Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Herodotus's style, Alexander, has deceived many people because it is so plain and effortless and glides so easily over its subject matter; but more people have been affected this way by his character. For it is not only, as Plato says, the extreme of injustice to seem just without being so; it is also a mark of the utmost malice to imitate good nature and simplicity in a way that is hard to detect. Above all he has behaved this way toward the Boeotians and the Corinthians, having spared none of the other Greeks either, and I think it is fitting for us, defending our ancestors and the truth at the same time, to take up this part of his writing, since to go after all his other lies and fabrications would require many books. But, as Sophocles says, the face of Persuasion is a terrible thing, especially
whenever it arises in a discourse that has such charm and power, concealing its other absurdities along with the author's character. Philip used to say to the Greeks who were deserting him and going over to Titus that they were merely exchanging a smoother but longer collar; and Herodotus's malice is, to be sure, smoother and softer than Theopompus's, but it takes hold
and hurts all the more, like winds that blow secretly through a narrow passage compared with those that are diffused abroad. It seems better to me to take, in a general outline, all the marks that are common to a narrative that is not pure and kindly but malicious — traces and signs, as it were — and to set each of the points under examination into these categories, wherever it fits. First, then, the writer who uses the harshest names and words for events, when milder ones are available, in
telling what has happened — as, when he might simply have called Nicias a man overly devoted to divination, instead calls him possessed by a god, or calls Cleon's boldness and madness rather than mere talkativeness — is not kindly, but seems to take a certain pleasure, through cleverness in narrating, in the affair itself. Second, when some evil attaches to a matter otherwise, but does not belong to the history, and the writer seizes on it and inserts it into the narrative
where it is not at all needed, but draws out and circles the narrative around in order to include someone's misfortune or some strange and disreputable act, he is clearly delighting in speaking ill of people. This is why Thucydides, although Cleon's errors were not lacking, did not make his narrative of them explicit; he touched on Hyperbolus the demagogue with a single word, calling him a worthless man, and let it go. Philistus, too, passed over all the wrongs Dionysius committed against
the barbarians that were not entangled with Greek affairs. For digressions and departures from the main history are given above all to myths and to antiquarian lore, and further to expressions of praise; but the writer who makes an insertion into his discourse for the purpose of slander and blame seems to fall into the tragic curse of picking out the misfortunes of mortals. And indeed the opposite of all this
is clearly this: the omission of something fine and good — a thing that seems to be an act for which one need not answer, yet becomes malicious whenever the thing omitted would fall in a place appropriate to the history. For to praise reluctantly while delighting in blame is not more reasonable, but in addition to being no more reasonable, is perhaps even worse. Fourth, then, I set down as a sign of an unkindly disposition in history the practice, when there are two or more accounts about the same matter,
of siding with the worse one. For sophists are permitted, for the sake of practice or reputation, sometimes to adorn the weaker of two arguments when they take it up; for they do not thereby produce strong conviction about the matter, nor do they often refuse to argue, against expectation, on behalf of things that are not believable. But the one who writes history is obliged to tell as true the things he knows, while of the things that are unclear
he ought to prefer to represent the better version as truly reported rather than the worse. Many writers omit the worse version altogether, as, for instance, Ephorus concerning Themistocles: after saying that he knew of Pausanias's treachery and of his dealings with the King's generals, Ephorus says, "But he was not persuaded," nor did he "accept it when Pausanias shared it with him and urged him toward the same hopes." Thucydides, on the other hand, left out this story
altogether, as though he had judged it unworthy of mention. Furthermore, in cases where the deeds are agreed upon as having been done, but the motive from which they were done, and the intention behind them, are unclear, the man who conjectures toward the worse is hostile and malicious — as the comic poets did when they declared that the war was kindled by Pericles on account of Aspasia or on account of Pheidias, rather than out of a certain love of honor and rivalry, to humble the pride of the Peloponnesians,
when none of the Lacedaemonians was willing to yield anything. For if someone attaches a base motive to deeds that are well regarded and actions that are praised, and drags them down through slanders into strange suspicions about the person's hidden purpose in acting — being unable openly to find fault with the deed itself — he is like those who attribute the murder of Alexander the tyrant of Pherae, carried out under Thebe, not to greatness of soul or hatred of wickedness, but to a certain jealousy and
a womanish passion; or those who say that Cato killed himself out of fear of a death accompanied by torture at Caesar's hands — it is clear that such people have left no excess of envy and malice unused. Historical narrative also admits malice with regard to the manner of an achievement, if it claims that some act was accomplished not through virtue but through money — as some say of Philip, that he achieved things without any toil and easily, as they say of Alexander
that he achieved things not through good judgment but through good fortune — as Timotheus's enemies did, drawing on tablets cities themselves creeping into a fish-trap while he slept. For it is clear that those who take away the nobility and toil, the virtue and the personal agency from deeds, thereby diminish the greatness and beauty of the deeds. Now, those who speak ill of the people they wish to attack directly can be charged with
ill temper, rashness, and madness, if they do not show moderation; but those who use slanders obliquely, as it were shooting arrows from concealment, and then circle back and retreat, denying — by claiming not to believe — the very things they very much want to be believed, thereby add servility to their malice. Close to these are those who attach some praise to their blame, as Aristoxenus did concerning Socrates: having called him uneducated, ignorant, and
undisciplined, he added, "but injustice was not in him." For just as flatterers who employ a certain skill and cunning sometimes mix light criticisms into many long stretches of praise, throwing in frankness as a kind of seasoning for their flattery, so malice, in order to gain credit for what it censures, sets its praise out in front beforehand. There would be still more categories to enumerate; but these suffice to provide an understanding of the man's
purpose and character. To begin, then, first of all, as though from the hearth, with Io the daughter of Inachus, whom all the Greeks believe to have been deified and honored by the barbarians, and to have left her name to many seas and to the greatest of straits because of her fame, and to have provided the origin and source of the most illustrious and most royal families — this noble
man says that she gave herself to Phoenician merchants, being seduced willingly by the ship's captain and fearing that she might be found to be pregnant. And he slanders the Phoenicians as though they were the ones saying this about her. Having said that the learned men of the Persians testify that the Phoenicians seized Io along with other women, he immediately declares his opinion that the finest and greatest achievement of Greece — the Trojan War — came about through foolishness, on account of
a worthless woman. "For it is clear," he says, "that if the women themselves had not been willing, they would not have been carried off." And so, by this reasoning, let us say that the gods too act foolishly, being angry at the Lacedaemonians on behalf of the daughters of Leucippus who were ravished, and punishing Ajax for the outrage against Cassandra: for it is clear, according to Herodotus, that if the women themselves had not been willing, they would not have been outraged. And yet he himself says that Aristomenes
was seized alive by the Lacedaemonians, and that Philopoemen, the general of the Achaeans, later suffered this same thing, and that the Carthaginians got Regulus, the Roman consul, into their power — men whom it would be hard to find more warlike and more skilled in war. But this should come as no surprise, since men also seize living leopards and tigers. Yet Herodotus accuses the women who were raped, while making an apology on behalf of those who seized them. So fond of barbarians is he that he acquits Busiris
