History, Hamartia, Herodotus

To some readers, Herodotus’s History seems to be a collec­tion of stories having no integrated aim or purpose. The stories appear to them strung together with a fond storytell­er’s love. Or if Herodotus does have a central theme or purpose, it is diffuse and frequently violated.^[1] Others main­tain that Herodotus is chiefly concerned with causality, with the attribution of responsibility, with the discovery of aitiae, but they either do not state or do not see the underlying unity to the aitiae of his history; so while these readers and scholars of Herodotus are to be praised for their insight into Herodotus’ quest for aitiae, they are to be blamed for seeing plurality where they should find unity and chaos where they should find order.^[2] I shall examine hamartia in Herodotus, not because it itself is the unified aitia which we are seeking, but because by examining hamartia we can discover a glimpse of the underlying aitia of Herodotean history, and perhaps of history in general.

It will be useful first to investigate the nature of hamartia. Though this topic is dealt with by others in this volume, a few words may help our argument here. Professor Crossett’s own contribution to our understanding of hamartia is essential to my remarks.

Aristotle defines hamartia in his Rhetoric (1374bl-10), where he distinguishes it from misfortunes and wrong actions. A misfortune (atuchema) is unexpected and is not vicious (that is, it occurs as a surprise but does not arise from vice); a mistake (hamartema) is expected and is not vicious (that is, it is not a surprise, for men are wont to commit errors, but it does not arise from vice); a wrong action (adikema) is both expected and vicious (that is, it is not a surprise and does arise from vice).

While Aristotle’s comments do not form a definition—for though they differentiate hamartia from misfortune and wrong actions, they do not place hamartia into a genus and species—they are nevertheless very useful. The confusion of misfortune with mistake is very rare. If, for example, a brick falls from a building and injures someone walking below, we do not say the person made a mistake; rather we would say that he suffered a misfortune.^[3] But there is an easy confusion between a mistake and a wrong action. Thus, we often speak of someone as having made mistakes in his youth, when in fact the actions he performed were vicious and voluntary. What were performed in his youth were wrong actions, not mistakes. This distinction is very important.

We must now examine the sort of things about which one can make a mistake. If a student is asked who the 63rd pope was, if that student has never studied the papacy and has never learned about the 63rd pope, he cannot make a mistake about the 63rd pope. Similarly, if one is asked the number of automobiles in Upper Volta, but that poor fellow has never heard of Upper Volta, while he may guess at the answer, and he might be wrong, we would not say that he has made a mistake. To make a mistake, one must have knowledge about the matter inquired about. Thus, a student of American History who has been asked the name of the first president might conceivably answer—by mistake—John Adams. But for him to make this mistake, he must already know that George Washington was the first president. In short, it is impossible to make a mistake about something concerning which one has no knowledge. One can err only if he has prior knowledge. Plato, in the Theaetetus, an aporetic dialogue, admits so much, even though he never does work out the nature of hamartia.^[4]

D. W. Lucas says in his edition of the Poetics, “The essence of hamartia is ignorance combined with the absence of wicked intent. Mere lack of knowledge is agnoia; hamartia is the lack of knowledge which is needed if right decisions are to be taken.“^[5] Lucas here fails to make an important distinction. He seems to accept the Platonic idea that to know the right is to do the right and that no one errs willingly—that if one errs, he is ignorant of what he should do. This is to say, of course, that a hamartia is involuntary. Now Aristotle, whom Lucas is interpreting, has already said that a hamartia is to be expected (me para loge), and, as we have shown earlier, a mistake has its essence in knowledge, not ignorance. With knowledge comes responsibility.

