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

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οὐ πείσει τούς γε πολλούς. Hdt. here writes as though the movements of the fleet were determined by a majority of votes; no doubt the Navarch, Eurybiades, really had the actual decision; cp. c. 64 supra.

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μεταβαλών: cp. 5. 75 Κορινθιοι . . μετέβαλλόν τε καὶ ἀπαλλάσσοντο. In that passage, as in 7. 52 supra, the word appears to be used, intransitively, of actual physical change of place; and here the words πρὸς τοὺς Ἀθηναίους support a similar interpretation—otherwise a mental conversion might be preferable. Mutato consilio ad Athenienses se convertens (Schweigh. Lex.) seems unwarrantably to combine both.

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περιημέκτεον: an Herodotean word, used with the dative, as in 4. 154, and absolutely, as in 1. 114 μᾶλλόν τι περιημέκτεε, is here used with a sort of causal genitive (ἐκπεφευγότων). The meaning is clear (‘were aggrieved’), but the etymology unknown.

ὁρμέατο: the pluperfect passive, without augment. The tense might here have its temporal meaning, even in view of the sequence εἰ οἱ ἄλλοι μὴ βουλοίατο. The condition predicated is, of course, purely psychological.

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ἐπὶ σφέων αὐτῶν βαλόμενοι, ‘at their own risk’? ‘on their own responsibility’? or ‘by themselves’? cp. 5. 73 and 3. 71. The exact metaphor is less clear than the meaning; the expression is apparently Herodotean. καί, etiam.

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ἔλεγέ σφι τάδε. Hdt. does not shrink from reporting the speeches of Themistokles; cp. cc. 60, 61 f., 80, 83 supra.

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πολλοῖσι παρεγενόμην: πολλοῖσι is presumably neuter, as co-ordinate with πολλῷ πλέω just below. The occasions referred to, if set out, would have furnished an interesting chapter of autobiography. The emphatic co-ordination καὶ ... καί is observable.

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ἀπειληθέντας [νενικημένους]: the doubled participles are clumsy though intelligible; cp. App. Crit. At Andros (Mannheim, Pape-Benseler) the Greeks have to do with ἄνδρες. Themistokles does not despise the enemy.

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ἀναμάχεσθαί τε καὶ ἀναλαμβάνειν: cp. 5. 121 μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο τὸ τρῶμα ἀνέλαβόν τε καὶ ἀνεμαχέσαντο οἱ Κᾶρες. (Themistokles can hardly have been present on that occasion.) ἀναλαμβάνειν having an object here (κακότητα) is of simpler construction, and perhaps of more obvious meaning, cp. 7. 232 supra, but κακότης itself is of disputable significance. In 2. 128 it appears to mean ‘evil plight,’ misery; and it may bear the same meaning in 2. 124; so too, most clearly, in 6. 67, where it is opposed to εὐδαιμονίη, but in 7. 168 supra it certainly denotes a defect of character, cowardice or what not (cp. Thuc. 5. 100 κακότης καὶ δειλία), and it might bear that interpretation here.

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εὕρημα γὰρ εὑρήκαμεν, ‘we have had a stroke of luck,’ cp. 7. 10 l. 43; the cognate acc. is simple enough, but the addition of the further accusatives, ἡμέας τε αὐτοὺς καὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα, complicates the sentence, and without the addition of a participle, co-ordinate with ἀνωσάμενοι, a constructio ad sensum is a trifle violent — as though εὕρ. εὑρήκ. might form a single verbal idea and construction = ἀναλελαβηκαμεν (sc. ἀνειλήφαμεν). ἡμέας τε αὐτοὺς καὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα may, however, be taken in apposition to εὕρημα — a somewhat excited phrase! Anything were better than inserting ἀνασωσάμενοι. Cp. App. Crit.

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νέφος τοσοῦτο ἀνθρώπων ἀνωσάμενοι: the metaphor is superb; the barbarians are mere ἄνθρωποι from this point of view (though ἄνδρες φεύγοντες immediately below). The verb is curious —cp. App. Crit.—but justified by 7. 139, a passage perhaps influenced by the oratory of Themistokles.

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τάδε, of antecedents; cp. the occasional use of ταῦτα for consequents; ὅδε and οὗτος both contrast with ἐκεῖνος, as the nearer with the more remote; and with each other, as the immediate present (or just coming) with the mediate present (or just gone).

