TRIBUS VIRIS ILLUSTRIBUS HENRICO STEIN
HENRICO VAN HERWERDEN
ALUREDO HOLDER
HOC VOLUMEN
D.D.D.
EDITORIBUS EDITOR
[p. vii]
PREFACE
THE present publication completes a task undertaken upwards of
twenty years ago, and but partially absolved in 1895 by the
issue of an edition, in the same series, of The Fourth, Fifth, and
Sixth Books of Herodotus. The most obvious difference in
method between the two works is the addition of an Apparatus
Criticus to this volume. That Apparatus, however, makes no
pretence to independent authority. Fully aware that fresh collations
of some of the Codices are desirable, I could have wished
in particular to have had something better and more recent in
relation to the Sancroft MS. than Gaisford3 (1840) to work
upon. Non omnia possumus omnes. I dare not face such
further delay of this publication as was involved in a thorough
collation, and I could not guarantee the results of a perfunctory
reading. If the present work have any special or novel merits,
they will be discovered in some other directions; yet I am not
without a hope that the printed text may prove a convenience,
and the synthesis of the labours of previous editors, presented
by the Apparatus, lack neither interest nor utility for those to
whom these volumes are addressed.
Commentary and Appendices may claim to present a good
deal more than a mere synthesis of the labours of others; yet
I despair, even with recourse to an Index Auctorum, of
acknowledging adequately my obligations to previous and contemporary
scholars and historians. I have nowhere consciously
exploited another man's work without acknowledgement; but
[p. viii]
now and again virtue has peradventure flowed over me from
masters unknown or forgotten. Thirty years have I lectured
and taught in the University upon the topics treated in these
volumes, and have doubtless profited directly and indirectly by
the winged words of fellow-students, at home and abroad: I am
no longer able to father my every thought upon its first and
only begetter. Moreover, what scholar has not known again
and again old ideas rediscovered and proclaimed as novelties, in
perfect good faith? It has happened to me also to encounter,
in print or viva voce, points or parallels which I could almost
have sworn were my very own. The jealous scramble for
priority of publication in the well-worked fields of Herodotean
research were a little difficult to justify; and the attempt here
to enumerate items, which I believe to be fresh and original in
my own work, a sorry speculation: so woefully would omitted
articles and unconsidered bagatelles depreciate the claim. I
shall be more than content if the comparatively small number
of readersall I can hope forwho are capable of a judgement
in the matter, find my work serviceable and interesting. It is
addressed to the friends of Hellenic studies: except for that
appeal, it has been accomplished through long years, amid many
conflicting duties, and latterly under some physical disabilities,
purely for its own sake, and as a debt of honouralmae Matri
nutriciato the University of Oxford, which in according me
a quasi-professorial position upon her staff, laid silently upon me
(as I understood) an obligation to diminish, so far as in me lay,
the reproachperhaps a trifle antiquatedof sterility, still too
often levelled against her resident sons.
Somewhat full analyses, or Tables of Contents, are prefixed
to the Introduction and to the Appendices in these volumes;
but, without recourse to the Indices, it will not be possible for
those who consult the work to assemble all the references bearing
upon the almost innumerable topics discussed. In particular,
the argument of the Introduction is constantly enforced, and
supplemented, in Commentary and Appendices, and it is only,
[p. ix]
for example, in Index IV. that the fuller references for the
priority of the last three Books in Composition, or the
hypothesis of the three Drafts, and so forth, are to be found.
I fear, indeed, that I have not always succeeded in avoiding
unnecessary repetitions: at least one such case of superfluity
affronts me in the parallel passages on the Hellespontine Bridges.
The passage in the Commentary was printed first; and yet it
seemed impossible, when the Bridges loomed up in the Appendix,
to be content with a simple reference back to the Commentary,
leaving an obvious lacuna and inconsequence in the sustained
argument of the section: but I would fain hope that this case
is all but unique. Exception may be taken to my inconsistencies
in transliterating proper names, and to discrepancies between the
spelling in my text and that upon some of my Maps. Such
objections in part affect the mystery of book-making, and your
author is hardly quite a free agent, or responsible: in part, such
discrepancies, which never leave the real objective in any doubt,
seem to me almost negligible quantities. If that is not enough,
I will make bold to say that, had I the whole work to do over
again, I would be, if you please, even more pedantic in such
matters, and enforce a transliteration of Greek proper names as
exactly as Grote and Browning did: Herodotus, though I have
adhered to it, is an abomination to me, and Thucydides
which the Anglo-Saxon pronounces Theusydidesean absurdity.
