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

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Ἀρτεμβάρης must have been father of Cherasmis; and he might just perhaps have been the Artembares whose son (Cherasmis?) Kyros had bullied 1. 114, somewhere about 570 B.C, though the exigencies of that anecdote require Artembares to have been a ‘Mede.’ Artayktes, the governor of Sestos, is not a young man in 479 B.C. His father might have been a boy with Kyros nearly a century before (two generations will sometimes exceed a century). The whole anecdote here is, however, full of inconsequence. The scene is placed just after the overthrow of Astyages (κατελὼν Ἀστυάγην); but the Kyros of this anecdote is plainly le bon père, and the ἔπος εὖ εἰρημένον ascribed to him ought plainly to be thought of as his legacy and testament to the ‘Persians.’

ἐστὶ ὁ ... ἐξηγησάμενος, ‘is (was) the real author of a proposal . .’; cp. 5. 31 σὺ ἐς οἶκον τὸν βασιλέος ἐξηγητὴς γίνεαι πρηγμάτων άγαθῶν. The construction ἐστὶ (ὁ) ἐξ. of course gives no colour to the construction of the substantive verb with aorist participle. ὑπολαβόντες here ‘took up and . .’ as we might say; cp. 3. 146, and contr. 7. 101.

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Κύρῳ προσήνεικαν. Blakesley too ingeniously interprets ‘attributed to Cyrus,’ and his remarks upon the barbarism of Artembares are directed to the wrong address. The words obviously mean ‘reported to Kyros.’

Ζεύς: cp. 7. 40 supra.

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ἡγεμονίην: sc. ἐθνέων, cp. 1. 95.

κατελὼν Ἀστυάγην (N.B. not κατε- λόντι). As Astyages had been the representative of the Median ἀρχή the Persians and Artembares regard themselves now as masters of all Asia; cp. 7. 8 supra. That position was not really attained until Lydia and Babylon at any rate had been conquered too. In Bk. 1 the conquest of Lydia, the overthrow of Kroisos, make Kyros master of all Asia (cp. 1. 130, also 1. 71). This anecdote is from a different (and less philo-Lydian) source.

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φέρε: an adverbial imperative, ‘come!’ L. & S. sub v. ix. 2.

γῆν ... ὀλίγην καὶ ταύτην τρηχέαν: cp. χώρην ἔχοντες τρηχέαν 1. 71. Hdt. himself nowhere (not even in 3. 97) describes Persis proper in any detail. As a general description of the land this phrase here is sufficiently accurate, and the later Greek writers endorse it; cp. Plato, Laws 695, Arrian, Anab. 5. 4. 5. For modern descriptions cp. Curzon, Persia 2 vv. (1892); Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia (1902); Rawlinson, Ancient Monarchies iv. (1867); Duncker, Hist. of Antiq. Bk. vii. c. i. (E.T. vol. v. pp. 3 ff., 1881); Perrot and Chipiez, Art in Persia, E.T. (1892) pp. 2-8; Reclus, Universal Geogr. E.T. vol. ix c. iv.; Ency. Brit. xviii. 561, etc. ete. Cp. note l. 18 infra.

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μεταναστάντες ... σχῶμεν, ‘let us emigrate ... and seize . .’ So σχόντες just below. cp. 7. 164. 5, and Index for the strong ἔχειν.

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ἀστυγείτονες, adjectivally, and without stress on the first word in composition; cp. 6. 99.

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πλέοσι, pluribus hominibus (Baehr); in mehr Stucken (Stein). This idea for a wholesale and voluntary migration expresses, no doubt, (a) a current notion, cp. 8. 140, 62, etc., (b) a genuine vera causa at the back of many movements of populations and peoples, cp. 7. 20, etc. But the position here is slightly different. The Persians are supposed already to have dominion over all Asia; they can take tribute and gifts from all their subjects without evacuating their own land. Cp. note l. 18 infra.

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Κῦρος δὲ ... ἐκέλευε ποιέειν ταῦτα: Kyros is, of course, conceived as speaking ironically: ‘do as you propose and become subjects instead of rulers’ αὐτοῖσι παραίνεε κελεύων is a resumptive parenthesis. οὕτω δέ as part of his speech = ταῦτα δὲ ποιήσαντας.

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οὐκέτι ἄρξοντας ἀλλ᾽ ἀρξομένους: the same antithesis (in a more restricted sense) 7. 162 supra.