of the human sacrifice and murder of strangers attributed to him, and testifies to great piety and justice on the part of all Egyptians, yet turns this same pollution and bloodguilt back upon the Greeks. For in the second book he says that Menelaus, having recovered Helen from Proteus and having been honored with great gifts, became the most unjust and worst of men; for, being held back by contrary winds, he devised an unholy scheme, and taking two children
of local men, made a sacrifice of them; and being hated for this and pursued, he fled away by ship to Libya. Now I do not know which Egyptian told this story; but on the contrary, many honors to Helen and many to Menelaus are still preserved among them. The writer goes on, moreover, to say that the Persians "learned from the Greeks to have intercourse with boys" — and yet how could the Persians owe the Greeks any lessons
in this kind of licentiousness, when among the Persians it is agreed by almost everyone that boys are castrated before they have ever seen the Greek sea? He says that the Greeks learned processions and festivals from the Egyptians, and that they learned to worship these twelve gods from them; that Melampus learned even the name of Dionysus from the Egyptians and taught it to the other Greeks; and that the mysteries and the rites concerning Demeter were brought from Egypt by the daughters of Danaus,
and he says that the Egyptians beat themselves and mourn, though he himself is unwilling to name whom, but keeps a discreet silence about matters of religion; yet in the case of Heracles and Dionysus, whom the Egyptians declare to be gods, while the Greeks regard them as men who lived to old age, he nowhere applies this same caution — even though he himself says that the Egyptian Heracles belongs to the second rank of gods, and
Dionysus to the third, as beings who had a beginning of their generation and are not eternal; yet all the same he declares those to be gods, while thinking that these Greek figures ought to receive offerings as to the dead and to heroes, but not sacrifices as to gods. He has said the same things about Pan, overturning the most solemn and sacred of Greek rites in favor of the boastful fables and mythologies of the Egyptians. And this is not the worst of it: but having
traced the lineage of Heracles up to Perseus, he says that Perseus was Assyrian according to the account of the Persians; "and the leaders of the Dorians," he says, "would appear to be native-born Egyptians, if one traces their ancestors upward from Danae the daughter of Acrisius." For he entirely leaves out Epaphus and Io and Iasus and Argus, being eager not only to make other Heracleses into Egyptians and Phoenicians,
but even to make this Heracles — the one he himself says was the third — a foreigner banished from Greece into the land of the barbarians. And yet, of the ancient and learned men, neither Homer nor Hesiod nor Archilochus nor Peisander nor Stesichorus nor Alcman nor Pindar held any account of an Egyptian or Phoenician Heracles; rather, all of them know this one single Heracles, the Boeotian who is at the same time Argive. And indeed, of the seven
sages, whom he himself calls sophists, he declares that Thales was originally, by descent, a Phoenician and thus a barbarian; and, railing against the gods under the mask of Solon, he has him say these words: "O Croesus, since you ask me about human affairs, knowing well that the divine is altogether jealous and prone to trouble." For the opinions he himself held about the gods he foists upon Solon, adding malice to his blasphemy
besides. As for Pittacus, though he uses him in connection with small matters not worth mentioning, the greatest and finest of that man's deeds — which occurred among his actions — he passed over. For when the Athenians and Mytilenaeans were at war over Sigeum, and Phrynon the Athenian general challenged anyone willing to single combat, Pittacus went out to meet him, and, casting a net over the man — who was strong and large — killed him. When
the Mytilenaeans offered him great gifts, he threw his spear and asked for only that much land as the spearhead covered, and it is called to this day the Pittaceion. What then did Herodotus do, when he came to this very place? Instead of Pittacus's feat of valor, he told the story of the poet Alcaeus's flight from battle, when he threw away his weapons — testifying, by not writing the honorable things and not omitting the shameful ones, to those who say that envy and
malicious pleasure at others' misfortunes spring from the same vice. After this, having cast the accusation of treachery upon the Alcmaeonids — men who had proved themselves and had freed their fatherland from tyranny — he says that they welcomed Peisistratus back from exile and helped restore him, on condition of his marriage to Megacles's daughter; and that the girl told her own
mother, "Mother dear, do you see? Peisistratus does not have intercourse with me in the customary way." And he says that the Alcmaeonids, indignant at this transgression, drove out the tyrant on account of it. Now, so that the Lacedaemonians should not fall short of the Athenians in malice either, see how he has defamed the man most admired and honored among them, Othryades: "the one man," he says, "who survived out of the three hundred,
ashamed to return to Sparta since his messmates had been killed, killed himself right there at Thyreae." For earlier he says the victory was disputed between both sides, but here, through Othryades's shame, he testifies to the defeat of the Lacedaemonians; for it would have been shameful to live having been defeated, but most honorable to survive as the victor. I pass over the fact that, having called Croesus ignorant and boastful and ridiculous
in every respect, he says that Cyrus — who was taken prisoner by him — was schooled and admonished by him, though Cyrus seems, in judgment and virtue and greatness of mind, to have far surpassed all other kings; and having testified that Croesus had no other good quality except honoring the gods with many great offerings, he shows this very act to be the most impious of all deeds. For, he says, Croesus had a brother, Pantaleon, who quarreled with him over the kingship
while their father was still alive; and so Croesus, once he had established himself in the kingship, destroyed one of Pantaleon's companions and friends, a man of his acquaintance, on a carding-comb, tearing him to pieces, and then, from that man's property, made offerings to the gods and sent them off. As for Deioces the Mede, who acquired his rule through virtue and justice, he says that he was not naturally such a man, but that, desiring tyranny, he set about it
under the pretense of justice. But I let go the matters concerning the barbarians, since Herodotus himself has provided abundant material regarding the Greeks. To begin, then: the Athenians and most of the other Ionians are ashamed of this name, not wishing but rather avoiding being called Ionians, while those who consider themselves the noblest among them, and who set out from the Athenian prytaneum, fathered children by barbarian women — their fathers and husbands and children
...having them killed, for which reason the women established a law and imposed oaths upon it and handed it down to their daughters: never to share a meal with their husbands, nor to call one's own husband by name — and that the Milesians of today are descended from those women. Having thus insinuated that only those who celebrate the festival of the Apatouria are purely Ionian — "and all celebrate it," he says, "except the Ephesians and the Colophonians" — he has in this way
excluded these two from noble birth. "He says that when Pactyes revolted from Cyrus, the Cymaeans and Mytilenaeans were preparing to hand the man over for a certain fee — for I cannot say exactly how much" — it is well done not to state definitely how large the fee was, and yet to fasten so great a reproach on a Greek city, as though he knew for certain. As for the Chians, however, he says that they did hand over Pactyes, once he had been brought to them from the sanctuary of Athena Poliouchos,
and that they did this after receiving Atarneus as their fee. And yet Charon of Lampsacus, an older man who dealt with the story of Pactyes, has fastened no such pollution on either the Mytilenaeans or the Chians. He has written the following, verbatim: "When Pactyes learned that the Persian army was advancing upon him, he fled, first to Mytilene, then to Chios; and
Cyrus got possession of him." And in the third of his books, narrating the Lacedaemonian expedition against Polycrates the tyrant, he says that the Samians themselves suppose and say that the Spartans made the expedition as a return of favor for the Samians' aid against the Messenians, both restoring the exiled citizens and making war on the tyrant; but that the Lacedaemonians deny this motive and say that they made the expedition against the Samians not to help them or
to free them, but to avenge themselves — because the Samians had taken from them a certain bowl that was being sent to Croesus, and a breastplate that was being brought back to them from Amasis. And yet we know of no city in those times so honor-loving or so hostile to tyrants as that of the Lacedaemonians. For what breastplate's sake, or what other bowl's, did they expel the Cypselids from Corinth and from Ambracia, and Lygdamis from Naxos, and
