This book started out as a PhD thesis completed at University College London in 2001. The original intention of that PhD was to produce a new approach to understanding religious interaction in the fourth century ad by exploring the writings of Libanius and Chrysostom alongside one another. I hoped to gain access to processes of religious interaction in a way that is not usually possible for the ancient world by taking advantage of the fact that these two authors, from different religious traditions, were working and writing in the city of Antioch almost contemporaneously. The original project did not get as close to achieving this goal as I would have liked. Four years of post-graduate study was barely enough time to get to grips with the massive body of material provided by Libanius and Chrysostom, let alone to develop a new theoretical model for understanding what their writings tell us about religious interaction. When I began to think about turning the PhD into a publishable book, it very quickly became clear that a lot more work was needed in order to make my study match the claims I was making for it. Over the last two years I have been engaged in this work and have tried to develop a strong theoretical grounding for ideas that previously had only embryonic form.

Scholarly responses to this most challenging speech fall into diverse categories:

1. Socles' speech is ‘incredibly inapt to the occasion’.

2. Herodotus is just using the occasion to tell stories.

3. The speech is a mélange of opposing political traditions: Athenian democratic, Corinthian anti-tyrant, Cypselid anti-Bacchiad and Panhellenic, the latter propagated by Delphi.

4. It exhibits the narrative leisureliness of inserted stories in Homer.

5. It is one of the main statements of Herodotus the tyrant-hater, or – more sophisticatedly – one of the main items in Herodotus’ tyrannical template/typology/model.

6. As contextualized, it serves more to prompt reflections about contemporary and recent history than to explain the historical situation of 504.

7. Its moralizing is unintelligent, because what really motivates states is self-interest, as largely applies to Sparta here, and the reinstatement of tyranny at Athens on this occasion would ultimately have entailed less destruction than the toleration of Athenian democracy.

8. Its emotive rhetoric aims to scare the audience into agreement.

9. The apparent inappropriateness of some of the material is only apparent and the oblique storytelling approach matches a tricky diplomatic situation.

Some of these views are diametrically opposed. Others differ only in degree. Some convict Herodotus of incompetence, others of literary opportunism. Some emphasize the oral Herodotus, others the written. Some see the speech as detached from its context, others as fully contextualized. Some are free-standing, others combinable.

Herodotus 5.55–95 deals with events that laid the foundation for Athens' greatness in the fifth century, namely her liberation from the tyranny that Peisistratus established and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus continued after his death, and the reforms of Cleisthenes. Most of the history of Greece arises in the earlier books of Herodotus' Histories as digressions from the main account of the rise and expansion of eastern power; for example, the story of the acquisition of the tyranny at Athens by Peisistratus arises out of Croesus' search for the strongest allies among the Greeks (1.56–64). Herodotus 5.55–95 is another such digression. It takes the form of a flashback (analepsis). The arrival of Aristagoras at Athens with his appeal for assistance against the Persians generates it (5.55.1), and the decision of the Athenians to accept his appeal and send ships and troops for the liberation of Ionia closes it (5.97.1–3). Within the digression Herodotus seems to choose material that charts the increase in the strength of the Athenians – presumably because her strength is why Aristagoras chooses to approach her after the Spartans refused him. He says famously at 5.78: isēgoriē is an excellent thing, since under tyranny, the Athenians played the coward since they were working for a master, but once liberated they worked for themselves and became far more militarily powerful than before.

BACKGROUND

This volume is devoted to the logoi of a single Book of Herodotus' Histories (Book 5). It derives from a Colloquium entitled ‘Reading Herodotus' held at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University in July 2002. The rationale behind the Colloquium was to gather together a group of Herodotean readers to explore the texture of individual logoi, their place in the structure of Herodotus’ narrative, and their significance for interpreting the history that he offers us. To this end, each contributor undertook to focus on a logos in Book 5, examining not only its content, but also its logic and language. We hoped that the project of bringing together different readers to address the same book in concert, but with distinctive voices and guided by different logoi, would provide an apt demonstration of just how much may be required to read Herodotus in all his complexity.