The most frequently cited example of error in Greek lit­erature, possibly because Aristotle himself gives it (though without explanation), is Oedipus. But what Oedipus’s error was is the subject of much dispute. Some think his error is in not knowing who his parents were and in thinking his Corinthian guardians to be his true parents.^[6] And yet how is this mistake a hamartia? Oedipus may be wrong, as he most certainly is, but, as we observed, there is a distinction between being wrong and making a mistake. Those who believed, before Copernicus, the earth to be the center of the universe and the sun to rotate around the earth were surely wrong, but they were not mistaken. For they were in ignorance, and, as we have shown, one must possess knowledge to make a mistake. It is impossible to err about what one does not know, though it is possible to be wrong about it. We cannot miss a mark unless we know where the mark is. If a scientist formulates a theory about biology, he may be wrong, for he might have the wrong evidence. But he will only be mistaken when he has misinterpreted the data. Now, to believe you know something when you do not know something is to be wrong, but it is not the same as to make a mistake. To make a mistake you must be wrong about something which you do know. One difficulty in explaining this is the deficiency of the vocabulary. Perhaps the following chart wiII help:

There are several ways of being wrong, but if we admit the validity of the distinctions, we ought to assign different names to them. A guess when one knows he is ignorant is vastly different from a mistake, where one knows the truth. Similarly, if one has only a belief about a matter, his condition when he makes a wrong statement is different from that of one who knows what the case is. For example, if one knows that the sun is shining but says it is raining, if he is serious, he is a bit daft. But if one merely believes that it is raining, say, because it was raining when he entered the building, and says it is raining even though the sun has begun to shine, we say merely that he is wrong.^[7]

Oedipus was frequently wrong, but he was not always mistaken. What was his mistake? Professor Crossett used to argue that Oedipus’s mistake was simultaneously to believe and to disbelieve the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle told Oedipus that he would murder his father and marry his mother. Believing the Oracle, he ran from Corinth. But if he really believed the Oracle, why should he have run? He must have believed that the oracle could be averted. But if he believed the oracle could be averted, he did not believe the Oracle. He both believed and disbelieved the Oracle simultaneously: here lay his mistake.

Mistakes, Crossett has argued, are all of this nature. They consist either of a simultaneous believing and disbe­lieving or of a simultaneous knowing and not knowing. Believing and disbelieving is a species of knowing and not knowing, for one who believes in contradictories knows that he cannot be right by believing in both. When we add two figures and give 9 as the sum of 5 and 6 instead of 11, we both know and do not know the answer. If we were writing 9 and someone interrupted us to ask what we were doing, we would have to say we were making a mistake, that of course we knew 5 and 6 to be 11. One cannot use as an excuse that one forgot for the moment or that one did not have the knowledge of the true answer. The action was a hamartia, a mistake. Without knowledge, the mistake would not have been possible. If a child who had not yet learned his numbers imitated the person making the error, though the child copied something false, we would not say that the child also made a mistake: for to make a mistake, one must have knowledge. Thus, the person who adds 5 and 6 knows the sum to be 11; yet at the instant when he writes “9” he does not know. Or perhaps we should say that he knows in one sense—namely, he can, if he pays attention, recall the correct sum—and he does not know in a different sense—for how can he know if he writes the wrong sum?

Now, what does it mean both to believe and disbelieve or to know and not know the same thing simultaneously? According to the law of noncontradiction, it is impossible for something to be both true and untrue simultaneously. To believe and disbelieve, to know and not know, is to violate logic and to be irrational. The heart and soul, therefore, of a mistake is irrationality. If the irrationality is prolonged over a stretch of time, we say the one making the mistake is mad or insane. Hence, one who thinks himself Napoleon or Jesus believes and simultaneously disbelieves that he is Napoleon or Jesus, for to know about the whole life of one of these people is to know that one is an entity separate from them. To believe that one is separate and not separate is irrational.^[8]

There are a number of important implications in consid­ering irrationality to be the source of mistakes. First, it suggests that the universe is a place of order, where no proposition or fact contradicts any other proposition or fact. It suggests that irrationality works against the order. But it also suggests, not only that irrationality exists, but that it exists only in man. For only man, the lone animal capable of making judgments, is capable of knowledge. Since knowl­edge is a prerequisite for mistakes, man is the only animal capable of making mistakes. Of course, not all mistakes are of the same magnitude. In adding figures incorrectly, the irrationality involved—the insanity, if you will—is temporary. But if one who knows the sum of 5 and 6 consistently and without larcenous motive writes the wrong sum, we can justly question his sanity.

