Herodotus

Front matter

Ancient Classics for English Readers EDITED BY THE

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

HERODOTUS

Introduction

INTRODUCTION.

So little is known for certain regarding the life of Herodotus, "the father of history," that it may well be a subject of congratulation that he has not shared the fate of Homer, the father of poetry, in having doubt thrown on his individual existence.

He appears to have been born about the year 484 before Christ, between the two great Persian invasions of Greece, at Halicarnassus, a colony of Dorian Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor. His family was one of some distinction. From his writings alone we should know that he received a liberal education, and became familiarly acquainted with the current literature of his day; and the epic form of his great prose work, besides numberless expressions and allusions, bears witness to the fact that the Homeric poems were his constant study and model.

His early manhood was spent in extensive travels, in which he accumulated the miscellaneous materials of his narrative. He visited, in the course of them, a great part of the then known world; from Babylon and Susa in the east, to the coast of Italy in the west; and from the mouths of the Dnieper and the Danube in the north, to the cataracts of Upper Egypt southwards. Thus his travels covered a distance of thirty-one degrees of longitude from east to west, and twenty-four of latitude from north to south—an area of something like 1700 miles square. It was an immense range in days when there were few facilities for locomotion, and when every country was supposed to be at war with its neighbours, unless bound by express treaties of peace and alliance. He travelled, too, it must be remembered, in an age when robbers by land and sea were members of a recognised profession,—very lucrative and not entirely disreputable: when (as we shall see hereafter) disappointed political or military adventurers took to piracy as a last resort, without any sort of compunction. "Pray, friends, are you pirates,—or what?" is the question which old Nestor puts to his visitors, in the 'Odyssey,' without the least intention either of jesting or of giving offence. A voyage itself was such a perilous matter, that a Greek seaman never, if he could help it, lost sight of land in the daytime, or remained on board his ship during the night; and at a later date the philosopher Aristotle distinctly admits that even his ideal "brave" man may, without prejudice to his character, fear the being drowned at sea. The range of our author's travels is, however, less wonderful than their busy minuteness. He is traveller, archæologist, natural philosopher, and historian combined in one. He appears scarcely ever to have concluded his visit to a country without exhausting every available source of information. Personal inquiry alone seems to have satisfied him, wherever it could be made; though he consulted carefully all written materials within his reach, records public and private, sacred and secular. He rightly calls his work a "History," for the Greek word "history" means really "investigation," though it has passed into a different use with us. In Egypt alone he seems to have spent many years, visiting and exploring its most remarkable cities—Memphis, Hieropolis, and the "hundred-gated" Thebes. In Greece proper, as well as its colonies on the Asiatic seaboard and in South Italy, and in all the islands of the Archipelago, he is everywhere at home, as well as in the remoter regions of Asia Minor.

Such details of his life as have come down to us rest on somewhat doubtful authority. It is said that he was driven from Halicarnassus to Samos by the tyranny of Lygdamis, grandson of that Queen Artemisia whose conduct he nevertheless, with some generosity, immortalises in his account of the battle of Salamis; that in Samos he learned the Ionic dialect in which his history is written; that in time he returned to head a successful insurrection against Lygdamis, but then, finding himself unpopular, joined in the Athenian colonisation of Thurium, in Italy, where he died and was buried, and where his tomb in the market-place was long shown. His residence at Samos may have been a fiction invented to explain the dialect in which he wrote, which was more probably that consecrated by usage to historical composition. At one time he appears to have removed to Athens, where he received great honours, partly in the substantial shape of ten talents (more than £2400), after a public recitation of his history. According to one story, he was commissioned to read it before the Assembly of all the Greek States on the occasion of the great national games held every fourth year at Olympia in Elis.

Amongst the audience on some such occasion, most probably at Athens, a young Athenian, Thucydides, is said to have been present; and the introduction which then took place may have given the first stimulus to the future historian of the Peloponnesian war, who, despairing of surpassing his predecessor as a charming story-teller, boldly struck out for himself a new path, as the founder of the critical method. It seems also that at Athens Herodotus enjoyed the friendship of the great tragic poet Sophocles. Plutarch has preserved the opening words of a poem in which the tragedian compliments the historian, after he had quitted Athens for Thurium. In two of the tragedies of Sophocles, the 'Œdipus at Colonos' and the 'Antigone,' are passages plainly adapted from this history. The society of Athens under Pericles, comprising all that was most select and brilliant in art and intellect, must have had great attractions for Herodotus; and it implies some self-denial on his part to have torn himself away from it. Probably he longed to exercise, as most Greeks did, full political rights, which, as an alien, he could not enjoy at Athens, though he was evidently an enthusiastic admirer of her institutions.