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θεοί τε καὶ ἥρωες, ‘Gods and Heroes combined.’ The passage refutes incidentally the sneer of Mardonios against the Greeks as τῶν τὸ πᾶν σφίσι ἤδη δοκεόντων κατεργάσθαι c. 100 supra (spoken of eourse with quite another ‘intention’), for at least it disclaims the victory as their own work: even Themistokles, however, appears in the context as overrating the effects of the battle of Salamis (παντελέως ἀπελάσας τὸν βάρβαρον).

οἳ ἐφθόνησαν ... βασιλεῦσαι: the doctrine of the divine φθόνος appears here upon the lips of Themistokles in its simplest form: the gods view with jealousy one man's lordship of Asia and Europe combined. Such an excess of human power is in itself a sufficient reason for the divine passion. The words which follow ἐόντα ἀνόσιόν τε καὶ ἀτάσθαλον may be taken, not as the justification of the ways of gods to man, but as a statement of pure matter of fact —a fact inevitable, since what mortal invested with such power could avoid pride, presumption, impiety, sin? In the examples which follow (ὅς κτλ.), if it were worth while to distinguish the ἀνοσιότης and the ἀτασθαλίη, the destruction of temples and cult-objects might illustrate the former, and the lashing and fettering of the sea the latter.

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ἐν ὁμοίῳ ἐποιέετο, ‘made no difference between . .’; cp. 7. 138 supra (in a somewhat different sense).

ἐμπιπράς τε καὶ καταβάλλων: as at Abai c. 33 supra, and above all at Athens c. 53 supra. It is noticeable that there is no reference to the case of Delphi (cc. 35-39 supra); nor is anything said of the cases in which Xerxes had shown positive respect for Greek religion and cult-objects (e.g. at Troy 7. 43 supra, at Halos 7. 197 supra, at Athens itself c. 54 supra, and of course at Thebes, not to press the sacrifices at Nine Ways 7. 114, at Sepias 7. 191). Athenians naturally made the most of the point (cp. Aischyl. Pers. 805 f.), though their own record was not clean in this respect (cp. 5. 102); but it was left for Cicero to represent the Persians as Puritan fanatics, indignant with the Greeks for believing that the gods could be enclosed ‘in temples made with hands’ ( de legg. 2. 10. 26 “Xerxes inflammasse templa Graecrae dicitur, quod parietibus includerent deos, quibus omnia deberent esse patentia ac libera, quorumque hic mundus omnis templum esset et domus”). That view is refuted by what is known of the policy of Dareios and his successors in Egypt, in Babylon, in Greece itself—to say nothing of the acts of Kyros and Kambyses. The invasion of Greece was in no sense a crusade or religious war, but the Greeks naturally enough invested their victory with a religious halo, and exaggerated the offences against the national religion committed by the Persians as incidents of the campaign. Hence the intensely religious tone of the Herodotean narrative, little as the great centres of the national religion did for Greece in her hour of need. Hence too the decree, or supposed decree, that the temples destroyed by the Persian should remain for ever in ruins (cp. the forged oath in Lycurgus c. Leocrat. 81, and Pausan. 10. 35. 2), a decree directly contravened by the earliest programme of Perikles (Plutarch, Perikl. 17) inter alia. But cp. c. 33 supra, 9. 116 infra.

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καὶ τὴν θ. ἀπεμαστίγωσε πέδας τε κατῆκε: according to the story related in 7. 35 supra. Themistokles omits the stigmatization! If this speech were authentic, and rightly dated to 480 B.C., it would be the earliest extant evidence for the incidents: items of Themistoklean oratory may be preserved in it, but hardly this particular sentence, which reads in any case rather forcedly. Perhaps the whole religious parenthesis (τάδε γὰρ ... κατῆκε) is Herodotean rather than authentic Themistokles. ἀπομαστιγῶσαι, ‘to flog soundly,’ occurs 3. 29.

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ἀλλ᾽ εὖ γὰρ ... ἡμῖν: cp. 7. 158 ἀλλὰ (sic) εὖ γὰρ ἡμῖν καὶ έπὶ τὸ ἄμεινον κατέστη, Gelone loq. (It can hardly be argued that the Sikeliote orator preserved while the Athenian avoided the hiatus: the variation exhibits the inconstancy of the MSS., perhaps of the author himself!)