When we took the decision to publish the papers that had been presented at the Colloquium, we were keen to preserve the spirit of the conference and the tone of the original papers, which varied in approach and took the kind of interpretative risks that are associated with exploratory reading and debate. We have tried to give the reader a sense of publication as conversation by throwing open our original discussions to a larger audience. To some extent this has already begun to happen in the published volume, as new voices have joined the original discussion and have opened it up in different directions.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the Aeginetan digression in Herodotus 5.82–9. It argues that the passage does not just provide the background to Athenian–Aeginetan hostilities but also offers an ambitious reflection on the nature of historical change more generally. There have been two detailed analyses of the passage in the twentieth century. Dunbabin discusses its value as a historical source for the Archaic Period, whereas Figueira asks what it tells us about Herodotus' use of sources and the political circumstances of the fifth century that shape his narrative. The present reading differs from its predecessors in that it does not try to reconstruct history or historiographical context, but instead traces the different conceptions of the past that Herodotus interweaves in this passage.

Recent scholarship has asked how Herodotus works with the types of history that were available to him. Critics have focused particularly on the opposition between a distant past and more recent history, each of them characterized by its own rules and purpose. It has been suggested that the earliest past familiar to Herodotus largely corresponds to the ‘mythical’ events known from epic, tragedy and other traditional narratives; whereas recent history starts roughly with the reign of Croesus and has a more ‘realistic’ texture.

PUSHOVERS AND PUTTINGS-ACROSS: ARISTAGORAS AT ATHENS

1. (a) Apparently it is easier to impose upon a crowd than upon an individual, for Aristagoras, who had failed to impose upon Cleomenes, succeeded with thirty thousand Athenians.

2. (b) It seems to be easier to fool a crowd than a single person, since Aristagoras could not persuade Cleomenes of Lacedaemon, who was all alone, but he succeeded with thirty thousand Athenians.

3. (Herodotus 5.97.2, tr. (a) de Sélincourt and (b) Waterfield)

If Aristagoras were a website, he would be full of links. The most obvious link here is between the way he played matters at Sparta (5.49–51) and the way he is now more successful at Athens: hence this famous comment that it is εὐπετ⋯στερον – ‘easier’, or more literally ‘more of a pushover’ – to διαβ⋯λλειν thirty thousand people than one – not really Waterfield's ‘fool’ or ‘persuade’, nor even quite de Sélincourt's ‘impose upon’, but rather ‘put one across’. More on these boldly daring choices of colloquial translation in a moment: but, however we translate them, we shall anyway see that those two words εὐπετ⋯ς and διαβ⋯λλειν are almost Aristagoras’ signature tunes. At Athens Aristagoras has indeed just used εὐπετ⋯ς of the Persian foe: they are hopeless with shield and spear, and would be such a pushover (εὐπετ⋯ες τε χειρωθ⋯ναι εἴησαν, 5.97.1).

INTRODUCTION

What we now call Herodotus' ‘Book 5’ begins with a historical anecdote about the Paeonian defeat of the Perinthians (5.1–2), followed by a description of Thracian customs (5.3–10). The two logoi are seemingly inconsequential, aside from the fact that they share a focus on Thrace and that they both seem, in the opinion of most people, to make a rather unpromising contribution to their respective genres of history and ethnography. However, this cursory evaluation may prove misleading: the prominent position of these logoi in the wider narrative and the geopolitical significance of the Thracian coast – the location they narrate – in Herodotus' time, recommend a closer look. In the analysis that follows, I will be concerned with four general aspects of the logoi that are at the same time central to Herodotean studies:

1. the textual and conceptual interplay between these seemingly disparate logoi;

2. the function of these chapters in the Histories as a transition to a narrative of Persian engagement with mainland Greeks in Books 5–9 and as a prelude to Herodotus' account of the Ionian Revolt;

3. the possibility that they provide programmatic reading strategies in miniature for the ensuing (and preceding) narrative; and

4. the implications that interpretation of these logoi has for the meaning of the Histories in their wider contemporary (political) context.

I adopt two premises in what follows: namely that it is meaningful to consider these stories as the beginning of Book 5 and also to discuss them together.

The image of the bridge is germane to the spirit of a volume that seeks to identify and explain connections between different logoi in Herodotus' Histories. The bridges in Herodotus' work have the potential to reveal the constructedness of the narrative and the transitions between different sections within this narrative. Bridging can also represent the historical operation that twenty-first-century readers are obliged to perform as we attempt to read historically and to make connections with the work's implied audiences.