What would it mean if the world were a place only of rationality? Would it not mean that the behavior of men would be predictable? For if men are given true premises and if they follow logic with perfect rationality, they will reach true conclusions, and in any given situation, should they not be able to make the proper judgment? A Platonist would admit as much but would argue, no doubt, that they could make a proper judgment only if they had sufficient knowledge about the circumstances and conditions surrounding the question. But since men are mortal, he would continue, they cannot ever have complete information about the circumstances and, therefore, because of ignorance may come to the wrong conclusion. The Platonist would, of course, be right, for if sufficient knowledge is lacking, it is impossible to judge correctly, even if logic is used properly, though we might guess correctly—but a guess is not a judgment. So if men were totally rational, while ignorance might result in wrong guesses, there would be no mistakes.

Irrationality is a cause of unpredictability. For where mistakes are made—mistakes in the sense of a simultaneous believing and disbelieving—prediction is impossible. Other cases of irrationality would also result in unpredictability. For example, if someone knowingly and willingly chose the lesser rather than the greater good, we could say with all fairness that he was behaving irrationally. Irrationality, by its very nature, is both the cause of unpredictability and is itself unpredictable.

Let us turn now to history. Let us assume for a moment that, instead of what has actually been the case, all men had acted correctly on all occasions and that no wrong decisions had ever been made, neither those generated by ignorance nor those generated by mistakes or other forms of irrationality. There would be no tales of vengeance, of broken treaties, of greedy impulsive men, of heroic battles, of anything, in short, of what we study when we study his­tory. We often hear that the value of history is to teach the mistakes of the past in order that men avoid making them again. Of course, since mistakes are only one form of wrong-doing, we should perhaps correct that statement to read “to teach the various forms of wrong-doing in order to avoid them again in the future.” Where, if all actions had been correct, would our history be? What would perhaps substitute for history would be long lists of rulers whose actions were right, whose words were golden, whose characters were sterling. If this had been the case, there would have been no wars motivated by the base passions; there would have been no opportunities for overcoming evil or spreading havoc. In short, there would have been nothing that could not have been predicted, with the sole exception of natural disasters. (And, of course, if there had been perfect knowledge of nature, even these could have been predicted.) Thus, human irrationality provides historical change: it causes, among other things, wars, and wars, as Professor Crossett used to say, are the principal source of change in the human world.^[9] Eusebius wrote that dogma has no history; only heresy has a history, for dogma, according to Eusebius, is always right, always constant. Only heresy, false choice, can have a history.^[10] Truth is eternal, it stands outside time; falsity, however, is glued to time, and the account of wrongdoing and falsity is history.

If a wrong action is performed because of ignorance, the responsibility of the wrongdoer is not so great as if he had behaved irrationally. Not to know all the facts of any set of circumstances is a condition of human existence and of the finitude of human minds. Perhaps before acting one should do what he can to know everything, but it is, of course, an end impossible to achieve. If one has done what he could to learn the facts of a case, he may be pardoned if things do not turn out as he wished—if he has behaved rationally and has made the proper judgments given what he knew. When, though, a wrong action arises out of irrationality, the responsibility for the action is great. When, to take a trivial example, one shoots at a target and misses, if there is no external cause for the miss—a loud noise, the sun, the wind, etc.—the responsibility for the miss rests squarely on the agent. If, as we have, I hope, shown, the agent in a mistake has knowledge and what constitutes the mistake is irrationality, it is impossible to place the responsibility elsewhere than on the agent of the mistake. When we come to assign responsibility, it is clear where the responsibility lies.^[11]

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the Father of History, has made it his task to assign responsibility. His concern is always with aitia, which points to the beginning of a chain of events. For it is at the beginning that we can place responsibility. Herodotus states his concern for this responsibility in his very first sentence:

This is the publication of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in order that the actions of men may not be erased by time, nor the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians be unsung, and especially on account of what aitia they warred against each other.