After his emigration to Thurium, he seems to have devoted his life to the elaboration and amplification of his great work. Several passages in his history prove that he was, at all events, acquainted with the earlier events of the great Peloponnesian war. The balance of evidence seems to point to his death having occurred when he was about sixty. If so, he at least escaped witnessing, as the result of that war, the fall of his beloved Athens from her well-won supremacy over Greece.

The history of Herodotus is a great prose epic, suggested doubtless to the author in early life by the fame of those events which were still fresh in the minds of all men—the repulse of the Persian invasion, and the liberation of Greece. The Greeks had thrown off colonies, from time to time, into the islands of the Levant and the west coast of Asia. These Asiatic Greeks had actually been enslaved by Persia; and European Greece, though free from the first, could only wake to the full consciousness of that freedom when the overshadowing dread of the monster Asiatic power had been dissipated. Independence could be but a name for either Athenian or Spartan, so long as the very sight of the Persian dress (as Herodotus tells us) inspired terror. Until Miltiades won Marathon, by a rush as apparently desperate as our Balaklava charge, the Persians had been reputed invincible. Their second expedition against Greece was intended to repair the damaged prestige of Persian valour, by setting in motion overwhelming numbers. It seemed as if the dead weight alone of Asiatic fleets and armies must carry all before it. It did indeed carry Athens, but not the Athenians. The sea-fight of Salamis was won by citizens who had lost their city. The two great victories which followed within a year—Platæa and Mycale, gained on the same day—indicated for ever the superiority of Europeans over Asiatics. The latter was fought out on Asiatic ground the beginning of the great retribution which has continued even to the present time, represented by uncertain tides of Western conquest gradually gaining ground on the East.

Never before or since has an author employed himself with grander subject-matter than Herodotus. The victories of Freedom in all ages, more than any other conquests, have stirred the human heart to its depths. It is the cause that alone humanises war, and makes it other than brutal butchery. Many such victories there have been in the course of time, but all of local and limited importance in comparison. And, indeed, perhaps Marathon made Morgarten possible. By Salamis and Platæa the world may have escaped being orientalised for ever, and bound in the immobility of China. These battles, by saving freedom and securing progress, anticipated the overthrow of the Saracens before Tours, and of the Turks before Vienna. Herodotus, indeed, could not see all this, when the plan of his great history dawned on his mind, but the salvation of his beloved Greece was to him a sufficient inspiration.

We find the same unity of design in the history of Herodotus as in Homer's great epic. As in the 'Iliad,' not the siege of Troy but the wrath of Achilles is the continual burden, so, in our author's work, not the history of Greece but the destruction of the great Persian armada is its one great subject. All the other local histories, though introduced with much fulness of detail, are subordinate to this consummation. They flow to it like the tributaries of a river, whose might and grandeur make men love to explore its sources. He gives us in succession the early history of Lydia, of Babylon, and of Assyria, in order to trace the rise and fall of those several Asiatic powers which merged at last in the great empire of the Medes and Persians, who are the actors in his true drama, to which these preliminary histories are a discursive prologue. His work is not a romance founded on fact, like Xenophon's 'Education of Cyrus,' or Shakspeare's historical plays, or Scott's 'Quentin Durward.' It is serious history, as history was understood in his time. But the historian's appetite was omnivorous in the collection of materials, and robustly digested fable and fact alike. His mind was like that of Froissart and Philip de Comines, who lived in another age, when miracles were thought matters of course. Yet in Herodotus we perceive the dawning of that criticism which finds its full expression in Thucydides, who was in mind a modern historian, though less fastidious as to the evidence cf facts than a man of our century would be. The incredulity of Herodotus, when it shows itself, seems rather evoked by the suspected veracity of his informant, or some contradiction in phenomena, than by the incredible nature of the facts themselves.

