On the War for Greek Freedom: Selections from The Histories

177 Pages·2003·1.73 MB·English

by  Herodotus

HERODOTUS
ON THE WAR FOR
GREEK FREEDOM
HERODOTUS
ON THE WAR FOR
GREEK FREEDOM
Selections from the Histories
Translations by
S S
AMUEL HIRLEY
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by
J R
AMES OMM
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2003 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
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Cover art: Audience Scene from Treasury. King with Crown Prince and Attendants behind Him. Persepolis, South Portico, Courtyard
17, c. 522–486. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Cover design by Abigail Coyle
Text design by Meera Dash
Maps on pages xxii–xxv, xxvii by Bill Nelson
Composition by Agnew’s, Inc.
Printed at Webcom Limited
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herodotus.
[Historiae. English. Selections]
On the war for Greek freedom : selections from the Histories / translations by Samuel Shirley ; edited, with introduction and notes, by
James Romm.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-87220-668-8 (cloth) — ISBN 0-87220-667-X (paper)
1. Greece—History—Persian Wars, 500–449 B.C. 2. Iran—History—To 640. I. Shirley, Samuel, 1912– II. Romm, James S. III. Title.
DF225 .H3913 2003
938?.03—dc21 2002038791
PRC ISBN: 978-1-62466-227-0
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
Herodotus, Histories. Translated by Pamela Mensch. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by James
Romm.
Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Paul
Woodruff.
Plutarch, Lives that Made Greek History. Edited, with Introductions and Notes, by James Romm.
Translated by Pamela Mensch.
Contents
Introduction
Chronology of the Archaic Age
Maps
Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom
I. Herodotus’ Introduction
II. Prologue: The Reign of Croesus of Lydia
(c. 560–546 B.C.E.)
III. The Growth of Persia: Cyrus Conquers Asia
(c. 550–530 B.C.E.)
IV. The Growth of Persia: Cambyses Conquers
North Africa (c. 530–522 B.C.E.)
V. The Growth of Persia: Darius Enters
Europe (521–499 B.C.E.)
VI. The Greek Revolt from Persia (499–494 B.C.E.)
VII. Persia versus Greece: Darius’ Wars (494–490 B.C.E.)
VIII. Persia versus Greece: Xerxes’ War (484–480 B.C.E.)
IX. Persia versus Greece: Mardonius’ War and After
(480–479 B.C.E.)
Historical Epilogue
Main Characters and Places
Index of Proper Names
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
Introduction
“Those cities that were formerly great are now diminished, while those that are now great were once
small.” If a single sentence can be said to sound the keynote of Herodotus’ Histories, surely it is this
one, privileged by its position at the end of the work’s introductory segment. Change is the greatest of
Herodotus’ many themes and the one that, like the sun in Plato’s famous metaphor, sheds illumination
on all the others. A particular kind of change interested him most, moreover: Not mere instability or
flux, but the movement that results in a leveling of extremes, like the reversal of a pendulum that has
swung too far in one direction. Such changes reveal the hand of divinity at work in the world, for the
gods dislike extremes and everywhere favor balance, proportion, and the mean. Human attempts to
attain extremes—of power and wealth, for example—are doomed to fail in the long run; just as with
the oscillation of boom and bust in finance, a “correction” must inevitably take its course.
The long run, however, may be very long indeed. While the ups and downs of economic cycles can
be plotted on monthly charts, the rises and falls of nation-states occur over decades or even centuries,
often too slowly to be perceived in the span of any one lifetime. Hence the need for historians, who
can remind us of the larger perspective when we feel we have attained a stasis or a control of our
destiny (“the end of history,” as the triumph of liberal democracy was famously dubbed at the end of
the twentieth century). Herodotus was the first writer in the Western tradition to examine the ebb and
flow of political power over such a vast time span, to capture not just a single war (as Homer had
done) but the rise of a great empire, the cresting of its influence and might, and the beginnings of its
inevitable lapse into decline. Although he has been called the father of history, he might be better
hailed as the discoverer of the historical time scale, a breakthrough as significant for his era as the
invention of the telescope was to the Renaissance.
The Scope of the Histories
Herodotus claims at 1.5 that he will begin his story with the rise of Croesus of Lydia (c. 560),1 but
this claim quickly turns out to be disingenuous. No sooner has Croesus been introduced in 1.6 than
Herodotus leaps back in time five generations, to relate how Croesus’ ancestor Gyges seized the
Lydian throne from Candaules; and he even pauses to take a further look backward at the origin of
Candaules’ dynasty among the offspring of the god Heracles, over five hundred years earlier. Much
the same back-leaping movement occurs in the narratives of the Medes, the Egyptians, and the Greeks,
tracing a continuous line of development over about three thousand years (in the case of Egypt, one of
the world’s two oldest peoples). But even such vastitudes of historical time are dwarfed by the slow
evolution of the earth’s surface, as in the formation of the land of Egypt out of Nile silt “in the vast
stretch of time before my birth” (2.11)—an expanse marked off by Herodotus in increments of ten
thousand years. Here his time scale approaches the geological, easily surpassing the biblical scheme,
which, up until the eighteenth century C.E., circumscribed all terrestrial events within a span of six
thousand years.
Of course, this reach back into the distant past had a benefit for Herodotus, as Thucydides was
quick to point out some years later: With no surviving evidence to gainsay him, Herodotus had a free
hand in embellishing, altering, or perhaps even inventing the events he records as history. Readers
who are accustomed to the empirical bias of modern-day historiography will feel at sea in the first
few books of the Histories, no longer sure where the boundary lies between fact and fiction, memory
and invention; indeed, the most accomplished experts are often unsure (as was, on some occasions at
