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

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δεύτερα, ‘next.’ Περσέων τοὺς δοκιμωτάτους, cp. e. 8 supra. There is an anecdote of Xerxes at Abydos related, c. 147 infra, in which οἱ πἀρεδροι figure.

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τῶνδ᾽ ... ὑμέων χρηἰζων συνέλεξα (ὑμέας）<*> χρηίζειν takes here a double genitive, like δέεσθαι.

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ἔχωμεν: the use of the first person is tactful, and altogether Xerxes comes out well in this speech, or ‘General Order,’ which comprises an appeal to his lords and officers to be good men and true, worthy of their ancestors, in view of a common object and a common good, and concludes with a compliment to the enemy, and a call to divine worship. Xerxes here shows himself brave, courteous, pious, not immodest, not insolent, not egotistic. Hdt. is generously inconsistent; cp. Introduction, § 11.

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ἐντεταμἐνως, the participial adverb; cp. 8. 128.

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οὐ μὴ ... ἀντιστῇ, the double negative with the subjunctive=a future with strong negation: Madvig, Syntax, § 124, R. 3. Xerxes is made to pay the Greeks a high compliment incidentally; but he does not affect to despise his enemy. (Cp. ἄνδρας ... ἀνθρώπων.)

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νῦν δὲ διαβαίνωμεν ἐπευξάμενοι τοῖσι θεοῖσι οἳ Πέρσας λελόγχασι, ‘but now, before crossing, let us make supplication to the gods, who have us Persians in their charge.’ There is no monotheism here (nor were the Persians of that age monotheists), nor even quite ‘Katheno-theism’ or ‘Heno-theism’ (to use F. Max Muller's term, Hibbert Lectures, 1878, 260). “It is questionable whether the Persians had the notion ascribed to them in this place of a special superintendence of different countries <nations?> by distinct deities” (Rawlinson). The verb no doubt implies a whilome partition; and the idea is undoubtedly Greek; so Homeric Poseidon describes the triple division of the universe between Zeus, Hades, and himself: Il. 15. 187 ff. τριχθὰ δὲ πάντα δέδασται, ἕκαστος δ᾽ ἔμμορε τιμῆς κτλ., the division here, however, holds not of nations, but of natural realms—Sky, Sea, and Underworld, Earth being common property. But the struggle of Poseidon and Athene περὶ τῆς χώρης was the fnndamental myth of Athens (cp. 8. 55), and the localization of deities was everywhere in order in Hellas (cp. Thuc. 2. 74. 2 “θεοὶ ὅσοι γῆν τὴν Πλαταιίδα ἔχετε”), and loeal titles among the commonest. The tribal and the national gods are thoroughly Hellenic institutions (cp. 1. 143, 144, 147, 148, 5. 49, etc.).

It is hardly reasonable to deny similar institutions and ideas to the other peoples and nations of antiquity; rather may it be said that the appropriation of gods to the nations, and of the nations to gods, is charaeteristic of antiqnity (4. 59, 79, 94 οὐδένα ἄλλον θεὸν νομίζοντες εἶναι εἰ μὴ τὸν σφέτερον, 5. 7, etc.). In the time of Hdt. this exclusiveness had been breaking down for a long time, and Greeks tended to identify their own deities with the gods of the surrounding nations, while foreign potentates and others, from policy or from piety, recognised and worshipped Greek deities. These phenomena were parts of the development of monotheism, a process the consummation of which was then still in a remote future; while, conversely, the essence of polytheism is involved in the local and tribal appropriation of deities (deity). The Persians were apparently qnite ready to recognize the gods of the nations (Kyros in Babylon, Kambyses in Egypt, Dareios and Xerxes; cp. c. 43 supra), but they still had their own especial gods (1. 131, 3. 76), and even the ruling house, or horde, its special patron deities (3. 65, 5. 106). The supposed iconoclastic monotheism of the Behistun Inscription is refuted, not merely by other Achaimenid inscriptions, bnt by the very context of Behistun.