He has been most found fault with for ascribing effects to inadequate causes; but we ought rather to feel grateful to him, considering the mould in which the mind of his time was cast, for endeavouring to trace the connection between cause and effect at all. In Homer the gods are always in requisition, and always at hand to manage matters, even in minutest details. That Herodotus had a religious mind there can be no doubt, for he speaks even of foreign and barbaric rites and beliefs with intense respect. And the great Liberation War of Greece was, in its circumstances, calculated to illustrate one great pervading principle of his religion—that heaven will not allow an excess of mortal prosperity. The rock which overhung the bay of Salamis, whence Xerxes looked down on his host, might well bear the statue of Nemesis. Nemesis, in the religious system of the ancient Greeks, is the great divine stewardess, who assigns to man his quota of good or of evil If man takes to himself more good than his share, she adjusts the balance by giving him evil; for the gods are jealous of those who try to vie with them. Did not Apollo flay Marsyas for daring to contend with him on the lyre? Did not Minerva change Arachne into a spider for boasting to be a better spinster than herself? So the Sovereign of the gods cannot endure the luxury and pride of the earthly despot. It becomes the business of Nemesis to compass his destruction. She invokes against him Ate, or Infatuation. Ate blindfolds his mind, and forces him to enter of his own will on the path whose end is destruction. To ward off this, men resort to sacrifice; but any sacrifice short of what is most precious is useless. Polycrates, the despot of Samos, almost insults the gods in supposing that throwing a jewel into the sea will atone for the crime of prosperous sovereignty; the ring comes back to him in a fish brought to his table. "Was not Agamemnon compelled to sacrifice his daughter, the pride of his house, before he could obtain a fair wind to sail to Troy? It seems to have been an article of the Athenians' creed, which Herodotus shared, that there was a sort of wickedness in one free man attempting to rise above the level of his fellow-citizens; and perhaps they thought that their honourable punishment of ostracism was devised as much for a great man's good as for theirs. It was a kind of inverted doctrine of the divine right of kings, traces of which we find throughout the Attic literature. Had Herodotus lived in our day, we may imagine that his attention would have been powerfully arrested by the fate of Napoleon the First, or the Czar Nicholas of Russia, as illustrating this sentiment.

Frequent references will be found in these pages to Mr Rawlinson's 'History of Herodotus;' but it is desired here to acknowledge more distinctly the use which has been made of his exhaustive volumes.

The History of Herodotus was divided by the ancients into nine books, each bearing the name of one of the Muses. His own order of narration is very discursive, for he digresses into local history and anecdote continually. In these pages a rearrangement into chapters will perhaps be more welcome to the general reader.

Crœsus

THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS.

CHAPTER I.

CRŒSUS.

And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs." >>Milton, "L'Allegro."

In the great quarrel between Europe and Asia, which is the end and scope of our author's work, it is of the utmost consequence to the satisfaction of his religious principles that the balance of blame should incline to the side of the true offenders. According to the showing of the Persians themselves, who had their story-tellers, if not historians, the Asiatics were the first offenders. A Phœnician skipper went to Argos, and carried off Io, the king's daughter, to Egypt, whither he was bound. By way of reprisals, the Greeks then carried off two women for one—Europa from Tyre, and Medea from Colchis. This may have partly excused Alexander or Paris, son of Priam king of Troy, for carrying off Helen, the wife of Menelaus, from Sparta, in the second generation afterwards. But then, said the Persians, the Greeks put themselves clearly in the wrong —for instead of carrying off another lady, they made the abduction of Helen a case of war. "To carry off women was manifestly the deed of unjust men, but to make so serious matter of their abduction was the part of simpletons, since they hardly could have been carried off without their own consent." Indeed, according to one account, Io at least eloped of her own free will. But in fact, our historian thinks, from the time of the Trojan war the Asiatics looked upon the Greeks as their natural enemies.

Without discussing too curiously all these tales, Herodotus has no doubt in his own mind that the blame ought to lie with the Asiatics, since Crœsus, king of Lydia, was the first historical aggressor. Before his time all the Greeks were free, and he was the first Asiatic potentate who, by fair means or foul, reduced Grecian states to various kinds of dependency. The towns on the coast he subdued by force, easily enough. He had proposed to try the same means with the islanders of the Archipelago, when he was dissuaded from his purpose by a shrewd jest. Among other travellers who visited his court was one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece—Bias of Priene. The king asked him, as he did all his visitors, what was the last news? "The islanders," said Bias, "are busy raising a force of cavalry with which they mean to invade Lydia." Crœsus declared it was the very thing he could wish,—but he hardly believed they could be so utterly foolish. Bias ventured to think that the Greek islanders would be equally amused to hear that the Lydians intended to attack them on their own element. The king took the hint: and it is the earliest specimen we have of the wisdom which after- wards so often clothed itself in the language of the "Court Fool."

The Lydians appear to have been a people, like the Egyptians, of nearly immemorial civilisation, and, like the Asiatic tribes who fought for the Trojans, to have had a common origin with the Greeks themselves, and to have differed little from them in manners and customs. There is manifest truth in the tradition which connected them with the Etruscans and the Pelasgians; and their three dynasties, of the second of which Hercules was said to be the founder, may have represented three cognate races of conquerors, like the Saxons, Danes, and Normans with us. They appear to have been at first a warlike people, but to have been enervated by conquest, and then, like the descendants of the ancient Italians, to have become chiefly famous as artists, especially as musicians.