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φιλέειν γὰρ ... τὰ πολέμια. The relation between ‘Physics and Politics’ occupied a large space in the minds of Greek thinkers. Hdt.'s own work is saturated with the assumption of a connexion between race and place, between climate and institutions. His interest in the varieties of human kind makes him the father of Anthropology, as his sense of the unity and continuity of human adventure and experience makes him the ‘father of history.’ Hence his descriptions of the land and river of Egypt as a prelude to his account of the people, their manners and institutions; and so too with Skythia and the Skythians, Libya and the Libyans, the ends of the earth, and the more familiar coasts of the Aigaian. Hdt. has in a remarkable degree the sense of the relativity of human institutions; it is a part of the sophistical illumination of the age, just begun. It had done something to correct the exaggerated notion of the omnipotence of the Nomothetes. It attains formal expression in the work of his great contemporary Hippokrates of Kos, de aere aquis et locis (Hippocr. opera, vol. i. ed. Kvehlewein, 1895), and the philosophy of the reaction, with its practical concern for the ideal city-state, does not fail to realise that for the πόλις κατ᾽ εὐχήν a site, a climate, a race κατ᾽ εὐχήν must also be posited. Thucydides (more clearly than Hdt.) mediates the action of physics on politics through the economic conditions (as in his Archaiologia): this profounder analysis was not lost in the sequel; Aristotle, for example, not only generalizes (or preserves the generalization) on the relation between τροφή and βίος (Politics 1. 8 = 1256 a), but traces in a fashion the merits of the Greek nation to its happy position between the barbarous extremes of cold and heat, of Europe and Asia (Pol. 4 (7). 7 = 1327 b). It stands to reason that the lesser differences between one Greek folk and another might be in part traceable to differences in the physicogeographical environment; and as a matter of fact the popular philosophy of Greece early ascribed the superiority of the Attic race to the advantages of its climate, traced the genesis of political parties to features in the Atticlandscape— the shore, the plain, the mountain— or ascribed the development of the democracy (somewhat superficially) to the growing importance of the sea, and sea-power, in the life of the city. Livy (38. 17) puts a speech into the mouth of Cn. Manlius (A.U.C. 565) on the Gallograeci, which might be taken as a commentary on this text; but in general the Roman conqueror believed in race (fortes creantur fortibus), and under the cosmopolitan rule of Rome, whether imperial or pontifical, much of the sense of the relativity of human institutions passed out of consciousness, to be rediscovered and reintroduced with the revival of Greek letters and the return to nature. The idea is now a commonplace of every history of civilisation, or philosophy of history; but an initial place in the bibliography of the subject must always be reserved for Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, 1748 (Livres xiv.-xviii.), as also for Buckle's Hist. of Civilization in England (1857), c. ii. The regnum hominis, much as it has advanced in our own day, has not yet succeeded in completely emancipating Man from the physico-geographical conditions of polity; climate, soil, structure, position, and even physical aspect, are permanent though modifiable factors in the life and character of the race.

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συγγνόντες ... ἀποστάντες, ἑσσωθέντες: the piling of these participles is a little clumsy. With the first cp. συγγνούς abs. 7. 13 supra (melius edocti, Stein); or συγγινώσκων (οἱ) λέγειν ἀληθέα 4. 43 (Baehr). The ἀπόστασις here is merely a retirement from the Presence. The defeat (ἧσσα) is purely dialectical, and precedes or coincides with the σύγγνοια.

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ἄρχειν τε εἵλοντο λυπρὴν οἰκέοντες. As history, this statement is hardly correct; the ‘Persian folk’ may have remained in Persis proper, but the nobles certainly came down into the richer and civilized portions of the empire to a considerable extent; and the dynasty resided as a rule less in Pasargadai (Persia proper) than in Susa (Elam) or Ekbatana (Media), or Babylon. As geography, the description of Persis proper is unduly severe; though Fars might compare ill with Babylonia, or even Susiana (cp. E. Meyer, G. d. Alterth. iii. (1901) p. 18). As argument, the conclusion looks, at first sight, oddly infelicitous for the last word of a record, which has exhibited in unsparing colours the attempt of the Persians to extend their empire over Hellas, an attempt ending in failure and flight, the prelude to further loss and forfeiture. But something else is in Hdt.'s mind. Mutato nomine fabula narratur. He is too delicate to dictate to the Greeks, or it may be to the Athenians; but the lesson is there for those who have ears to hear. It is at once the rationale of the Greek success, and a call to future expansion. The men λυπρὴν οἰκέοντες, the nurslings of poverty (7. 102) and hard fare (9. 82)—theirs is the victory, and theirs the empire, if they will: what the Persians had done in the days of Kyros, why should not the Greeks do in the days of Kimon, or of Perikles?

Such a moral belongs to a period long before the Peloponnesian war, and fits in well with the many other evidences that the story of the Great Invasion of 480-79 B.C. was composed early in the period of Hdt.'s literary labours. This anecdote, which conveys, in dramatic form, the rationale and the moral of the war, no doubt in the first instance was designed as the conclusion of Bks. 7, 8, 9, though it now serves as the hardly less appropriate colophon to the whole work. It is an anecdote which is hardly consistent with the representation of Kyros in Bk. 1, and especially of his end: it seems to belong to one of those other cycles of stories on the later years of Kyros which Hdt. rejected when he came to deal with the passing of Kyros as itself an integral portion of his work (cp. 1. 214 ad f.).

It might even have been this finale to his work, as originally conceived and drafted, which led Hdt. back to the investigations, τόν τε Κῦρον ὅστις ἐὼν τὴν Κροίσου ἀρχὴν κατεῖλε, καὶ τοὺς Πέρσας ὅτεῳ τρόπῳ ἡγήσαντο τῆς Ἀσίης, which now bulk so large in Bk. 1. And thus, indeed, to use Rawlinson's simile, ‘the tail of the snake is curved round into his mouth’ in the completed work of Hdt., which forms a whole now, with a clear Beginning, Middle, and End. Historically and artistically the work is complete and concluded, though not, indeed, equally or evenly finished throughout: a phenomenon which the prior genesis of the latest portion, and the subsequent addition of the earlier, introductory, and discursive parts, go some way to explain. Blakesley, who, while recognizing the earlier composition of the last three Books, nevertheless holds the work to be incomplete, questions the authenticity of this chapter.