the sons of Pisistratus from Athens, and Aeschines from Sicyon, and Symmachus from Thasos, and Aulis from among the Phocians, and Aristogenes from Miletus, and put an end to the dynasty among the Thessalians, deposing Aristomedes and Angelus through King Leotychides? Of these matters a more exact account has been written elsewhere. But according to Herodotus, the Lacedaemonians have left no excess of either wickedness or foolishness unmatched, if, in denying the noblest and most just
pretext for the expedition, they were admitting instead that out of resentment and pettiness they were attacking men who were unfortunate and faring badly. Nevertheless, he has somehow, in painting the Lacedaemonians, given them at least a touch of color to soften his portrait; but the city of the Corinthians, though it lay outside the scope of his narrative at this point, he nonetheless drags in, as a mere digression along the way, so they say, and fills it with a dreadful charge and the most vicious slander. "For the Corinthians too," he says, "eagerly joined in the expedition against
Samos, an outrage having earlier been committed against them by the Samians. It was this: Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, was sending three hundred boys, sons of the leading Corcyraeans, to Alyattes to be castrated. The Samians, when these boys put in at their island, taught them to sit as suppliants in the temple of Artemis, and by setting out treats of sesame and honey for them day after day, saved them." This
outrage of the Samians against the Corinthians is what the writer calls it, and he says that it was for this reason that the Corinthians incited the Lacedaemonians against them, not a few years later, making it their accusation that the Samians had preserved three hundred boys of the Greeks as men. But the man who lays this reproach on the Corinthians thereby shows the city to have been more depraved than the tyrant himself: for Periander sought vengeance on the Corcyraeans because they had killed his son, whereas the Corinthians — what had they suffered — that they took vengeance on the Samians, who had merely stood in the way
of such great cruelty and lawlessness, and that too three generations later, still nursing anger and resentment on behalf of a tyranny which, once overthrown, they never ceased to erase and obliterate every memorial and every trace of, so harsh and burdensome had it been to them? But such, then, was the outrage of the Samians against the Corinthians: and what sort of vengeance was that of the Corinthians against the Samians? If
they were truly angry at the Samians, it would have been fitting for them not to incite but rather to dissuade the Lacedaemonians from making their expedition against Polycrates, so that the Samians would not become free once the tyrant was overthrown and cease being enslaved. But what is most telling: why in the world were the Corinthians angry at the Samians, who had wished to save the sons of the Corcyraeans and were unable to, while they brought no charge against the Cnidians, who did save them and give them back? And yet the Corcyraeans
have not much to say about the Samians on this account, but they do remember the Cnidians, and the Cnidians have honors and exemptions and decrees among them: for it was the Cnidians who sailed in and drove out Periander's guards from the temple, and themselves took up the boys and conveyed them to Corcyra, as Antenor has recorded in his Cretan History, and Dionysius of Chalcis in his Foundations. That the Lacedaemonians made their expedition not
to punish the Samians but to free them from the tyrant and to save them, one can use the Samians themselves as witnesses. For it is said that there is a tomb, built at public expense, for Archias, a Spartiate who fought brilliantly on that occasion and fell, and that it is honored by them in Samos; and that for this reason his descendants continue always to treat the Samians in a friendly and kindly manner, as Herodotus himself, at any rate,
has attested. In the fifth book, he says that Cleisthenes, of the best and foremost men at Athens, persuaded the Pythia to become a false prophet, always urging the Lacedaemonians to free Athens from the tyrants — thus attaching to the noblest and most just of deeds the slander of so great an impiety and trickery, and robbing the god of a prophecy that was fine and good and worthy of the goddess Themis, said to prophesy jointly with him. Isagoras
— he says — yielded up his wife to Cleomenes, who used to visit her; and, as is his habit, mixing praise with blame to secure credence, he says: "Isagoras, son of Tisander, was of a distinguished house, but I cannot speak to its origins further back; his kinsmen sacrifice to Zeus Carios." A well-tuned and politic sneer this is from our historian, banishing Isagoras
off to the Carians as one might banish something to the crows. Aristogeiton, however, he no longer sends off indirectly and disparagingly, but drives him straight out the gate into Phoenicia, saying that he was originally a Gephyraean, and that the Gephyraeans were not, as some suppose, from Euboea or Eretrians, but were Phoenicians — so he himself has learned. And so, unable to take from the Lacedaemonians the credit for freeing the Athenians from the tyrants, he manages, by the most shameful device, to obliterate and disgrace
the noblest of deeds. For he says that they quickly repented, on the ground that they had not acted rightly, because, being persuaded by false oracles, they had driven out from their homeland men who were their guest-friends and had promised to make Athens subject to them, and had handed the city over to an ungrateful populace. Then, he says, they sent for Hippias from Sigeum, to bring him back to Athens; but the Corinthians opposed them and dissuaded them, Socles having recounted
all the evils that Cypselus and Periander, as tyrants, had inflicted on the city of the Corinthians." And yet no deed of Periander's is recorded as more cruel or more savage than his sending away of those three hundred boys — for whose rescue and preservation from such a fate he says the Samians earned the anger and resentment of the Corinthians, as though the Corinthians had themselves been outraged. So great is the confusion and inconsistency with which his malice fills his narrative, sneaking in under every possible pretext as the story unfolds. In
what follows, narrating the affair of Sardis, he does everything in his power to dissolve and spoil the achievement. The ships that the Athenians sent to help the Ionians who had revolted from the king, he has dared to call the "beginners of evils," though they undertook to free so many and so great Greek cities from the barbarians; whereas of the Eretrians he makes only the barest mention in passing, passing over in silence a great and celebrated achievement. For already, with Ionia
in confusion, and a royal fleet sailing up, they met the Cyprians outside and defeated them in a sea-battle in the Pamphylian sea; then, turning back and leaving their ships at Ephesus, they attacked Sardis and besieged Artaphernes, who had fled to the acropolis, wishing to relieve the siege of Miletus; and this they accomplished, and drove the enemy out from there, who had fallen into a remarkable panic; but when a great multitude poured in upon them, they withdrew. These events
have been told by others, and among them Lysanias of Mallos, in his work on Eretria; and it would have been fitting, if for no other reason, at least on account of the city's capture and destruction, to add mention of this brave deed and act of valor. But Herodotus says that they were even defeated by the barbarians and driven back to their ships in flight — though Charon of Lampsacus records nothing of the kind, but writes
the following, word for word: "The Athenians sailed with twenty triremes to help the Ionians, and marched against Sardis and took it — everything around Sardis except the royal wall; and having done this they withdrew to Miletus." In the sixth book, narrating about the Plataeans, how "they offered themselves to the Spartans, who instead bade them turn to the Athenians, since they were their near neighbors
and not bad men to help defend them" — he adds, not as mere conjecture or opinion but as though he knew it precisely, that "the Lacedaemonians gave this advice not out of goodwill toward the Plataeans, but wishing the Athenians to have trouble, being entangled with the Boeotians." So then, if Herodotus is not malicious, the Lacedaemonians are scheming and malicious, the Athenians are senseless dupes taken in, and the Plataeans were, not out of goodwill or honor, but
cast out into the midst simply as a pretext for war. Moreover, he has now clearly been proven false in his account of the Lacedaemonians and the full moon, which he says they were waiting for at Marathon, and so did not go to help the Athenians. For not only have they undertaken countless other expeditions and battles at the beginning of the month, without waiting for the full moon, but even in the case of this very battle, which took place on the sixth of Boedromion, they arrived only a little late, so that they even saw the corpses
