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There follows here, by way of digression (cc. 108-113), a story of the King's Amour, or the Death of Masistes, which exhibits Hdt. at his best. A story could hardly be better told, or present more artfully the elements of a domestic tragedy, of a palace intrigue, started in passion and jealousy, culminating in torture, rebellion, death. One great defect the story, indeed, has from the moral point of view: it is the innocent who suffer, or who suffer most; the guilty king, the jealous and cruel queen, come off scot free. Two considerations may slightly relieve this objection from an aesthetic standpoint: Artaynta, the daughter of Masistes, has a good deal to answer for: she is the root of the mischief. Again, ‘rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,’ and Masistes and his sons die with arms in their hands against the king. But it eannot be said that Hdt. makes anything of these motifs. As a historian he might plead (though it is not his way!) that the faets were as he stated them, painfully immoral. and aesthetically distressing. As a moralist he might plead that the true moral lay outside the story, in the suggestion of all that Hellas had been spared by the successful resistanee to the Oriental despot, which had made such tragedies, possible in tyrants' houses, for ever impossible in Hellas! And, again, that he thus dismisses Xerxes, to go to his own place, the scorn and derision of all good men, with his lawless passions and his slavish submission to ‘the law of the Medes and Persians,’ his childish vanities (ἡσθεὶς περιβάλλεται) and his prodigal pleasures (ἡσθεὶς δὲ καὶ ταύτῃ), his humorous caprices (speeches to Masistes) and his capricious wrath (θυμωθείς). The dramatic narrative falls into five acts. (i.) The scene in Sardes: Xerxes' passion for his brother Masistes' wife: her faithfulness and virtue! and the king's ruse to win her, by wedding his son Dareios to her daughter. (ii.) The scene shifts to Susa: the king's still fouler transfer of his affections from his brother's wife to his son's wife, Artaynta. (iii.) The fatal gift: the robe of Amestris the queen: her jealousy and error: destruction to the wife of Masistes, the mother of Artaynta! (iv.) The king's birthday feast: the queen's request: the despot's involuntary humiliation. (v.) The catastrophe: wreck of the house of Masistes. (Masistes rejects the king's overtures: the mutilation of his wife: the rebellion, and its defeat.) It is an omission that Artaynta does not expressly share the fate of her family. This story might almost rank with the Hebrew story of Esther as an illustration of life at the Persian court. But, except for the external referenee above indicated, it lacks the national and popular setting, the political purpose, and therewith the ethical contents, which ennoble the Jewish tale. The Greek interest in this tale is purely reflexive. No Greek, whether man or woman, figures in this drama: the virtues of the wife of Masistes are purely domestic; her husband as the ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός, good man, husband, father, and yet rebel withal, prepared to work ‘no end of ill’ to the king, his brother, umtes to some extent the rôles of Mordecai and Haman; the king himself cuts no great figure in either tale, but here he is less of a puppet and more of a curse, while behind and over all rises the terrible figure of Amestris, ‘a fury slinging flame,’ a barbarian fiend incarnate. (If Ahasuerus = Xerxes, Esther would = Amestris. But that cannot be, “if we accept the stories which Hdt. tells of Amestris,” and which the Jews tell of Esther.)
ἐν δὲ τῇσι Σάρδισι: cp. 8. 117 supra; it is, however, a question whether Xerxes was in Sardes at this time, and not rather engaged, in upper Asia, in the reduction of the revolted satrapy of Babylon; cp. C. F. Lehmann, ‘Xerxes und die Babylonier,’ Wochensch. f. Klass. Philologie, 1900, 959-965, Ed. Meyer, G.d.A. iii. p. xiv.; Appendix VII. § 2. ἐτύγχανε ἐών marks a coincidence, which is not causally related to the antecedents, or rather concomitants. Xerxes, as we are here given to understand, spent the winter of 480-79 B.C., and at least the whole of the ensuing summer, in Sardes, presumably awaiting the issue of the campaign in Greece. Aischylos (Persai) makes Xerxes return direct from Athens to Susa.
φυγών accepts the representation of the king's return as a φυγή. τότε δή: at the time of the battle of Mykale; or perhaps more generally throughout the period from his return to the battle of Mykale. ἄρα: cp. c. 104. 3 supra. ἄρα ἤρα looks unfortunate. Stein compares the position of ἄρα here and in c. 9 supra and in 4. 134 (i.e. construes it with ἐν τῇσι Σάρδισι ἐών?). τῆς Μασίστεω γυναικ<*>ς: that this lady is anonymous in the story does not make for its credit. Was she possibly, like her daughter, an Ἀρταΰντη, and possibly again a relative, a sister, of the Artayntes who has figured above? Masistes apparently throughout has only one wife. She had not accompanied her lord on the march to Greece (cp. 7. 187), but had probably come down to meet him on his return to Sardes with Xerxes.
προσπέμποντι: sc. άγγέλους The subject of ἐδύνατο may be ἡ γυνή (van H. takes it to be τὸ ἐπεθύμει).
προμηθεόμενος, ‘out of respect for . .’; a genitive might be expected. εἶχε, ‘supported,’ ‘upheld.’
εὖ γάρ κτλ., ‘for she well knew that violence would not be employed against her.’
ἐργόμενος is middle; cp. 7. 197. 21 supra. τὸν γάμον τοῦτον refers to the following θυγατέρα. The verb πρήσσει has, perhaps, a suggestion of intrigue: he indeed was hoping still to get hold of the mother (λάμψεσθαι = λήψεσθαι: cp. Smyth, Ionic § 130, p. 136).
Δαρείῳ: this Dareios was the eldest son, and on the assassination of his father in 465 B.C was falsely accused of the crime, and executed by his youngest brother Artaxerxes; Ktesias, Pers. 29; Gilmore, p. 158 f. Had all this happened when this story was first contrived?
ἐς Σοῦσα: the scene shifts to the capital; cp. 8. 99, 7. 151 supra, and 5. 54. ἠγάγετο: the middle is generally used of the bridegroom, here of the father-in-law. This word marks the actual marriage; the practices (πρήσσει） and the performances of the usual rites (τὰ νομιζόμενα ποιήσας), at Sardes previously, only amounted to a betrothal (ἁρμόσας). The crown-prince lives apparently in his father's palace, even after his marriage: is this improbable?
οὕτω δὴ ... ἐπέπαυτο: this pluperfect is plainly rhetorical, and not used of strict temporal sequence. ὃ δέ: the subject is re-expressed, and the δέ attached, for the sake of emphasis; cp. c. 106. 7 supra.
διαμειψάμενος ἤρα, ‘transferred his affections’: perhaps the δια- (in comp.) marks the completeness of the change, ἤρα τε καὶ έτύγχανε the rapidity of his success. For τυγχάνειν cp. 5. 23 (ἕτυχε), and τευξομένη supra, τεύξεσθαι c. 109 infra.
Ἀρταὕντη: the mere identity of name with Artayntes, c. 107 supra, is not, of course, sufficient to prove any connexion between the house of Masistes and that of his colleague and foeman; but the name is of ill-omen for the house anyway—and perhaps for that reason the daughter of Masistes bears it.
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