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νῦν μὲν ... ἐπιμεληθῆναι. Stein regards this construction as intolerably harsh, and emends the text (cp. App. Crit.); bnt surely the infinitive may stand as hortative (Madvig, Gk. Syntax, § 168), especially here when elucidated immediately in the very next sentence by the imperative ἀναπλασάσθω (cp. Aristoph. Wsps. 108), to say nothing of the jingle ἄμεινον καταμείναντας. The form of the verb ἐπιμεληθῆναι, like the subst. ἐπιμέλεια (6. 105), implies a present ἐπιμελέομαι — though the form of the present in use appears to have been ἐπιμέλομαι; cp. ἐπιμέλεσθαι 1. 98, ἐπιμελομένῳ 2. 2, ἐπεμέλετο 2. 174. (μέλομαι, I care for, take care of, with gen.; in the Tragedians passim.）

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οἰκετέων: cp. c. 106 l. 8 supra.

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ἀναπλασάσθω. πλάσσειν is used properly of soft materials, earth, wax, etc.

σπόρου ἀνακῶς ἐχέτω: cp. 1. 24 ἀνακῶς δὲ ἔχειν τῶν πορθμέων. Also Thuc. 8. 102. 2 “ὅπως αὐτῶν ἀνακῶς ἕξουσιν, ἢν ἑκπλέωσι”. The construction of ἔχειν with the adv. is, of course, regular enough, but the word άνακῶς itself is a curious one; cp. Plutarch, Thes. 33 τιμὰς ἰσοθέους ἔσχον (sc. οἱ Τυνδαρίδαι) Ἄνακες προσαγορευθέντες, ἢ διὰ τὰς γενομένας ἀνοχὰς (in Attica), ἢ διὰ τὴν ἐπιμέλειαν καὶ κηδεμονίαν τοῦ μηδένα κακῶς παθεῖν στρατιᾶς τοσαύτης ἔνδον οὔσης: ἀνακῶς γὰρ ἔχειν τοὺς ἑπιμελομένους ἢ φυλάττοντας ὁτιοῦν: καὶ τοὑς βασιλεῖς ἴσως ἄνακτας διὰ τοῦτο καλοῦσιν. εἰσὶ δὲ οἱ λέγοντες διὰ τὴν τῶν ἀστέρων ἑπιφάνειαν Ἄνακας ὀνομάζεσθαι: τὸ γὰρ ἄνω τοὺς Ἀττικοὺς ἀνέκας ὀνομάζειν καὶ ἀνέκαθεν τὸ ἄνωθεν. The passage contains an exemplary bit of antique etymologizing, but L. & S. accept the connexion of ἀνακῶς with ἄναξ. The word was used by Plato, Com. incert. 24 (ed. BotheDidot) καὶ τὰς (or τᾶς) θύρας ἀνακῶς ἔχειν: cp. Erotianos p. 66, Ἀνακῶς: ἑπιμελῶς καὶ περιπεφυλαγμενῶς. ἔστι δὲ ἠ λέξις Δωρική. (Is it not rather ‘old Attic,’ and so appropriate in the mouth of Themistokles?)

παντελέως ἀπελάσας τὸν βάρβαρον. Themistokles appears to share theillusion (ascribed above to Eurybiades) that Salamis had put an end to the presence of the ‘barbarian’ in Greece. Stein, indeed, takes the sentence as conditional, and refers it not to the battle which has taken place, but to the land-engagement, which Themistokles expects to be fought before the winter (i.e. not “now that we have driven,” but “as soon as we shall have driven the barbarian clean away”). This interpretation (i.) ill suits the context, especially the corresponding passage c. 108 ad fin.; (ii.) involves Themistokles in a huge misconception in regard to the probable action of the Peloponnesians; (iii.) makes him treat a great land-battle immediately to come as a foregone conclusion, to be mentioned en passant, sandwiched between the restoration of Athens and the expedition to the Hellespont; while (iv.) Hdt. himself declares the rusé character of Themistokles' advice to the Athenians; and although the purpose he assigns is unacceptable (see below), the possibility remains open that the argument of the speaker is a make-believe. In fact, the words, if authentic, may have been used by Themistokles with his eyes open, and his participation in the Spartan illusion, that no land - battle would ever be necessary, may have been a voluntary hypothesis, argumenti causa. So, too, the promise to sail to the Hellespont and Ionia in the spring might at this point have been rather a concession to gain the Athenians, and to prevent the break-up of the fleet, than a deliberate plan, in view of the utter discomfiture of the Persian, or in anticipation of the subsequent policy of reprisals. It would, however, be a possible preventive of the re-invasion of Attica, in case the Persians had not evacuated Europe: as applicable in the spring as in the present autumn. The whole discussion (it must be remembered) can hardly have taken place until the Persians had evacuated Attica, and probably did not take place at Andros, but at Salamis. Whether Themistokles, when he realized that Mardonios was still in Greece with an army, failed to grasp the strategic aspects of the case, is a further question (cp. Appendix VII. § 1). It is at least arguable that the greatest of the Athenians never had any illusions upon the point.