when they came upon the place. And yet this is what he has written about the full moon: "It was impossible for them to do this at once, since they did not wish to break the law; for it was the ninth day of the rising month, and on the ninth, they said, they would not march out, since the circle of the moon was not yet full. These men, then, waited for the full moon." But you transfer the full moon to the beginning of the month, which is the mid-month day,
and thereby throw into confusion the heavens themselves, together with the days and all the facts — and this while professing to write the history of Greece, and claiming to be particularly devoted to Athens! You have not even recorded the procession to Agrae, which they still send to this day to Hecate in thanksgiving for the victory, celebrating the festival. But this omission at least helps Herodotus against that other charge leveled at him, that he flattered the Athenians
in order to get a great deal of silver from them. For if he had read this account to the Athenians, they would not have allowed it, nor would they have overlooked, on the ninth day, Pheidippides urging the Lacedaemonians to the battle, when he had just come from the battle itself — and this, arriving in Sparta from Athens on the second day, as he himself says — unless it was after defeating the enemy that the Athenians sent for their allies. That he received ten talents as a gift
from Athens, on the proposal of Anytus, is stated by Dyillus, an Athenian man not among the negligible in matters of history. Having reported the battle at Marathon, Herodotus, as most say, diminished the achievement by his count of the dead. For they say that the Athenians had vowed to Agrotera to sacrifice as many she-goats as they should kill of the barbarians, and then, after the battle, when the number of the dead proved uncountable,
they petitioned the goddess by decree that they might instead sacrifice five hundred she-goats each year. But let us set this aside and look at what came after the battle. "As for the rest," he says, "the barbarians backed off and, taking on board from the island where they had left the slaves from Eretria, sailed around Sunium, wishing to arrive at the city before the Athenians. And blame
was cast upon the Athenians, that this was contrived by a scheme of the Alcmaeonids: for these men, it is said, had come to an agreement with the Persians and displayed a shield as a signal, while the Persians were already aboard their ships. These, then, sailed around Sunium." Here, as for his calling the Eretrians "slaves," though they had shown themselves inferior to no Greeks in courage or ambition, and had suffered a fate unworthy of their valor — let that pass; but as for the slander cast on the Alcmaeonids, among whom were
the greatest of houses and the most esteemed of men, it is a lesser matter to speak of; but the magnitude of the victory is overturned, and its outcome amounts to nothing of the celebrated achievement — there seems to have been no contest, no deed of such greatness at all, but merely a brief brush with the barbarians as they disembarked, as the detractors and slanderers say, if after the battle they do not flee, cutting the cables
of their ships, and giving themselves over to the wind carrying them farthest from Attica; but instead a shield is raised as a signal of treachery, and as they sail toward Athens, hoping to take it, and having rounded Sunium at their leisure, they hover off Phalerum, while the first and most esteemed of the men betray the city, having despaired of it. And indeed, later, when acquitting the Alcmaeonids, he attributes the treachery to others: "for a shield was indeed displayed,
and this cannot be denied," he says, having seen it himself. But this was impossible to have happened, since the Athenians had won decisively; and even if it had happened, it could not have been seen by the barbarians together, driven in flight and with much toil, wounds, and missiles toward their ships, and abandoning the place, each as fast as he could. But when, again, on behalf
of the Alcmaeonids, pretending to defend them against the very charges he himself was the first of all men to bring, he says: "I marvel, and I cannot accept the account, that the Alcmaeonids would ever have displayed a shield to the Persians by agreement, wishing the Athenians to be under Hippias" — I am reminded of a certain proverbial saying: "Stay, crab, and I will let you go" — for why did you bother to seize hold of something, if, having seized it, you mean to let it go? You accuse, and then you defend;
and you write slanders against illustrious men, which you then retract, evidently distrusting yourself — for you have heard yourself say that the Alcmaeonids raised a shield for the defeated and fleeing barbarians. And indeed, in the passage where you defend the Alcmaeonids, you show yourself to be a false accuser: for if, as you write here, the Alcmaeonids "show themselves to have been haters of tyrants, more than or as much as Callias son of Phaenippus, father of Hipponicus" — where
will you put that conspiracy of theirs which you wrote of in the earlier passage — how, hoping to make a marriage alliance, they brought Pisistratus back from exile to the tyranny, and would not have driven him out again, had he not been slandered for having unlawful relations with his wife? These things, then, contain such confusions: he makes use of the slander and suspicion against the Alcmaeonids, while employing praise of Callias son of Phaenippus, and attaching to him his son
...Hipponicus, who according to Herodotus was among the richest men in Athens, has as much as admitted that, though nothing in the facts called for it, he dragged Callias in only to curry favor and win the goodwill of Hipponicus.
Since everyone knows that the Argives did not refuse the alliance with the Greeks, but merely asked not to be forced always to obey the orders of the Lacedaemonians, their bitterest enemies, and that this was their sole condition, he insinuates a most malicious charge, writing: "Since the Argives knew well that the Lacedaemonians would not share the command with them, they made this demand so as to have a pretext for staying out of the war." He goes on to say that afterward, when Argive envoys went up to Susa, they reminded Artaxerxes of this, and that he told them he considered no city more friendly to him than Argos. Then, hedging as usual and drawing back from his own words, he adds: "I cannot say for certain whether this is so, but I do know that all men have their faults, and the Argives have not committed the most shameful ones. I am obliged to report what is said, but not at all obliged to believe it, and let this rule hold for the whole of my account." And again: "Since this too is said, that it was the Argives who called in the Persian against Greece, because their war with the Lacedaemonians was going badly and they wanted, whatever the cost, to be free of their present distress."
Is this not exactly what he himself says the Ethiopian remarked of Persian perfumes and purple robes — that as deceitful were the words, so deceitful were the garments of the Persians? One might say the same of him: that as deceitful are his words, so deceitful are the twists and turns of Herodotus's own phrases, and nothing in them sound, but all evasion and circling round — just as painters make bright colors stand out more sharply by shadow, so he sharpens his slanders through his denials and deepens his insinuations through his ambiguities.
That the Argives, by refusing to join with the Greeks — giving way to the Lacedaemonians over the question of command rather than over valor — disgraced Heracles and their noble birth, cannot be denied; it would have been better for them to rank below Siphnos and Cythnos in the liberation of Greece than, quarreling with the Spartans over supremacy, to abandon so many and so great a struggle. But if they themselves had actually summoned the Persian against Greece because their war against the Lacedaemonians was going badly, why did they not openly side with the Medes once he arrived? Why, if they were unwilling to campaign with the King, did they at least not ravage Laconia, or seize Thyrea again, or in some other way lay hold of and harass the Lacedaemonians — men quite capable of doing great damage to the Greek cause — instead of letting the Spartans march out to Plataea unhindered with so large a force of hoplites?
Here, at least, his narrative makes the Athenians great and proclaims them saviors of Greece — rightly and justly, if only so much slander had not been mixed in with the praise. For when he says that the Lacedaemonians would have been betrayed by the rest of the Greeks, and, left alone, though performing great deeds, would have died nobly — or else, seeing the other Greeks medizing before that happened, would have come to terms with Xerxes — he plainly does not say this to honor the Athenians, but praises the Athenians only so as to slander everyone else.
For what could anyone object to, when he bitterly and relentlessly reproaches the Thebans and Phocians at every turn, and yet, even against men who actually risked their lives for Greece, passes a verdict of treason not for anything that happened but for something that — as he himself merely conjectures — might have happened? As for the Spartans themselves, he leaves the matter deliberately in doubt, raising the question whether they would have died fighting the enemy or surrendered — casting suspicion, by Zeus, on slight evidence indeed, given what actually happened at Thermopylae.