The transition between Books 4 and 5 of the Histories coincides, neatly, with the interstitial space of the Hellespont and marks a shift in subject matter as Herodotus links the acts of conquest undertaken by foreign rulers in distant lands (narrated in Books 1–4) with the extension of conquest into the Greek arena (narrated in Books 6–9). In the following discussion of chapters 23–7, I will examine how the geographical gulf of the Hellespont serves to highlight cultural gaps and differences and, as a marker that features in several significant campaigns, highlights gaps in understanding on the part of different agents in the Histories. As a symbolic space between two continents that has geographical, ethnographical, and historical significance, the Hellespont represents the kinds of repeated crossings that the reader of Herodotus has to make in order to comprehend the significance of the different dimensions of the narrative.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Placed at the very centre of Herodotus' work (5.28–6.42), the Ionian Revolt of 499–494 bc plays a pivotal role, both chronologically and causally, linking the Persians' Eastern campaigns to their invasions of Greece. It also represents a crucial moment in Herodotus' history of the Ionians, which spans the whole work from beginning to end. The Ionians jump-start the Histories, one might say, and they do so because they find themselves at the receiving end of the first known Eastern aggressions against Greeks (1.5.3, 6.2–3). Croesus of Lydia completes ‘the first subjection of Ionia’, as the narrator summarizes at the end of the Croesus logos. The second is called ‘enslavement’, when Cyrus defeats Croesus and conquers his possessions. And so is the third, which occurs after the failure of the revolt we are examining:

The Ionians become free from Persian domination after the Greek victory at the time of Xerxes' invasion. But the 1–2–3 count in the statement above proleptically alludes to a fourth subjection, beyond the chronological range of the Histories and not explicitly mentioned in our text. At the time of narration the Ionians are the tributary subjects of Athens.

Herodotus' history of the Ionians is a narrative about being conquered.

In Herodotus 5.17–21, Amyntas receives the Persian ambassadors sent to demand submission to Darius, accepts their offer, and gives a banquet to welcome the Persians. The youthful Alexander, outraged at the Persians' treatment of Macedonian women during the after-dinner drinking, assassinates the ambassadors by replacing the endangered women with young men carrying knives, who kill the Persians; Alexander then manages to keep the affair secret, by handing over his sister Gygaea to Bubares, the leader of the Persian search party and son of Megabazus. An account is then given in chapter 22 of Alexander's demonstration of Greekness at Olympia, and his victory in the stadion there.

Herodotus' treatment of Alexander and his father Amyntas has an important place in Book 5. Chapters 17–21 form a bridge between Darius' failed invasion of Scythia in Book 4 and the Ionian Revolt and subsequent Persian invasion of Greece in Books 5 and following; they follow immediately on from Megabazus' deportation of the Paeonians of Thrace to Persia on Darius' instruction in the first sixteen chapters. The Macedonian ruling family is thus introduced in a way that focuses on relations with Persia. Alexander's political and strategic actions then tie in with Herodotus' concern with medism, and the question of the allegiance by Greek poleis to the cause against Persia in Books 8 and 9.

Herodotus' engagement with Alexander here has been explored in some important work.

That a new logos begins at 5.11 is clear. At 4.143–4 Darius left Megabazus in Thrace, reached Sestos and crossed the Hellespont. Megabazus went into action against those who did not medize. And then we moved to Libya. At 5.1 we rejoined Megabazus but not Darius. Now at 5.11 we rejoin Darius. There is no messing about here: in a familiar enough Herodotean technique, a new section begins with the name, no article, of the prime protagonist. We know from this first word what we are in for: Darius resumes control. If the reader thought that Megabazus had been left to determine for himself the precise contours of a mission that was only generally defined and that Darius had no further personal interest west of the Hellespont, s/he is about to discover otherwise. If Darius has scurried off extremely fast (tachista) that is not so much to get out of it, as to get back into it, to pick up the reins of power.

The opening chapters of Book 5 have highlighted a number of issues about power. A concern with the nature of power, with what makes one city powerful and another weak, with how and why cities and peoples that were once powerful cease to be powerful, and those who were not previously powerful become powerful, is central to the whole Herodotean endeavour, from the proem to the final sentence.