This Crœsus, the son of Alyattes, in time extended his empire over most of the countries westward of the river Halys. He was, in some sort, the Solomon of his age; fabulously rich, magnificent in his expenditure, and of unbounded hospitality; so that great men came to visit him from all parts, and to gaze on the splendours of his court. Amongst them was Solon the Athenian. Solon had remodelled the laws of Athens, with the concurrence of the Athenian people; but, knowing the fickleness of his countrymen, had gone into voluntary exile for ten years, having bound them by oath that they would make no change in their institutions in his absence. Crœsus, in the course of his conversations with Solon, wished to extract from him the confession that he considered him the happiest of mankind. Solon refused to account any man happy till death had set its seal on his felicity, and took occasion to warn Crœsus of the instability of all human affairs, dilating especially on the jealous nature of the gods. The king could not brook the plain-speaking of his guest, and dismissed him in disfavour. He was soon to prove the truth of his warning: the terrible Nemesis, says our author, was awakened—probably, he thinks, by this very boast of thinking himself the happiest of mortals. Then he goes on to tell, in his own delightful fashion—

The Story of Adrastus.

Crœsus had two sons—the one grievously afflicted, for he was deaf and dumb, but the other by far the first of the youths of his age, by name Atys. Now Crœsus dreamed that he should lose this Atys by the stroke of an iron weapon. Through fear of this dream, he took him no longer with him to the wars, but sought out for him a wife who might keep him at home. Nay, he even had all the weapons that hung in the men's rooms stacked away in the inner chambers, lest any of them might fall on him by accident. While the marriage was preparing, there came to seek refuge at Sardis a Phrygian of royal birth who had committed homicide. Crœsus purified him with the due rites, and then inquired his name. He said, "I am Adrastus, son of Gordias; I slew my brother by misadventure, and my father has turned me out of doors, and I have lost all." And Crœsus answered, "Thou art the son of a friend, and art come to friends; with me thou shalt lack nothing. Thou wilt do best to bear thy mishap as lightly as thou mayest." About this time it came to pass that a huge wild boar came out of Mount Olympus in Mysia and laid waste the fields; and the people came to Crœsus and besought him to send to them his son to help them with the hunting-train. And Crœsus, mindful of the dream, refused to send his son, but promised to send the train and picked sportsmen of the Lydians. But his son Atys coming in, was much vexed, and said, "Thou bringest me to shame, my father, in the eyes of the citizens and of my bride, in that thou dost forbid me to go to the wars and the chase, as though I were a coward." But Crœsus said, "I hold thee no coward, yet I do wisely, for I was warned by a dream that an iron weapon should slay thee; therefore did I give thee a wife to keep thee at home. For thou art in truth my only son, for the other I count as though he were not, being deaf and dumb." Then answered the son, "It is natural, my father, to take good heed on my behalf, after such a dream. But what iron weapon hath a boar, or what hands to hurl it? If indeed thou hadst dreamed that I should die by a tusk, thou wouldst be wise in doing what thou doest, but not now, for this war is not with men." Crœsus confessed himself persuaded by these words, and allowed his son to join the chase; but he begged Adrastus to go with him and guard him, lest any evil should happen by the way; and Adrastus, though heavy of heart, deemed that he could deny Crœsus nothing in return for his kindness, and went accordingly. So the hunters made a great hunt, and having brought the boar to bay, stood round and threw javelins at him. And it came to pass that Adrastus threw his javelin, and missed the boar, and killed the son of Crœsus. So the dream was fulfilled. Now Crœsus, when he heard the news, was sorely troubled, and in his anguish, called on Jupiter as lord of purification, as lord of the hearth, as lord of companionship, to witness what he suffered at the hands of his suppliant, his guest, and the man whom he had sent to guard his son. And now came the Lydians hearing the corpse, and behind them followed the slayer, Adrastus. And he, standing before the bier and stretching forth his hands, besought Crœsus to take his life, as he was no longer worthy to live. Then Crœsus, though in great grief, pitied him and said, "Thou hast made full atonement, in that thou hast judged thyself worthy of death. Thou art not to blame, but as a tool in the hands of some god, who long since did signify to me what should come to pass." So Crœsus buried his son, and spared Adrastus. But when he was departed, Adrastus, as thinking himself of all men the most wretched, slew himself upon the tomb. And Crœsus mourned for his son for the space of two years. But at the end of that time he was fain to bestir himself, for there came to him a rumour that Cyrus the Persian had conquered the Medes, and was exalting himself above all the kings of the earth; and he hasted, if it were possible, to crush the Persian power before it became too strong.