And in describing the wreck that overtook the King's fleet, he tells how, when much treasure was washed ashore, Ameinocles son of Cretines, a man of Magnesia, profited greatly, gathering untold gold and riches for himself — yet even this man he will not leave without his bite, adding: "Though not fortunate in other respects through his finds, he became very rich; for a grievous misfortune also befell him, one that grieved him through the murder of his child." It is plain to everyone that he brought in the golden treasure, the finds, and the wealth cast up by the sea only to make room for the place where he would set down Ameinocles's child-murder.
As for Aristophanes the Boeotian's claim that Herodotus, having asked the Thebans for money and been refused, and then, when he tried to converse and spend his leisure with their young men, was prevented by the magistrates on account of their boorishness and dislike of learning — this in itself proves nothing. But Herodotus corroborates Aristophanes' account by the very way he levels his charges against the Thebans, some falsely, some out of spite, and some as a man who hates them and is at odds with them. He declares that the Thessalians medized at first under compulsion, and in this he speaks the truth; and, prophesying about the rest of the Greeks — that they would have betrayed the Lacedaemonians — he adds the qualification that they would have done so "not willingly, but under compulsion, as their cities were captured one by one."
Yet to the Thebans he grants no such pardon for the very same compulsion, even though they sent five hundred men and the general Mnamias to Tempe, and to Thermopylae as many men as Leonidas requested — men who, alone with the Thespians, stayed with him even after the others left once the pass was surrounded. This was after the barbarian, having gained the passes, was already on their borders, and after the Spartan Demaratus, out of guest-friendship, had arranged for Attaginus, the leader of the oligarchic faction, to become a friend and guest of the King, while the Greeks were still on their ships and no one advanced by land to help. Only then, overwhelmed by dire necessity, did the Thebans accept terms.
For they had neither sea nor ships at their disposal as the Athenians did, nor did they live as far off as the Spartans, tucked away in the recesses of Greece; rather, with the Mede only a day and a half's march away, they took their stand at the pass and, fighting alongside only the Spartans and Thespians, met with misfortune. Yet the historian is so even-handed that of the Lacedaemonians — left alone, bereft of allies — he merely says they might well have come to terms with Xerxes, while he heaps abuse on the Thebans for suffering exactly the same fate under exactly the same compulsion.
Unable to deny outright the greatest and noblest deed of the war, since he could not claim it never happened, he set about defacing it with base insinuation, writing this: "Now the allies who were sent away departed and obeyed Leonidas — all except the Thespians and Thebans. Of these, the Thebans stayed against their will, unwillingly, for Leonidas kept them, treating them as hostages; the Thespians, by contrast, stayed entirely of their own accord, declaring that they would never abandon Leonidas and those with him."
Is it not obvious that he bears some personal grudge and hostility toward the Thebans, under whose influence he not only slandered the city falsely and unjustly, but did not even trouble to make the slander plausible, nor to avoid contradicting himself in a way that only a few careful readers would notice? For having first said that Leonidas, on perceiving his allies to be reluctant and unwilling to share the danger, ordered them to leave, he then says, only a little later, that he kept the Thebans there against their will — men whom, on the contrary, he ought to have driven off even had they wished to stay, if they were under suspicion of medizing.
Where he had no need of unwilling men, what use could there be in mixing suspect persons among those about to fight? Surely the king of the Spartans and leader of Greece was not so foolish as to keep four hundred armed men as "hostages" alongside his three hundred, with the enemy already pressing him from front and rear at once. Even if he had earlier been leading them along as hostages, at that final, desperate moment it was to be expected that they, paying no heed to Leonidas, would have simply made their escape, and that Leonidas himself would have feared being surrounded by them more than by the barbarians.
Quite apart from all this, how is Leonidas not absurd — telling the other Greeks to leave because he was about to die at any moment, yet holding back the Thebans, as though he, on the point of dying for the Greeks, were somehow standing guard over them? If he really had been leading these men about as hostages — or rather as slaves — he ought not to have kept them there to perish with the doomed, but should have handed them over to the departing Greeks. The one remaining explanation available to his accusers — that he kept them there meaning them to die along with him — the historian has himself ruled out, by stating in so many words, concerning Leonidas's ambition for glory: "Leonidas, reflecting on all this and wishing the glory to belong to the Spartans alone, sent the allies away — not because they had quarreled in their opinions." It would be an extreme of folly for him to drive his allies away from a glory he then kept back the suspect Thebans to share.
That Leonidas, then, bore no grudge against the Thebans, but in fact counted them steadfast friends, is clear from what he actually did. He marched his army to Thebes and, by his request, obtained an honor granted to no one else — to sleep the night in the sanctuary of Heracles — and he reported to the Thebans the vision he saw there in his dream: he dreamed that, on a sea heaving with great, rough waves, the most illustrious and greatest cities of Greece were tossing about unevenly and pitching, while the city of Thebes rose above them all, was lifted high into the sky, and then suddenly vanished — a dream resembling what befell that city long afterward.
But Herodotus, in his account of the battle, has obscured Leonidas's greatest achievement, saying that all his men fell where they stood, in the pass near the hill called Colonus; in fact it happened otherwise. For when in the night they learned of the enemy's outflanking march, they rose and advanced on the camp, making for the very tent of the King, intending to kill him or die around him; and so, cutting down whoever stood in their way and routing the rest, they pressed on almost to his tent. But since they could not find Xerxes, and went searching and wandering through his vast and boundless army, they were at last, with difficulty, surrounded on every side by the barbarians and cut down. The other bold deeds and sayings of the Spartans that he has left out will be told in my Life of Leonidas; but it does no harm to go through a few of them here as well.
Before marching out, they held funeral games in their own honor, and their fathers and mothers watched. Leonidas himself, to the man who remarked that he was leading out far too few men for the battle, replied, "Yet enough to die." And to his wife, who as he set out asked whether he had any word for her, he turned and said, "Marry good men, and bear good children." At Thermopylae, after the encirclement, wishing to save two of his kinsmen, he tried to send one of them off with a letter; the man refused it, saying angrily, "I followed you as a fighter, not as a messenger." The other he ordered to carry some word to the Spartan magistrates; this man answered with his deed alone, taking up his shield and taking his place in the line.
No one could fault him had he simply passed these things over, as another writer might. But a man who has troubled himself to collect and record Amasis breaking wind, the thief's approach with his donkeys, and the swelling of the wineskins, and much else of that sort, cannot plausibly be thought to have let noble deeds and noble words slip merely through carelessness or disdain — but rather because he is neither well disposed nor fair toward some of his subjects.
Of the Thebans he says, first, that "they were present with the Greeks and fought under compulsion" — as if not only Xerxes but Leonidas too kept whip-bearers at hand, by whom the Thebans, against their own will, were forced under the lash to fight. And who could be a crueler slanderer than a man who says that men free to leave and flee fought only under compulsion, yet that they medized willingly, though no one at all came to their aid?
Immediately after this he writes: "While the others hurried toward the hill of Colonus, the Thebans broke away and, stretching out their hands, drew near the barbarians, telling them the plain truth — that they had medized and had given earth and water to the King, that they had come to Thermopylae only under compulsion, and were guiltless of the harm done to the King. By saying this they saved themselves, for they had the Thessalians as witnesses to it." Consider: amid such uproar of barbarian shouting, chaotic tumult, flight and pursuit, a legal plea is heard and witnesses cross-examined, with the Thessalians — in the very midst of men being slaughtered and trampled underfoot at the pass — testifying on the Thebans' behalf, because, forsooth, the Thebans had lately routed and driven them out as far as Thespiae when the Thessalians held mastery over Greece, and had killed their commander Lattamyas! Such was the relationship between Boeotians and Thessalians at the time — nothing of decency or goodwill in it at all.