For Herodotus, irrationality is the moving cause of human history. It is the beginning of the chain of events. The two greatest manifestations of irrationality are mistaken interpretations of omens or oracles and wrongful sexual conduct: both have their origin in irrationality.

The History of the Persian Wars begins its search for aitia in a series of rapes. First, Herodotus tells us, the Phoenicians landed at Argos and carried off a number of women, including lo (I, 1). Later, some Greeks, probably Cretans, landed at Tyre and carried off the king’s daughter Europa (I, 2). Then some Greeks, in the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts, sailed to Aea and carried off Medea (1, 2). In the next generation, Paris Alexander, the son of Priam, came to Greece and stole Helen, and the Trojan War began (I, 3).^[12] Thus, according to the old tales, the enmity between Greeks and Asians is very ancient, going back almost to the dawn of history.

Herodotus says, however, that he cannot verify any of these tales, but he does know the Asian who first attacked the Greeks, and he was Croesus, King of Lydia (I, 5), who later fell to the army of Cyrus the Great of Persia. Since Herodotus is concerned with aitiae, he tells us how Croesus’s family acquired sovereignty (1, 6-14), for in that acquisition begins the chain of events which ends in Persia’s defeat in the war with Greece.

The family of Croesus acquired the throne from the Heraclidae, descendants of Heracles. Herodotus is careful to record this detail, for descendance from a hero or god is a sure sign of legitimacy, and the Heraclidae were absolutely legitimate. Candaules, the last of the Heraclidae, lost the crown by irrational lust. Herodotus writes of him bemusedly, “Now this Candaules was in love with his own wife!And loving her he believed her to be the loveliest of all women” (I, 8). Candaules desired to show her naked to his bodyguard Gyges. For a long time Gyges refused, saying:

Sir, what an unhealthy proposal (logos) you make, urging me to see my queen naked. With her clothes a woman puts off her modesty. Wise maxims have been laid down by men of old; from these it is our duty to learn: let every man look to things that concern himself. I am persuaded that she is the most beautiful of her sex, but I beg you not to require what is wicked.

Gyges’s speech is magnificent in its brevity and com­pleteness. Gyges first appeals to his own place in the hier­archy—the fact that Candaules’s wife is his queen—for Can­daules should remember the proper order of things. He next appeals to nature (physis) and explains that a woman by nature sheds her modesty with her clothes. He then appeals to custom, to nomos, (and thus covers himself on both sides of the nomos-physis controversy, which will rage in Herodotus’s time) referring to maxims handed down by the men of old. And finally, he concedes that the Queen is the most beautiful of women so that there is no need for him to see her naked. The argument is thorough and compelling. If Candaules is rational, he ought either to refute the argument or to abandon his demand. But Herodotus continues: “The other [Candaules] replied: ‘Cheer up, Gyges, and don’t be afraid that I’m testing you.’ In other words, Candaules neither refutes nor even pays attention to the arguments. Hesiod, in the Works and Days had written (293–97):

That man’s completely best who of himself
Thinks of all things, … and he is also good
Who trusts a good advisor; but the man
Who neither for himself can think nor, listening,
Takes what he hears to heart, this man is useless.

In Candaules we find a man who without reason rejects a good argument.

Gyges obeys his king’s behest. While from a secret hiding place behind a door he watches the Queen undress, she sees him, but for the moment remains calm and in no way reveals her knowledge. Later she requires Gyges to visit her in her royal apartment. When he comes, she gives him an unhappy choice: either kill himself immediately or kill the King, her husband Candaules, and become her husband and King of Lydia. He chooses the latter course. When the people protest the assassination of their king, it is agreed to let the Delphic Oracle determine the best course. It decides in Gyges’s favor but adds that vengeance for the Heraclidae will come in the fifth generation. Croesus was the fifth generation.

Now what was Gyges doing when he looked at Can­daules’s wife? And what was going through Candaules’s mind when he required such outrageous conduct from his lieutenant?

