Classical World

This article, part of a broader investigation of the way Herodotus describes his research, discusses the meanings of the term λόγιος in Herodotus, in other Greek authors, and in modern scholarship. It argues that the word, rather unspecific in meaning, originally indicated members of the community who were seen as particularly authoritative. It probably carried an old-fashioned undertone and in time came to be used with some irony and referred almost exclusively to non-Greeks, undermined by the increasing specialization of knowledge in classical Greece. Interpretations that make of "the λόγιοι" specialists of oral traditions in prose or oral memorialists should be rejected.