But even granting the Thessalians' testimony, how exactly did the Thebans save themselves? "The barbarians killed some of them as they approached," as he himself says; "but most of them, on Xerxes' order, they branded with the royal marks, beginning with their general Leontiades." Yet Leontiades was not the general at Thermopylae — it was Anaxandros, as Aristophanes established from the official archon-lists, and as Nicander of Colophon likewise reports. Nor does anyone before Herodotus know of Thebans branded by Xerxes — although this would have been the strongest possible refutation of the slander, and it would have suited the city well to take pride in those very brand-marks, as proof that Xerxes had judged Leonidas and Leontiades his bitterest enemies: the one's body he mutilated after he had fallen, the other he branded while still alive.
But while presenting his cruelty toward Leonidas as proof that the barbarian was angrier at him, while he lived, than at any other man, Herodotus also says that the Thebans, though medizing, were branded at Thermopylae, and that, having been branded, they went on to medize enthusiastically again at Plataea. It seems to me that here, like Hippocleides gesturing away his marriage with his legs on the table, he might as well say, dancing away the truth as he goes, "Herodotus does not care."
In the eighth book he says that the Greeks, panic-stricken, resolved to flee from Artemisium back into the interior of Greece, and that when the Euboeans begged them to remain a little longer so that they might get their families and servants to safety, the Greeks paid no heed — until Themistocles, having taken money, shared it with Eurybiades and with Adeimantus, the Corinthian general, and only then did they agree to stay and fight the barbarians by sea. Pindar, though his city was not an ally but was actually under suspicion of medizing, nevertheless recalled Artemisium and proclaimed: "where the sons of the Athenians laid the shining foundation-stone of freedom." But Herodotus, by whom some claim Greece has been adorned and honored, represents that very victory as the fruit of bribery and theft, and the Greeks as men who fought against their will, deceived by generals who had taken money for themselves. And even this comes to no...
his malice does not stop there. Almost everyone agrees that although the Greeks were victorious in the sea-battles fought off Artemisium, they nevertheless withdrew from Artemisium and yielded to the barbarians once they heard the news from Thermopylae; for there was no advantage in sitting there guarding the sea once the war had moved inside the Gates and Xerxes had gained control of the passes. But Herodotus, before he even reports the death of Leonidas, already represents the Greeks
as deliberating a flight. He writes it this way: "having been roughly handled, and the Athenians not least, since half their ships had been disabled, they were planning a flight into Greece." And yet the withdrawal that took place before the battle might fairly have been called that, or rather reproached as such—but he had already used the word "flight" once, and now he calls it "flight" again, and a little later he will call it "flight" once more. So bitterly does he cling
to the word. "Immediately after this a man of Histiaea came by boat to the barbarians, announcing the flight of the Greeks from Artemisium; but they, distrusting him, kept the messenger under guard and sent out fast ships to reconnoiter first." What are you saying? That men were running away as though defeated, when their enemies, after the battle, refuse to believe they are fleeing, since they think them decisively victorious? Then is it worth trusting
this man when he writes about a single man or a single city—he who with a single word strips Greece of her victory, tears down the trophy, and effaces the inscriptions they set up beside the shrine of Artemis of the Dawn, calling them mere boasting and bragging? The inscription runs as follows: "Sons of the Athenians, once upon this sea in battle overthrew the tribes of every race that Asia bred, when the army of the Medes had perished,
and set up these tokens for the maiden Artemis." Now in the actual battles he does not even array the Greeks in order, nor does he show which region each city held as it fought at sea; but as regards the withdrawal, which he himself calls a flight, he says the Corinthians sailed first and the Athenians last. Even so, he ought not to have trampled so heavily even on those Greeks who did medize—especially since Herodotus is himself generally reckoned a man of Thurii,
but is claimed by the Halicarnassians, who, though Dorians, campaigned against the Greeks together with their women's quarters in tow. Yet he is so far from softening the compulsion that drove the medizers that, in narrating about the Thessalians—that they sent word to the Phocians, their enemies and foes, promising to keep their land unharmed if they received fifty talents as payment—he writes this about the Phocians in these very words: "For the
Phocians alone among the peoples of that region did not medize, for no other reason, as I reckon by inference, than their hatred of the Thessalians; and if the Thessalians had been promoting the Greek cause, as I believe, the Phocians would have medized." And yet shortly afterward he himself will say that thirteen Phocian cities were burned by the barbarian, their land ravaged, the temple at Abae set on fire,
men and women destroyed, except those who managed to escape in time to Parnassus. Yet all the same, he assigns those who endured the worst sufferings rather than abandon what was honorable to the same category of baseness as those who medized most eagerly—and being unable to fault their actual deeds, he sat composing shabby accusations and insinuations at his writing-desk against them, judging their intention not by
what they actually did but by what they would have done, he claims, if the Thessalians had not opposed it—as though, once their land had been seized by others, they were thereby cut off from any chance of treachery. Now if someone should try to excuse the Thessalians of medism by saying that this was not what they wanted, but that seeing themselves siding with the Phocians in the quarrel against the Greeks, they medized against their own judgment out of spite, would that not seem
a most shameful piece of flattery, twisting the truth by manufacturing respectable motives for base actions merely to please others? I think it would. How then can it fail to seem the most blatant slander, when this man declares that the Phocians chose the best course not out of virtue, but simply because they knew the Thessalians held the opposite view? For he does not even trace the calumny to others, as is his usual habit, saying he heard it from someone; instead he says he found it himself by inference. He ought therefore
to have stated the evidence by which he was persuaded that men acting like the noblest of men had, in fact, the same intentions as the basest. For the argument from hatred is absurd: the quarrel with the Athenians did not prevent the Aeginetans, nor the quarrel with the Eretrians the Chalcidians, nor the quarrel with the Megarians the Corinthians, from allying with Greece; nor again did the Macedonians, the bitterest enemies of the Thessalians, turn away from friendship with the barbarian because the Thessalians medized.
