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

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πρῶτα μέν answered by μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα, c. 33. W. M. Ramsay (St. Paul the Traveller and the R. Citizen, p. 27) maintains that πρῶτος is a strict superlative, and implies three degrees. πρώτιστος (Homeric) is not necessarily fatal to that; but it helps to explain the fact that πρῶτα is practically a positive, or at most a comparative (‘prior,’ not ‘prime’) in Hdt., and has ceased to imply more than duality.

κήρυκας (not ἀγγέλους). (The first mission, by Dareios, in 491 B.C., 6. 48.) The mission of these heralds at this point to demand ‘earth and water’ is a little puzzling, and seems the more confused by the secondary purpose of commandeering dinners for the king. The motivation for this second mission (Xerxes wished to find out exactly how little resistance he had to expect) is quaintly, not to say awkwardly put: a symptom of some unsoundness in the passage. That these heralds were sent everywhere (τῇ τε ἄλλῃ πάντῃ) in Hellas but to Athens and Lakedaimon is vague, to say the least of it; a list of cities or tribes here would have been more convincing. Finally, the absence of any reason for the exceptions here is doubly remarkable, in view of cc. 133-137 infra. As the king wished to punish Athens for Marathon (c. 8 1. 30 supra) there is no need to explain why Athens was not included in the scope of the heralds' instructions; but the omission of Sparta is not so easy to account for if Hdt. was acquainted with the story, cc. 133 ff. infra, when he first wrote this passage. Perhaps this text belongs to the earliest draft of the seventh book, and the chief problem is to explain the insertion of that story below rather than in this place; cp. notes ad l., and Introduction, § 9. The return of these ‘heralds’ is recorded c. 131 infra.