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ταῦτα ἔλεγε ἀποθήκην μέλλων ποιήσασθαι. This contribution to the Themistoklean legend represents him as a traitor from the beginning. The motivation is plainly an inference from the event (τά περ ὦν καὶ ἐγένετο), and is both psychologically and historically bad. There is an assumption involved that Themistokles did wrong in dissuading the Athenians from sailing off by themselves from Andros (or Salamis?) to the Hellespont, and his crime is the more flagrant seeing that he himself had advocated the move to the Hellespont just before. But Themistokles was neither inconsequent nor disloyal if he now wrought with the Athenians to prohibit a schismatic undertaking: rather might Hdt. have pronounced such an eulogy upon his act as Thucydides pronounced upon the act of Alkibiades in retaining the Athenian fleet at Samos in 411 B. C. from precipitately making for the city (cp. Thuc. 8. 82. 2). Strategically, the separate adventure of the Athenians must have been highly precarious; politically, it might have shattered the Alliance, which still had work to do: the reduction of the Kyklades by the confederate fleet was both strategically and politically the better investment. In so far as Hdt. (or his source) ascribes to Themistokles a prevision of possible disaster to himself in time to come, and sets him about making provision against a turn of Fortune's wheel, the bounds of psychological possibility are not passed, for a Greek and a Themistokles. Of such reverses, too, he could say: καὶ αὐτὸς ἤδη πολλοῖσι παρεγενόμην καὶ πολλῷ πλέω ἀκήκοα τοιάδε γενέσθαι. The trophies of Miltiades were before his eyes day and night. But there is no real relation between his reported advice on this occasion and his subsequent ‘medism’—such as it was. The motivation here depends upon the truth of the story (in the next c.) of the second mission of Sikinnos—and that story is a transparent fraud. Grote, indeed, credits the view that Themistokles—“a clever man, tainted with such constant guilt”—calculated on being one day detected and punished; i.e. Grote takes the Themistokles-legend very much at its own estimation. Blakesley's note is curiously perverse, amounting to this: Thucydides is wrong in saying that Themistokles claimed credit in his letter to Artaxerxes (1. 137) for having saved the bridge for Xerxes, while Hdt. is right in saying that Themistokles, not knowing that the bridges were already broken down in 480 B. C. (if they were; cp. c. 117. 4 infra), intended, on some future occasion, should need arise, to claim credit with the king for saving the bridge!

ἀποθήκην ... ποιήσασθαι ( = ἀποθέσθαι, or ἀπόθετον ποιήσασθαι) is scarcely adequate; cp. 6. 41 χάριτα μεγάλην καταθήσεσθαι. ἐς here looks like apud. τὸν Πέρσην generalized (for Ξέρξην) perhaps in the light of the event, Hdt., of course, knowing that Themistokles was received by Artaxerxes.

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ἄρα, “in hypotheticals, to indicate the improbability of the supposition,” L. & S. comparing Thuc. 1. 93. 7 “τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις παρῄνει” (sc. ὁ Θεμιστοκλῆς) ἢν ἄρα ποτὲ κατὰ γῆν βιασθῶσι, καταβάντας ἐς αὐτὸν ταῖς ναυσὶ πρὸς ἅπαντας ἀνθίστασθαι. The particle conveys perhaps a note of irony in the present passage, or perhaps a reference to the mind of Themistokles away from the author's. πάθος = πάθημα, as often.

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ἀποστροφήν: in somewhat the same sense Thuc. 4. 76. 5 “ούσης ἑκάστοις διὰ βραχέος ἀποστροφῆς” (perfugium). In a less literal sense, but more material, Hdt. 2. 13 οὐ γὰρ δή σφι ἐστὶ ὕδατος οὐδεμία ἄλλη ἀποστροφη ὅτι μὴ ἐκ τοῦ Διὸς μοῦνον.