They set aside their private hostilities, for the common danger overshadowed them, so that, casting off their other passions, they aligned their judgment either with what was honorable, out of virtue, or with what was expedient, out of necessity. And indeed, even after that compulsion under which they were caught and forced to side with the Medes, the Thessalians changed sides again toward the Greeks, and Lacrates the Spartan himself bore direct witness to this on their behalf. Herodotus
himself, as though forced to it, admits in his account of Plataea that the Phocians too joined the Greeks. And it is no wonder that he presses so bitterly on the unfortunate, when he even transfers those who were present and shared the danger into the ranks of the enemy and of traitors. "For the Naxians sent three triremes as allies to the barbarians, but one of the trierarchs, Democritus, persuaded the others to choose the side of
the Greeks" — does he say it this way? He cannot even praise without blaming; in order that a single man be praised, an entire city and people must be spoken of ill. Against him stand as witnesses, among the older writers, Hellanicus, and among the more recent, Ephorus, one recording that the Naxians came to help the Greeks with six ships, the other with five. Herodotus himself, moreover, refutes his own fabrication
entirely. For the Naxian local historians say that even earlier they repelled Megabates, who sailed against the island with two hundred ships, and again drove off the general Datis when he sailed in with a hundred ships; and if, as Herodotus says elsewhere, they burned and destroyed their city while the people escaped to the mountains and were saved, surely they had good reason to send aid to those who had destroyed their homeland,
rather than to help those who were defending the common freedom! As for the fact that he did not compose this falsehood in order to praise Democritus, but to disgrace the Naxians, that is clear from his passing over entirely and suppressing Democritus's own achievement and feat of valor, which Simonides made known in an epigram: "Democritus was the third to begin the battle, when at Salamis the Greeks joined the Medes in combat on the sea; five enemy ships he captured,
and with his own hand he rescued a sixth, a Dorian ship, from the barbarians as it was about to be taken." But why should anyone be indignant on behalf of the Naxians? For if there are antipodes to us, as some say, dwelling around the underside of the earth, I do not suppose even they are ignorant of Themistocles and of the plan of Themistocles—the plan by which he persuaded Greece to fight at sea before Salamis—and set up a temple to Artemis of Good Counsel in Melite, after the barbarian
had been defeated in war. This achievement of Themistocles our charming historian, so far as it lies in his power, strips away and transfers the credit to another, writing the following, word for word: "At that point, when Themistocles had come to his ship, Mnesiphilus, an Athenian, asked him what had been decided; and on learning from him that it had been resolved to sail the ships to the Isthmus and fight
the sea-battle before the Peloponnese, he said: 'Then, if they take the ships away from Salamis, you will no longer be fighting for a single fatherland at all; for each contingent will scatter to its own city.'" And shortly after: "But if there is any way, go and try to undo what has been decided, and see if you can somehow persuade Eurybiades to change his mind and stay here." Then, adding that "the suggestion pleased Themistocles very much,
and without answering anything in reply he went to Eurybiades," he writes again, in the very same words: "There Themistocles, sitting beside him, related all that he had heard from Mnesiphilus, presenting it as his own, and adding other points besides." You see how he pins the reputation for malice on the man, by saying that he passed off Mnesiphilus's plan as his own? And going still further, mocking the Greeks, he says that Themistocles neither
perceived the advantage nor understood it, but overlooked it—the very man who was nicknamed Odysseus for his shrewdness—while Artemisia, Herodotus's own fellow-citizen, with no one to instruct her, conceived entirely on her own the idea of telling Xerxes in advance that "the Greeks will not be able to hold out against you for long, but you will scatter them, and each contingent will flee to its own city; and it is not likely that they, if you march your infantry
against the Peloponnese, will stay still, nor will they care to fight at sea in defense of Athens; but if you press to fight at sea at once, I fear that the naval force, if it suffers harm, will also damage the land force." These words lack only meter, Herodotus, to make Artemisia out to be a Sibyl, foretelling the future with such precision! That is why Xerxes entrusted her with taking his own children to Ephesus—for he had apparently forgotten, coming as he did from Susa,
that one takes women along, if the children needed a woman's escort. But as for what he simply invented, we have nothing to say here; we are examining only the things in which he actually lied. He says, then, that the Athenians claim that Adeimantus, the Corinthian general, when the enemy came to close quarters, was overcome with terror and fled in fear—not by quietly backing water or slipping away unobtrusively through the combatants, but by conspicuously hoisting
his sails and turning all his ships about; and then, as he was being rowed off, a small boat happened to meet him near the far end of Salamis, and from the boat someone called out: "You, Adeimantus, are fleeing and betraying the Greeks—but they are actually winning, just as they prayed to overcome their enemies." Now this boat was, it seems, dropped straight from the machinery of a tragedy—for why else should we need
a stage-device of tragedy, when in everything else he outdoes the tragedians in sheer effrontery? So Adeimantus, believing this, "returned to the camp, the deed already accomplished; this at least is the story told by the Athenians. The Corinthians, however, do not agree, but consider themselves to have been among the foremost in the sea-battle, and the rest of Greece bears them out." Such is the man in many matters: he heaps up one slander against one people
and one accusation against another, so as never to fail to make someone appear altogether wicked—just as here he manages it both ways: if the slander is disbelieved, the Corinthians lose their good name; if it is believed, the Athenians do. I suppose that neither the Corinthians against the Athenians, nor the Athenians against the Corinthians, but this man against both together, is lying. Thucydides, at any rate, when he has the Athenian at Sparta answering the Corinthian, and speaking at length in praise of the achievements of the Persian Wars, and of
the sea-battle at Salamis, brings no charge of treachery or desertion against the Corinthians; nor was it likely that the Athenians would slander the city of the Corinthians in this way, a city which they saw ranked third after the Spartans and after themselves, inscribed upon the dedications made from the spoils of the barbarians; and at Salamis, right beside their own city, they granted the Corinthians the right to bury their dead as men who had proved themselves brave, and to inscribe this
elegy: "Stranger, once we dwelt in the well-watered city of Corinth; but now the island of Salamis, Ajax's isle, holds us. Here we captured Phoenician ships and Persians and Medes, and saved sacred Greece." And the empty tomb at the Isthmus bears this inscription: "When all Greece stood balanced on a razor's edge, we lie here, having saved her with our own lives." And on the dedications of a certain Diodorus, one of the Corinthian trierarchs, set up in the temple of Leto,
this too is inscribed: "These arms, taken from the hostile Medes, the sailors of Diodorus dedicated to Leto, memorials of the sea-battle." As for Adeimantus himself, whom Herodotus never stops reviling, he even says he "alone among the generals was struggling to flee from Artemisium and would not wait"—consider, then, what reputation this man actually had: the tomb of that same Adeimantus, around which all Greece wound a crown of freedom. For it was not likely that
such an honor would be given, after his death, to a cowardly and treacherous man, nor would he have dared to name his daughters Nausinike, and Acrothinion, and Alexibia, or to call his son Aristeas, unless there had been some brilliance and distinction attached to him from those very deeds. And indeed, that the Corinthian women alone among Greek women prayed that famous
and marvelous prayer—that the goddess would cast into their husbands' hearts a passion for the fight against the barbarians—it is not only implausible that Herodotus and his circle should be ignorant of this, but not even the lowliest of the Carians could be; for the matter became widely known, and Simonides composed an epigram, when bronze statues were set up in the temple of Aphrodite, which they say Medea founded—some say when she ceased to love her husband, others
that it was to make the goddess stop Jason from loving Thetis. The epigram runs thus: "These women stood here on behalf of the Greeks and their fellow citizens who fought at close quarters, praying to divine Aphrodite; for divine Aphrodite did not wish the bow-bearing Medes to hand over the citadel of the Greeks." These are the things he ought to have written and remembered rather more than the child-murder of Ameinocles that he drags in. Now, gorging himself unrestrainedly on the accusations against Themistocles,
among which he says that Themistocles never stopped secretly stealing and enriching himself at the expense of the other generals around the islands—in the end he strips the Athenians themselves of the crown of victory and awards it to the Aeginetans, writing as follows: "Having sent the first-fruits of the spoils, the Greeks asked the god at Delphi in common whether he had received the first-fruits full and satisfactory; and he said that he had received them from the other Greeks, but not
from the Aeginetans; instead he demanded from them the prize of valor for the sea-battle at Salamis." No longer does he attribute his own inventions to Scythians or Persians or Egyptians, fabricating as Aesop did with crows and monkeys; instead, using the mask of the Pythian god himself, he strips Athens of the first prize at Salamis. And as for Themistocles, once the second prize had gone at the Isthmus—because each of the generals
awarded the first prize to himself and the second to Themistocles, and the judgment reached no conclusion—though he ought to have blamed the rivalry of the generals for that, he says instead that all the Greeks sailed away because out of envy they refused to proclaim the man first. And in the ninth and final book, hastening to pour out whatever was still left of his personal grudge against the Spartans,
he strips away the celebrated victory and the famous achievement of the city at Plataea; for he writes that "at first they were afraid of the Athenians, lest, persuaded by Mardonius, they should abandon the Greek cause; but once the Isthmus had been walled off and they had placed the Peloponnese in safety, they no longer cared about the rest and looked the other way, feasting at home and toying with the Athenian envoys, and dragging things out." How then did they set out to
five thousand Spartiates go out to Plataea, each man with seven helots attending him? Or how, having taken on so great a danger, did they prevail and cut down so many tens of thousands? Listen to his plausible explanation: “It happened,” he says, “that a man from Tegea named Chileos was staying in Sparta, who had certain friends and guest-friends among the ephors. This man, then, persuaded them to send out the army, saying that the wall across the Isthmus would be of no use to the Peloponnesians if the Athenians should join Mardonius.” This is what led Pausanias out to Plataea with his forces; and if some private business at Tegea had detained that Chileos, Greece, it seems, would never have survived.
