South with Herodotus #2

The Bible is quite interested in genealogy:
Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's handmaid, bare unto Abraham: And these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, according to their generations: the firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth; and Kedar, and Adbeel, and Mibsam, And Mishma, and Dumah, and Massa, Hadar, and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah: These are the sons of Ishmael, and these are their names, by their towns, and by their castles; twelve princes according to their nations. (Gen. 25:12-16)
Herodotus shares that interest:

There was a certain king of Sardis, Candaules by name, whom the Greeks called Myrsilus. He was a descendant of Alcaeus, son of Hercules. The first king of this dynasty was Agron, son of Ninus, grandson of Belus, and great-grandson of Alcaeus; Candaules, son of Myrsus, was the last. The kings who reigned before Agron sprang from Lydus, son of Atys, from whom the people of the land, called
previously Meonians, received the name of Lydians. The Heraclides, descended from Hercules and the slave-girl of Jardanus, having been entrusted by these princes with the management of affairs, obtained the kingdom by an oracle. Their rule endured for two and twenty generations of men, a space of five hundred and five years; during the whole of which period, from Agron to Candaules, the crown descended in the direct line from father to son. (Herodotus, Book 1)

The modern reader wonders why the Bible bothers telling us the names and lineage of people who are at best tangential to the story, just as she wonders why Herodotus keeps telling us who was descended from whom and what contest they won at the games. These details seem pointless to us - which is just the point. Ancient literature came into being in a society radically different from ours. Read correctly, it takes us there.

But what is the correct way of reading ancient literature? Does it really take us into antiquity?

I suggest reading these books like a time traveler. 

If you could land a time capsule in fifth century BCE Greece, you wouldn't be quite sure of what you were seeing when you stepped out. You would have to observe cautiously and avoid jumping to conclusions. You would need a reliable informant to explain things. But how could you find one? And how could you know if he was reliable? It would be a little like a reporter asking his taxi driver to explain things to him while on the way to a new foreign assignment.

Reading Herodotus I had to be doubly cautious, because I was reading him in translation, and I depended on the translator's ability to decipher the text and render his understanding. Is de Selincourt a reliable informant? 

What exactly did the passage I just quoted, about Candaules, Hercules, and the rest mean to Herodotus' audience? Why were they interested? 

What it was for them cannot be what it is for us. Our interest in Herodotus as a key to understanding ancient Greek culture is obviously foreign to the interest of Herodotus' contemporaries - since they probably assumed they understood their own culture perfectly well.

I was set down in South Carolina, not a place as foreign to me as ancient Greece, but I couldn't always understand what I was seeing. I spent a summer in Charleston in the summer of 1968, teaching African-American high school students in an Upward Bound program, but I remembered very little of the city, and things have changed significantly since then.

Fortunately, I did have a reliable informant, my second cousin Beth Keyserling, who put me up at her house, introduced me to her daughters, and briefed me extensively.