But perhaps what might most loudly call for an apology is
the audacity of my dedications. I have ventured to inscribe the
first volume of this Ex voto to the three distinguished Editors
on whose foundations my Apparatus is in the main erected; and
with the second volume I have dared couple the names of three
distinguished fellow-countrymen of my own, all brilliant expositors
of old Greek life and letters. They will not, I hope,
be shocked if I say in defence that Herodotus had in him the
makings of a very decent Irishman, just as Thucydides might
pass, of course, for a typical John Bull. But, as I may call them
in some sort, all three, friends of long standing, they will forgive
[p. x]
me when they find their namesthat is, their good examples
and courageous spiritassociated with my work. Had Sir
Richard Claverhouse Jebb been still within hearing of such an
Ave, I might have claimed a like indulgence for the unauthorized
use of his name.
I have to acknowledge with cordial thanks the care and
acuteness with which an old friend and former pupil, Mr.
George Buckland Green, now a Master at the Academy School
in Edinburgh, has assisted me in the correction of the proofs of
this work. My gratitude is due to Messrs. R. & R. Clark,
of Edinburgh, and to their accomplished and learned staff, for
the accuracy and unfailing courtesy with which the lengthy
business of printing these volumes has been conducted, and to
the House of Edward Stanford, for the pains bestowed upon
the maps in the second volume. Last, and not least, I desire to
record my grateful sense of the patience and kindness with
which my publishers, and in especial Dr. George A. Macmillan,
have endured a long-drawn engagement, from which neither
publisher nor author can expect to derive pecuniary advantage!
REGINALD W. MACAN.
OXFORD, December 1907.
[p. xv]
INTRODUCTION
[sect. 1]
Unity of the last three Books of Herodotus
The seventh, eighth, and ninth Books, or Muses, constitute
a distinct part, or section, of the work of Herodotus. They form
a whole in themselves, separate from the preceding Books, and
closely continuous and related with each other. Though comprising
in actual substance a full third of the work, the narrative
in this volume presents but a single short war, of two campaigns,
and is free for the most part from digressions and excursuses, such
as bulk so large in the earlier Books. The chronological conditions
of the continuous narrative are complete in a dyad, or at most
in a decade, of years. A somewhat larger demand is made in the
geographical interest; but the requirements of the narrative, or of
the composition, are satisfied without serious interruption of the
main theme, and geography rarely, if ever, in these, as often in the
earlier Books, becomes an end in itself. Nor is the story proper
much neglected, or often deserted, for purely narrative digressions,
stories within or beside the story of the war; if anecdotes or
tales are brought in which break the strict sequence or continuity
of the main narrative, yet they have mostly some bearing upon
the subject in hand, as antecedents, consequents, or illustrations.
There is, indeed, as compared with the preceding Books, a remarkable
closeness in the texture and argument of this last trio.