Crœsus, in Herodotus' story, appears in close relations with the god Apollo. The world-famous shrine of this god was at Delphi on Mount Parnassus, currently believed to be the exact centre of the earth—the earth itself being looked upon as a round disc. In the temple there, the site of which was supposed to be the spot where the serpent Python was slain by the arrows of the Sun-god, there was an oracle, the most renowned in the world. Its answers, in spite of their ambiguity, guided the public and private affairs of the Greeks to an extent which appears to us now almost ludicrous. Though generally vague and perplexing, yet they were often so much to the point, that some of the old Fathers of the Church attributed them to Satanic influence, as they doubtless would table-turning and spirit-rapping, if they lived now. It was also believed that their efficacy ceased exactly with the coming of our Lord, by which time, at all events, faith in them had worn out. Milton alludes to this tradition in his "Hymn on the Nativity":—

The oracles are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathèd spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."

Before he determined on his expedition against Cyrus, Crœsus sent to test the most famous oracles in Greece and that of Jupiter Ammon in Libya, in order that he might know which was most to be trusted. And he made the trial thus: he told his messengers to ask each oracle, on the hundredth day after their departure, what Crœsus was doing at that particular hour. The other answers are unrecorded, but the answer of the priestess of Apollo at Delphi ran thus:—

"Truly the tale of the sand I know, and the measures of ocean— Deftly the dumb I read, I list to the voice of the silent.

Savour has reached my sense from afar of a strong-skinned tortoise Simmering, mixed together with flesh of lamb, in a caldron; Brazen the bed is beneath, and brazen the coverlet over."

Crœsus, when he received this answer, judged the god of Delphi to be the wisest, since he alone could tell exactly what he was doing—for he had been cooking the flesh of a tortoise, mixed with lamb's flesh, in a brass caldron with a brass lid. Accordingly he sent rich presents to the shrine of Apollo, and ordered all his subjects to pay him especial honours. Thus having satisfied himself that this oracle at least was true, he next sent to inquire if he should go to war with the Persians. The answer was, that if he did so "he would ruin a great empire;" at which answer Crœsus rejoiced greatly, for he expected to destroy the empire of the Persians. He sent a third time and inquired of the oracle if his reign would be long? And the oracle answered:—

"When it shall come to pass that the Medes have a mule for monarch, Lydian, tender of foot, then along by the pebbles of Hermus Flee, and delay not then, nor shame thee to quail as a coward."

Crœsus rejoiced still more when he heard this, for he thought that, as a mule could never reign over men, the rule of himself and his descendants would never come to an end.

His next step, still under the advice of the oracle, was to make friends of the most powerful Greek states. At this point Herodotus, having wound his readers up to the expectation of a catastrophe, like some modern novelists, diverges into one of his favourite episodes, and takes advantage of the fact that Crœsus found the leading Greek states to be the Lacedæmonans and Athenians, to relate a part of their history.

At Athens, Pisistratus, the son of Hippocrates, had now raised himself to absolute power. Athens being divided between the parties of the Plain and the Coast, he had headed the third, called the party of the Mountain, and by pretending that his enemies had wounded him, managed to be allowed a body-guard, and then seized on the citadel. He had some vicissitudes of fortune before he was firm in the saddle, and on one occasion returned to Athens in a chariot accompanied by a woman of great beauty and stature, who personated the goddess Athenè (Minerva). The success of the imposition is possible, if we remember that the early Greeks believed that the gods sometimes came down visibly among mortals. By whatever devices, however, he gained or secured the sovereignty, he appears to have ruled well and righteously, and to have done much for the civilisation and glory of Athens.

The Spartans or Lacedæmonians were now beginning to assert the leadership which they afterwards obtained in the Peloponnese, as a consequence of those laws of Lycurgus, whose sole end and object was to make Sparta a model barrack for a state of soldiers.

With the Spartans Crœsus had no difficulty in concluding an alliance, as the path of friendship had been paved by a previous interchange of gifts and civilities; they had also heard of the Delphic prophecies. He immediately proceeded to commence a campaign against the Persians by marching into Cappadocia. A sensible Lydian made one last effort to dissuade him. "O king," said he, "thou art about to march against men who have trousers of leather, and all the rest of their dress of leather, and they feed not on what they would like but on what they have; for their land is rough. Nay more, they are unacquainted with wine, being water-drinkers, and they have no figs to eat, nor anything else that is good. If thou conquerest them, thou canst get nothing from them, for they have nothing to lose; if thou dost not, thou wilt lose all thine own good things. There will be no thrusting them back when once they have had a taste of what we enjoy; nay, I thank the gods that they do not put it into the mind of the Persians to march against the Lydians."