This text is part of:
κατασκόπους ... ἄνδρας τρεῖς: this story would be more credible had the names and cities of the ‘spies’ been preserved. Were they all Spartans? Or was there one Spartan with two Athenians? Or were they from three different states? Or how were they describable? The confederate Greeks would surely have had many sources of information open to them in Asia, but they might well have wished to be informed by trustworthy emissaries of their own, and it would doubtless have been easy for European Greeks to have haunted the Persian camp all along, provided that the Greek subjects of the king did not betray them. Such a mission, and more than one, there may have been; but the story of these anonymous spies is given such an obviously characteristic moral that one is tempted to suspeet it of being fabulous, but cp. ce. 135 ff. supra. Is that story of the ‘scapegoats’ a doublette of this story of the ‘spies,’ or vice versa? The variation in the figures (2: 3) is not fatal to an affirmative.
ἐς Σάρδις: this item serves to date the Congress, by which the spies had been commissioned, to the winter of 481-80 B.C., or at latest the beginning of spring. Even so, they would not have seen the whole forces of the king (τὴν βασιλέος στρατιήν), cp. cc. 26, 40, 44, 59 supra, but only one of the corps d'armée; though that of course is not Hdt.'s view. He assumes here, as elsewhere, that the whole forces of the kiug were massed at Sardes in the year 481-80 B.C.; cp. πάντα τε τὸν πεζὸν στρατὸν καὶ τὴν ἵππον infra.
ὡς ἐπάιστοι ἐγένοντο: the method of discovery requires statement; who betrayed them? If these ‘spies’ were Sperthias and Boulis, they made themselves known. βασανισθέντες ὑπὸ τῶν στρατηγῶν: Schweighaeuser and Baehr deny ‘torture.’ In 1. 116, 2. 151, the context shows that the word is used without connoting actual torture; but in this passage the circumstances are such that torture was probable. Cp. Thuc. 7. 86. 4, 8. 92. 2. The names of the Persian commanders, c. 82 supra. This story gives neither their names nor their number; perhaps only the two in command of the main or mid-column were there (cp. c. 121 supra).
τῶν τινας δορυφόρων: on the order of the words cp. e. 143 supra. The king's behest would have been given perhaps to Hydarnes, who was in command of the Immortals, if not actually satrap of Sardes.
ἐς ὄψιν τὴν βασιλέος: cp. c. 136. Were these ‘spies’ not made to kowtow?
σφέας is governed by περιάγοντας: with ἐπιδείκνυσθαι σφίσι may be understood. Cp. note c. 136. 3 supra.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.