Reginald Walter Macan, Herodotus, The Seventh, Eighth, & Ninth Books with Introduction and Commentary

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ἦλθε ἀγγελίη: who brought this intelligence? Doubtless his own scouts and cavalry. Probably the arrival of this information, or perhaps an ineffectual attempt to capture Megara—no doubt a well-walled city—encouraged Mardonios to hope that the Greeks would follow him into Boiotia; the next news, that they were in full force at the Isthmos, convinced him.

πρόδρομον ἄλλην στρατιὴν ἥκειν ἐς Μέγαρα Λακεδαιμονίων χιλίους. This may not have been the whole force; there had been but 300 ‘Spartans’ at Thermopylai; perhaps this was really the avant-garde of the whole army, and Mardonios would feel that unless he was prepared to do battle in Attica, the time had come to retire. πρόδρομον and ἄλλην are not quite consistent; ἄλλην is relative to the previous message of the Argives; πρόδρομον is a bit of information which might or might not have been reported to Mardonios, but at any rate shows that the force at Megara was not a tertium quid, but a portion of the levée en masse. See, however, App. Crit. Mardonios is next credited with a wish, a plan, and an attempt to catch or capture this force (ἕλοι, Homeric; cp. Il. 2. 37 “Πριάμου πόλιν”, 13. 42 νῆας Ἀχαιῶν, 21. 102 πολλοὺς ζωούς). To do so he returns apparently on his tracks (ὑποστρέψας） and leads his whole force against Megara. Such conduet is inconsistent with his deliberate intention to withdraw into Boiotia, for the good and sufficient reasons set forth in the previous chapter. Possibly Mardonios fought a ‘rear-guard action,’ or sought to retard the advance of the Peloponnesians, while he evacuated Attica. He could not view with equanimity the penetration of Boiotia by the Peloponnesian army (via Dryoskephalai) before he had evacuated Attica, even though Thebes was probably held, and held strongly, by a Persian (or Makedonian) garrison; nor did he desire to fight the great battle in Attica at all. His cavalry, or a few squadrons of cavalry, employed in harrying the Megarid, doubtless retired either by Dryoskephalai or even by Aigosthena into Boiotia, while the main column marched by the eastern pass or passes; see next chapter.

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ἐπὶ τὰ Μέγαρα: apparently Megara, unlike Athens, was fully fortified, and strongly held. No previous attack upon it has been mentioned; and the Megarid had escaped a Persian visitation in the previous year, improbable as such immunity may in itself appear, cp. 8. 70. The loss of Megara was treated by Themistokles, 8. 60, as the certain consequence of the evacuation of Salamis: per contra, the victory at Salamis may have saved the city. Even now only the χώρα suffers. That would practically be the plain lying between the Kerata, Geraneia, and the two seas. The city itself possessed two citadels (Pausan. 1. 39. 5, 42. 1): hence perhaps the plural form of the name.

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ἐς ταύτην δὴ ... ἀπίκετο. “Here was the furthest point in Europe towards the setting sun to which this Persian army ever penetrated,” Rawlinson. “This was the furthest point [not ‘the westernmost’] of Europe, looking westward, which was reached” (by this army of Persians), Blakesley. “This was the furthest land in Europe towards the sun-setting to which this Persian army came,” Macaulay. Blakesley is no doubt right in saying that the emphasis is not on the exact orientation, but on the distance; nevertheless the orientation is given, and involves Hdt., or his cartographer, unwittingly in error. Hdt. evidently conceives of Central Greece as running approximately north and south (cf. his orientation of Thermopylai 7. 176). It did not occur to him, when he wrote this passage, that not merely was Delphi (visited ex hypothesi by the Persians, 8. 35) far to the west of the Megarid, but that the whole route of the Persian forces in Central Greece, Mardonios' march from Thessaly in this very spring, had lain west of the point here marked as the furthest point of Europe in the west reached by the Persian arms. The orientation, then, breaks down equally whether Hdt. meant by the words αὕτη στρατιή the army (cp. 6. 12 where it is used absolutely for πεζὸς στρατός) of Xerxes or the army of Mardonios; and this passage evidently belongs to a composition to be dated before Hdt.'s own visit to Europe, to Delphi, Thebes and Central Greece, and was left standing, perhaps by oversight, after he must have known better (perhaps like the Thermopylai orientation). Cp. Introduction, § 9. Hdt. certainly did not mean that another Persian army had penetrated further, i.e. further westwards, into Europe; but he may have had in his mind the possibilities that other Persian armies had penetrated further into Europe, to wit, northward, or north-eastwards (having regard to his conception of the continent); and he probably has no special intention of distinguishing here the army of Mardonios from the army of Xerxes.