The subject proper comprises the story of the invasion of Greece
by the Persians, the Barbarians, under Xerxes, a well-defined
and well-understood episode, or climax, to which Thucydides, for
example, afterwards applied the title τὰΜηδικά, the war with
the Mede, as a technical term.1 In dealing with this special
[p. xvi]
subject Herodotus undertook to cover a good deal of ground, and
to organise a large mass of material; the result is a treatment
upon a scale for which the preceding six Books have afforded no
parallel. How curt the stories of the Marathonian campaign, of
the first expedition of Mardonios, of the six years' struggle with
Ionia in revolt, compared with the scale on which the invasion
under Xerxes is delineated! Even the invasion of Europe by
Dareios in person, which might more nearly challenge comparison,
is dwarfed beside the story of the great Expedition, much more
the other and earlier adventures, of Greek against Greek, or Greek
against Barbarian, or of Barbarians among themselves, whereof
the former Books of Herodotus have preserved a memory. So
great, indeed, is the contrast in scale, method, and interest
between the last three Books of Herodotus and the first three,
that it would be difficult to relate these two sections of the work
to each other, or to believe them parts of one whole, governed by
one single plan and conception, if accident had divorced them, or
if, say, the middle portion of the work, Bks. 4, 5, 6, like the
middle Books of the Annals of Tacitus, had been lost in the lost
archetypal manuscript.2 The distinct and independent unity of
the last three Books is further accentuated by the clear stylistic
break between the sixth and seventh Books on the one hand, and
the total absence of any stylistic break between the seventh and
eighth Books and between the eighth and ninth Books upon the
other. Nowhere, indeed, is the existent division into Books less
justified than in the last section of the work of Herodotus.3 The
break between Book 7 and Book 8 seems indeed inevitable from
the otherwise unruly dimensions of the former, and a distinct
pause is marked in the narrative, after Thermopylai, by the
record of the erection of monuments, subsequently, upon the spot,
and by the author's clear severance of the operations by sea off
Artemision from the operations by land at Thermopylai. This
justification or call for a convenient division is emphasized by the
Spartan anecdote, probably a later addition, and hardly from the
[p. xvii]
author's pen, with which the Book now concludes; but neither
in the original nor in the final draft of this section or volume of
the work was there any grammatical or stylistic break or pause
between our Book 7 and our Book 8. The same observation is
exactly true of the break between Books 8 and 9; grammatically
the breach is ignored, and materially it is purely artificial, not to
say unnatural. Least of all do the existing divisions correspond
to a chronological skeleton, such as underlies the division of the
work of Thucydides into Books.4 The action of the last forty
chapters of the seventh Book is synchronous, so to say, with that
of the first twenty-five chapters of the eighth Book, just as the
events narrated in the first half of the ninth Book are ex hypothesi
synchronous with the events narrated in the second half. If the
Book of Artemision was to be separated from the Book of
Thermopylai, so might the Book of Mykale have been parted,
and with more justification in the nature of things, from the
Book of Plataia. The purely artificial or arbitrary nature of
the divisions, plainly dictated by merely external convenience, is
a witness to the essential coherence of the record as a whole.
This coherence is further attested by the observation of the overlaps
between Book and Book: thus the narrative of the naval
operations is taken up at the opening of Book 8 from Book 7
c. 196, and again in Book 9 c. 90 from Book 8 c. 132; what
would otherwise have been purely a naval story has been
interrupted, we may say, in the one case by the story of
Thermopylai, in the other by the story of Plataia. No other
equal portion of the work of Herodotus exhibits so remarkable a
coherence, continuity, and freedom from digression, interruption,
or asides as this the third and last volume, or trio, of Books.
Other particular and considerable portions of the work do indeed
reveal an equal closeness and unity of structure, the Egyptian
Logoi, the Skythian Logoi, the Libyan Logoi, each severally; but
the size and separateness of the Egyptian Logoi, for example,
destroys by its position the unity and continuity of the MedoPersian
history into which it has been inserted, and the smaller
but substantial unities of the Skythian and Libyan Logoi have
[p. xviii]
combined to form a unity in Book 4, which has destroyed
apparently for most students and editors the inner continuity of
Herodotus's narrative from the passage of the Bosporos by Dareios
to the battle of Marathon, and its immediate sequelae. Moreover,
the bewildering kinematograph of Hellenic histories developed in
Books 5 and 6, and especially in the latter, throws into all the
greater relief the comparative simplicity and unity of interest and
story in Books 7, 8, 9. If that unity and that simplicity are
not conspicuous to a fault, the result is due in the first place to
the dividing and conflicting interest of actions conducted synchronously
on land and on sea, and not always in sight of each
other; it is due in the second place to the ubiquitous methods of
the author, who is equally at home among invaders and invaded,
and narrates with equal confidence deliberations and doings in
the Persian court and camp on the one hand, and combinations
and conduct among the Greeks on the other, passing from sea to
shore and from side to side with a regularity which amounts
to a principle, or at least a trick, of composition.