Again, unable to decide what to make of the Athenians, he now exalts and now disparages the city, shifting it up and down: he says that at one point they were set to contend with the Tegeans for second place, invoking the memory of the Heraclidae and their deeds against the Amazons, and the burials of the Peloponnesians who fell beneath the Cadmeia; and finally, coming down in his account to Marathon, they were eager and content to obtain command of the left wing. Yet a little later, he says, Pausanias and the Spartiates yielded the command to them and urged them to take up position against the Persians, receiving the right wing themselves and handing over the left wing to the Athenians, on the ground that, from inexperience, they were declining battle with the barbarians.
And yet it is absurd, if they were used to the enemy, to suppose they should be unwilling to fight. But as for the rest of the Greeks, led off to the other generals' camp, he says, “when the cavalry moved, they gladly fled toward the city of the Plataeans; and in their flight they arrived at the Heraeum”—in which passage he accuses them, virtually all of them together, of insubordination, desertion, and treachery. In the end he says that only the Lacedaemonians and Tegeans fought it out against the barbarians, and only the Athenians against the Thebans, while he strips all the other cities alike of any share in the success: “no one else took part in the struggle, but all sat still, laid down their arms, and betrayed those who were fighting on their behalf; and it was only late that the Phliasians and
Megarians, on learning that Pausanias was winning, advanced and fell in with the Theban cavalry, and were destroyed for no good reason; while the Corinthians were not present at the battle at all, but after the victory, hurrying through the hills, chanced not to encounter the Theban horsemen.” For the Thebans, once the rout had occurred, rode ahead of the barbarians and eagerly came to the aid of them as they fled—clearly repaying the marks branded on them at Thermopylae.
But as for the Corinthians, one may learn from Simonides both the position in which they fought against the barbarians and how great an outcome they won from the struggle at Plataea, where he writes as follows: “And in the middle were those who dwell in Ephyra of many springs, skilled in every excellence in war, and those who occupy the city of Glaucus, the town of Corinth, who set as the fairest witness of their toils gold in the sky honored, and it increases the wide renown both of themselves and of their fathers.” For these lines Simonides recorded not while training a chorus at Corinth, nor composing a song for the city, but simply as history of those deeds, writing them in elegiac verse. Herodotus, anticipating the refutation of his falsehood by those who would ask, “Whence, then, the mass graves and so many tombs and memorials of the dead, at which the Plataeans down to this day offer sacrifice in the presence of the assembled Greeks?”—
has, I think, made an accusation more shameful than the very charge of treachery he brings against these families, in the following words: “As for the rest, whatever tombs are also to be seen at Plataea, these, as I learn, were heaped up by each of the cities as empty mounds, out of shame at their absence from the battle, for the sake of those who should come after.” This absence from the battle, which amounts to treachery, Herodotus alone of all men has ever heard of; it escaped the notice of Pausanias and Aristides and the Lacedaemonians
and Athenians that the Greeks had abandoned them in the danger; and neither did the Athenians, though at odds with the Aeginetans, bar them from the inscription, nor did they expose the Corinthians, whom they had earlier defeated and put to flight from Salamis, though all Greece bore witness against them. And yet it was Cleadas the Plataean who, ten years after the Persian Wars, currying favor with the Aeginetans, as Herodotus himself says, inscribed the mass grave with their name. What, then, made the Athenians and Lacedaemonians,
who at that very time nearly came to blows with one another over the trophy of the victory, refrain from driving out those Greeks who had shown cowardice and run away from the prizes of valor? Instead they inscribed them on the trophies and on the colossal monuments, and gave them a share of the spoils; and in the end they engraved on the altar this inscription: “When the Greeks by the might of Victory, by the work of Ares, trusting in bold courage of soul,
had driven out the Persians, they set up in common, for a free Greece, an altar of Zeus the Liberator.” Was this too, Herodotus, inscribed by Cleadas or someone else flattering the cities? Why, then, did they need to dig up the earth for nothing, to trouble themselves and idly heap up mounds and build memorials for the sake of those to come, when they could see their glory consecrated among the most conspicuous and greatest dedications?
And indeed Pausanias, as they say, already harboring tyrannical ambitions, had inscribed at Delphi: “When as leader of the Greeks he destroyed the army of the Medes, Pausanias dedicated this memorial to Phoebus”—thereby, in a way, making the Greeks share the glory of what he had proclaimed himself sole commander of. But when the Greeks would not tolerate this, and brought charges, the Lacedaemonians sent men to Delphi and had this inscription chiseled out, and in its place engraved the names of the cities, as was just.
And yet how is it likely either that the Greeks who had no share in the inscription would be indignant, if they were themselves conscious of having deserted the battle, or that the Lacedaemonians, after erasing the name of their own leader and general, would inscribe those who had abandoned them and looked on at the danger? How utterly monstrous it would be if Sophanes and Aeimnestus and all those who fought with distinction in that battle were not vexed even when the Cythnians and
the Melians were inscribed on the trophies—yet Herodotus was. He, having assigned the struggle to three cities alone, chisels all the rest out from the trophies and the sacred dedications. Of the four engagements that then took place against the barbarians, he says the Greeks fled from Artemisium; and at Thermopylae, while their general and the King himself risked their lives in the vanguard, he has them sitting idle and neglecting the fight to celebrate the Olympic and Carnean festivals; and in his account of Salamis he has written so much
about Artemisia that he has not reported the whole sea battle in as many words. Finally, sitting at Plataea, he has the Greeks ignorant to the very end of how the battle went, as though it were some Battle of the Frogs and Mice—the sort of thing Pigres, Artemisia's kinsman, wrote for sport and nonsense in verse—agreeing to fight it out in silence so as to escape the notice of the rest; and he has the Lacedaemonians themselves prove no better in courage than the barbarians, but win only because they fought armed and armored
against men naked and unarmed. For while Xerxes himself was present, the barbarians were driven forward against the Greeks scarcely by whips at their backs; but at Plataea, it seems, they took on other souls: “in spirit and strength they were not inferior; but their clothing, being bare of armor, did them the greatest harm, for being light-armed they fought a battle against hoplites.” What, then, remains glorious or great for the
Greeks from those struggles, if the Lacedaemonians fought against unarmed men, and the rest were absent from the battle without anyone's notice, and the mass graves honored for each are empty, and the tripods and altars beside the gods stand full of false inscriptions, while Herodotus alone has known the truth, and all the rest of mankind, as many as have any repute among the Greeks, have been deceived by the report of those exploits of that time, as though they had
been something extraordinary? What then? The man is a vivid writer, his style is pleasing, and his narratives have charm and cleverness and a certain bloom; and like a bard telling a tale, though not with full understanding, he has spoken clearly and gracefully. To be sure, these qualities charm and win everyone over; but, as one must beware of the blister-beetle hidden among roses, so one must beware of his slander and malicious speech, concealed beneath a smooth and gentle style, lest unawares we come away holding absurd and false opinions about the best and greatest of the cities and men of Greece.