least, Herodotus himself). In most cases, a solid grounding of recoverable facts underlies the
narrative, but many layers of imaginative material have been added, including speeches and
dialogues, omens and portents, folktales and myths. Some readers will adapt easily to this
Herodotean farrago and come to savor it as one of the text’s principal delights; others will remain
uneasy and mistrustful of the author’s intentions. In this regard I think it worth quoting at length what
Robert Alter has recently written of the historiographical method of the biblical books of Samuel:
The known general contours of the historical event are not tampered with, but the writer brings
to bear the resources of literary art in order to imagine deeply, and critically, the concrete
moral and emotional predicaments of living in history, in the political realm. To this end, the
writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters with a fine mesh of recurrent
motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of events through
allusion, metaphor and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to
understand it.2
This description, it seems to me, eloquently defines the technique Herodotus uses in the first book of
the Histories, where he often looks back as many centuries into the past as did the chroniclers who
composed the historical books of the Hebrew Bible.
The length of Herodotus’ chronology is matched by the breadth of his geography. His predecessor
Hecataeus had composed a kind of world tour in prose, probably entitled Periodos Gēs (circuit of the
earth). The surviving fragments show that this was an ambitious catalogue of the lands and peoples
known to the archaic Ionian Greeks, who, with their exposure to the intellectual crosscurrents of the
Asian mainland, had learned more about such matters than their European kinsmen. Herodotus shared
Hecataeus’ goal of depicting the entire known world and, quite possibly, borrowed some of his
information as well, but unlike his predecessor he housed his verbal world atlas within a connected
narrative framework. His is not a mere “circuit of the earth” but a study of how power advances,
stage by stage, across the globe, until it threatens to encompass under one regime all that the globe
contains. And this includes all the richly varied cultures of the earth’s peoples, ranging from the Stone
Age primitives of its least developed regions to the masters of its great urban centers, the Egyptians,
Babylonians, and the Greeks themselves, whom Herodotus never describes explicitly but whose
culture often stands as the norm against which others are evaluated.
The Persians
The framework that allows Herodotus to survey so much of the earth’s surface is the story of Medo-
Persian imperial expansion, from roughly 650 to 480. In these 170 years the map of the ancient world
underwent as much change as it had in perhaps the preceding millennium. The Medes, a nomadic
people skilled in horsemanship and archery, first entered the historical record as tribute-paying
subjects of the Assyrians in the ninth century. By the seventh century they had begun to chafe under the
overlordship of the ancient Assyrian empire, and around 650 they actually dared to attack it, with the
help of their own subjects, the Persians. Only a few decades more sufficed to make the Medes strong
enough to overcome the Assyrians and destroy the imperial capital, Nineveh, in 612. In the next
century the Persians under Cyrus overthrew the Medes and took over the territory won from Assyria,
and the Achaemenid empire was born.
World history offers few parallels to the aggressiveness and drive of this new Persian entity; only
perhaps the Mongols in the thirteenth century C.E. and the Aztecs in the fifteenth had similarly
meteoric rises to superpower status. In the thirty years following Cyrus’ accession, the Persians
subdued the kingdoms of Lydia, Chaldaea (Babylon), and Egypt, along with numerous other less
prominent realms (including the Greek cities of Ionia). A departmental system of taxation was quickly
put in place, with tribute payments collected by twenty regional satraps, or governors, being funneled
to the imperial capitals of Susa, Persepolis, and Pasargadae; all the precious metals of Asia were
drained into these coffers. Highways were built, sea routes charted, and lines of communication laid
across the length and breadth of the empire. Lands stretching from North Africa to the banks of the
Indus River were united in a single contiguous state, by far the biggest the ancient world had yet seen.
The Jews, who have left us the most complete record of how these events were perceived by
contemporary observers, attest in many of their scriptures to a sense of awe at the rapidity of the
changes around them—changes that, from their perspective, could only have been guided by a divine
hand. They chose to interpret the rise of Cyrus as part of a plan for their own redemption: For unlike
the now-fallen empires of Babylon and Assyria, the Persians were tolerant masters who did not
interfere with the religious practices of their subjects. Indeed, Cyrus’ capture of Babylon and freeing
of the captive Jewish population earned him the epithet messiah (the anointed one) in the later
sections of the book of Isaiah. Conversely, the dramatic collapses of the former overlords of the Near
East were viewed as punishments for their arrogance, over-confidence, material decadence, and
mistreatment of the Jews.
To the Greeks, by contrast, who had had very little experience of imperial subjugation prior to the
coming of Cyrus, this new Persian state looked far less benign. The Greek cities on the coast of Asia
felt the most immediate threat. Granted, they had been paying tribute to the kings of Lydia for decades,
but these were hellenized monarchs from a culture resembling their own (1.95); the Greeks even
fought on Croesus’ side in his war against Cyrus, rather than supporting the Persians as liberators. As
a result, Cyrus bore them a grudge from the time of his first arrival in western Asia Minor, and most
of them sought, in vain, to build defensive walls to resist him. These new Persian overlords,
moreover, neither knew nor respected the Greek way of life, as illustrated in the anecdote Herodotus
relates (1.153) concerning the first encounter between Persians and mainland Greeks. The prospect of