon and Salamis and then wrote the Persians (see Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus, pp. 91-108).

Most of Herodotus' sources were certainly oral: individuals and groups with whom he spoke, such as descendants of the Spartans who died at Thermopylai (7.224), or acquaintances of participants in battle at Marathon or Salamis (Epizelos at 6.117 and Dicaios at 8.65). Herodotus pauses to note (2.99) when his sources for Egyptian information change from his own observation (autopsy is the Greek term) to hearsay. In between come eyewitness reports, and invaluable but slippery slope for past events.

The impersonal voice presents hundreds of Hellenic and barbarian partisan and partial accounts, some preserved in writing (see Drews) but more collected from oral informants. More than two hundred sources are identified with some specifics (individuals sometimes by name, but more often "the Egyptians say", "the Samians claim," "it is said by the Persians," etc). Sources are not rarely entirely anonymous (more than one hundred such citations). Specific informants are generally mentioned because they disagree. Some sources are cited for expert knowledge, others because of their presence at events where particular actions are disputed, such as what part the Corinthians played at the battle of Salamis (8.94). Herodotus both names sources (unlike the suppressive Thucydides) nad leaves their conflicting versions side by side within his text for the reader to decide among (for example, 3.122, 4.195, 6.75, 8.87, again unlike and independent opinion; it does not need to depend on the judgment of fallible observers or self-appointed authorities (for an extensive inventory, see Lateiner, pp. 84-90).

Citation itself may have been a Herodotean innovation. Among his unnamed sources-and perhaps we should think of these as his intellectual context-are nonhistorical writers and thinkers who influenced his Histories. These include the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers, the itinerant Sophists such as Protagoras, the Hippocratic medical writers, and other investigators working in scientific fields such as geology and climatology (as Rosalind Thomas has demonstrated in Herodotus in Context).

Herodotus weighs the conflicting accounts, judges them, and when the evidence permits, accepts one or none of them. Whether or not he explicitly selects one, or elements of several, among the logoi or accounts received-and he is more transparent about his procedure here than Thucydides and the rest of his alleged successors-he creates his own account from the congeries and and from self-revealing silences. That narrator's account therefore encompasses the polyphony of his sources. Although managing the living historical tradition-including, excluding explicitly, ordering, sequencing, admitting a failure to find a dependable account, etc. -Herodotus does not suppress the data that he has excavated, the histor's (investigator's) spade-work. By telling the reader when he is supervising the sometimes rambunctious logoi (by means of metanarrative signposting - see, for example, 1.95, 2.43, 4.10-11, 4.30, 5.62, and 9.84; compare Munson, pp. 20-24 and 32-37, and Dewald, "'I didn't give my own genealogy': Herodotus and the Authorial Personality," pp. 274-276), Herodotus preserves (or encourages us to believe that he preserves) the autonomy of future readers and investigators.

Nevertheless, Herodotus' lively mind seeps through his story-that is, a narrator's persona emerges in the text, however true or untrue it may be to the personality of the dead author. That persona can be combative, dispensing praise and blame to other researchers as well as to the veterans and politicians still fighting the last generation's battles. He admires clear thinkers and clever tricksters like the Halicarnassian queen Artemisia; he (intermittently) defends the Athenian general and later turncoat Themistocles, and he respects the exiled Spartan king Demaratos (compare Boedeker, "The Two Faces of Demaratus"), an eloquent Laconian.

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Regards,

Bulgaroctonus