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

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ἔπεμπε: was the postal route really carried all round the Aegean, from Athens to the Hellespont, and so on to Susa? Was there no system of signalling? Cp. 9. 3 infra. The parataxis with τε ἅμα καί may be notieed; the need for special emphasis is not obvious.

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σφι would seem to refer primarily to (ἐς) Πέρσας, where the συμφορή was not, strictly speaking, παρεοῦσα—at least until the news arrived. It may be taken to cover all Persians—those at home being involved unwittingly in the disaster to those abroad. The word can hardly be taken simply with ἀγγελέοντα —and ἐς Πέρσας is practically rather locative than ethnical.

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ἐστὶ οὐδὲν ὅ τι θᾶσσον παραγίνεται θνητὸν ἐόν, ‘there is nothing which comes along so fast—and yet is mortal.’ This saying has almost a touch of autopsis, and is more forcible than the stereotyped τῶν ἡμεῖς ἴδμεν. (But cp. 2. 68 for the two in combination.) There are two points in which this account of the Persian postal service has a special interest for the problem of Hdt.'s composition (i.) This passage conflicts with 3. 105 εἶναι δὲ ταχυτῆτα οὐδενὶ ἑτέρῳ ὅμοιον, οὕτω ὥστε, εἰ μὴ προλαμβάνειν τοὺς Ἰνδοὺς τῆς ὁδοῦ ἐν ᾧ τοὺς μύρμηκας συλλέγεσθαι, οὐδένα ἂν σφέων ἀποσώζεσθαι. Hdt. must have forgotten the one passage in writing the other. (ii.) A more important point: the Persian postal service is taken for granted in 3. 126 without description, and the very term itself—ἀγγαρήιον here explained—is used. (The substitution of ἀγγελιηφόρον is the substitution of the gloss for the text) This passage, therefore, would appear to be of earlier composition than Bk. 3, although one must admit that the description of the post has not been introduced at the first possible occasion even in these Books (e.g. e. 54 supra). In 1. 216 the horse is described as πάντων τῶν θνητῶν τὸ τάχιστον—a statement not inconsistent with this passage, but in a different genre.

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οὕτω ... ἐξεύρηται τοῦτο, ‘this swiftness the Persians have secured by the invention of those special messengers’; or, perhaps, ‘this institution of messengers is a Persian invention for securing extraordinary rapidity.’ Stein renders οὕτω adeo sollerter, comparing 4. 200 τοῦτο μὲν δὴ οὕτω ἐξευρέθη. But there the οὕτω may be merely modal, referring to the method of diseovery just previously deseribed. Others, again, boldly refer the whole sentence to what follows; so Rawlinson, “and this is the method of it” (which will hardly do). It is unlikely, by the way, that ‘the Persians’ invented this conrier service, or imperial post, though Xenophon, Kyrop. 8. 6. 17 f, ascribes it to Kyros, and Baehr—on general grounds—to Dareios. The invention may be taken to be centuries older than either, and to have been employed by all the great empires and kingdoms which were now merged in the Persian. It is substantially one with the system of the Prairle Post, or Pony Express, described by Mark Twain in Roughing it, c. vni.

λέγουσι: with this admission we relapse upon hearsay, or it may be a previous writer's description (Hekataios?). ἡ πᾶσα ὁδός, if it referred primarily to any actual route, would probably be the Royal Road, described in 5. 52 f., along whieh no doubt the Anatolian posts travelled. But the word is here of purely generic significance.

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διεστᾶσι, ‘are posted at intervals’— of a day's journey: in σταθμοί no doubt.

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τοὺς οὔτε νιφετός κτλ. Cp. Mark Twain l.c. “No matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his ‘beat’ was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, . ... he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind! There was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness — just as it happened.”

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μὴ οὐ κατανύσαι: a simple instance of the idiom, which follows not merely the express negative οὔτε, but the implicit negative in ἔργει = κωλύει = οὐκ ἐᾷ. The repetition of οὔτε by οὐκ is rhetorical: nearly the same sequence in 1. 132. αὐτῷ after τούς (relative) almost = ἑκάστῳ.

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διεξέρχεται: sc. τὰ ἐντεταλμένα— presumably tablets, 7. 239 supra, or βυβλία, 3. 128, 5. 14 (in which passage one ἱππεύς apparently carries the βυβλίον from sender to recipient).

κατά περ <ἐν> Ἕλλησι ἡ λαμπαδηφορίη, ‘just like in Greece the torchbearing, with which they conclude the Festival of Hephaistos.’ The reference is to such a performance as that described by Plato, Rep 328 (in honour of Bendis), though the λαμπὰς ἀφ᾽ ἵππων is there treated as a novelty (καινόν γε τοῦτο). Nor is the point of the comparison in Hdt. the presence of horses, but the passing of the torch from one man to another (λαμπάδια ἔχοντες διαδώσουσιν ἀλλήλοις). The method described by Pausanias 1. 30. 2 of the race from the Akademeia to the Akropolis, in which each competitor carried a lighted torch (if he could) all the way, would not offer a true analogy. In 6. 105 Hdt. mentions a λαμπάς at Athens in honour of Pan—probably of the latter type.

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τοῦτο ... καλέουσι Πέρσαι ἀγγαρήιον has an unfortunately gloss-like appearance, and might easily be an addition, even if from the author's hand. The fact remains that the word ἀγγαρήιον is also to be read 3, 126, naturally used; cf. note above. It was familiar in Greece before the days of Hdt. So Aischylos, Agamemnon 282 “φρυκτὸς δὲ φρυκτὸν δεῦρ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἀγγάρου πυρὸς ἔπεμπεν” —of the fire-signals crossing the Aegean; cp 9, 3 infra. ἀγγαρεύειν is found in N.T.; angaria and angariare in Later Latin. Suidas has articles on ἀγγαρεία, ἄγγαρος (bis), ἄγγαροι, οἱ ἐκ διαδοχῆς γραμματοφόροι οἱ δὲ αὐτοὶ καὶ ἀστάνδαι. τὰ δὲ ὀνόματα Περσικά. In the Roman Empire the words had come to be used for any compulsory or enforced service. H. C. R. ap. Rawl. derives the word from hakkáreh, ‘a man fit for every sort of work,’ ‘a messenger’ (“a slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands”), and notices that courier dromedaries are still known throughtout India and Persia as karhareh.