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141.
The next king was the priest of Hephaestus whose name was Sethos. He despised and had no regard for the warrior Egyptians, thinking he would never need them; besides otherwise dishonoring them, he took away the chosen lands which had been given to them, twelve fields to each man, in the reign of former kings.
[2]
So when presently king Sanacharib1 came against Egypt, with a great force of Arabians and Assyrians, the warrior Egyptians would not march against him.
[3]
The priest, in this quandary, went into the temple shrine and there before the god's image bitterly lamented over what he expected to suffer. Sleep came on him while he was lamenting, and it seemed to him the god stood over him and told him to take heart, that he would come to no harm encountering the power of Arabia: “I shall send you champions,” said the god.
[4]
So he trusted the vision, and together with those Egyptians who would follow him camped at Pelusium, where the road comes into Egypt; and none of the warriors would go with him, but only merchants and craftsmen and traders.
[5]
Their enemies came there, too, and during the night were overrun by a horde of field mice2 that gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields, with the result that many were killed fleeing unarmed the next day.
[6]
And to this day a stone statue of the Egyptian king stands in Hephaestus' temple, with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription to this effect: “Look at me, and believe.”
1 Sennacherib's attack on Hezekiah of Judaea was made on his march to Egypt.—II Kings, xviii.
2 This is Hdt.'s version of the Jewish story of the pestilence which destroyed the Assyrian army before Jerusalem. Mice are a Greek symbol of pestilence; it is Apollo Smintheus (the mouse god) who sends and then ends the plague in Hom. Il. 1. It has long been known that rats are carriers of the plague.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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References (38 total)
- Cross-references to this page
(7):
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.3.1
- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), PHARETRA
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), AETHIO´PIA
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), MEMPHIS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), PELU´SIUM
- Basil L. Gildersleeve, Syntax of Classical Greek, Copula
- Smith's Bio, Sethon
- Cross-references in notes to this page
(1):
- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Aristot. Rh. 2.24
- Cross-references in notes from this page (2):
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page
(28):
- LSJ, ξ.
- LSJ, ἄτι_μ-ος
- LSJ, ἄχα^ρις
- LSJ, ἀγοραῖος
- LSJ, ἀλογ-ία
- LSJ, ἀντιάζω
- LSJ, ἀπειλέω
- LSJ, ἀπ-οδύρομαι
- LSJ, ἀπορία
- LSJ, ἀρουρ-αῖος
- LSJ, ἐπέρχομαι
- LSJ, εἰσβολή
- LSJ, εὐσεβ-ής
- LSJ, φα^ρετρ-εών
- LSJ, γυμνός
- LSJ, ἵστημι
- LSJ, κάπηλος
- LSJ, καταφα^γεῖν
- LSJ, λι?́θ-ι^νος
- LSJ, μάχι^μ-ος
- LSJ, μῦς
- LSJ, ὄχαν-ον
- LSJ, ὀλοφύρ-ομαι
- LSJ, πίσυ^νος
- LSJ, θαρσύνω
- LSJ, στρα^τοπεδ-εύω
- LSJ, τι_μωρ-ός
- LSJ, χείρων-αξ
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