It is clear that Gyges knew he was engaging in wrongful conduct, for we have his eloquent speech protesting Candaules’s wish. Yet he watched the Queen undress.^[13] Did Gyges feel a conflict of obligations: one obligation to obey ancient laws and allow another man’s wife her modesty and at the same time another obligation to obey monarch? If one must perform a wrong action (looking at the queen) in order to perform a right action (obeying a king), is one making a mistake? I would argue that he is not, for there is no simultaneous belief and disbelief. If looking at the naked Queen was not Gyges’s mis­take, did he make a mistake? Could his mistake have been in killing Candaules rather than himself? Perhaps.

For by obeying Candaules even to the point of violating the ancient laws, Gyges was acknowledging the obligations of a subject to his monarch, an obligation that extended even to wrongful actions. When he killed Candaules, however, he was denying the obligations of a subject to his monarch. Herodotus says that Gyges felt the force of compulsion, but, as Milton sang, necessity’s the tyrant’s plea. Gyges’s mistake, then, was to believe and simultaneously to disbelieve in the obligations to a king.

And what of Candaules, who loved his wife? He wanted to show his trusted friend something that the friend did not wish to see. He rejected advice from a man whose relationship to him was based on advice: he both believed and disbelieved in Gyges as an advisor; to the extent that he did not trust Gyges’s advice, he should not have wished to share his intimate prize with him; since he rejected Gyges’s advice, he should also have rejected the bond which tied him to Gyges. If Candaules had either accepted Gyges’s advice or rejected him as an advisor, he would have done no wrong. But Candaules’s irrationality cost him his throne and generated the sequence of events which led to Croesus’s attack on Persia and the Persian attempts on Greece.^[14]

Improper sexual behavior has grim consequences in other Herodotean stories. The most conspicuous example occurs at the very end of the history, after Xerxes has been defeated by the Greeks. Having returned to Persia, Xerxes develops an erotic fixation on his brother Masistes’s wife and tries to enter into a liaison with her, but she always re­ fuses. At length Xerxes arranges a marriage between his son and a daughter of Masistes, hoping somehow to further his chances of a sexual union with Masistes’s wife ( IX, 108). We are not told how he expects such a marriage to help him, but perhaps he believes his sister-in-law (Masistes’s wife) will be grateful for her daughter’s sake, because the daughter has married the Prince, or perhaps he thinks that there will be more opportunity for seducing her. In any case, once his son marries, Xerxes transfers his lust from his sister-in-law to his new daughter-in-law. The daughter is less virtuous than her mother and very soon grants Xerxes her favors. Xerxes’s wife, Amestris, discovers the affair and contrives to take revenge. She looks upon Masistes’s wife as the guilty party, even though the woman is in truth innocent, and during the occasion of a public banquet, asks her husband to give her the woman. Since Xerxes is constrained by the ritual of the banquet to grant whatever a petitioner seeks, he has no choice but to give the innocent woman to Amestris, his wife. Xerxes tries to soften the loss of a wife to Masistes, and gently asks him to surrender his wife, assuring him that he will receive one of Xerxes’s own daughters to marry. Masistes refuses, and Xerxes, full of rage, tells his hapless brother that hence­forth he will live without his own wife and without the prof­fered replacement. Amestris meanwhile has caused the wife of Masistes to be mutilated by having her breasts, nose, ears, and lips cut off; her tongue is ripped out by the roots. Thus mutilated, she is allowed to go home (IX, 108-113).

Xerxes, at several points in the story, himself expresses horror at various requests, but complies with them nevertheless and becomes enraged when others are slow to cooperate. His actions, his wife’s requests, are stirred by eros, that same sort of irrationality which led him to attack Greece in the first place.^[15] He believes what he is doing to be wrong; still he believes it to be the right course of action; such simultaneous belief in contradictories constitutes his hamartia. 

Herodotus is not the only author in whom sexuality is the source of irrationality. Eros, Hesiod had sung, is “the most beautiful of the immortal gods, who in every man and every god softens the sinews and overpowers the prudent purpose of the mind” (Theogony, 120-122). Augustine, the Christian Platonist, explains the irrationality of sexuality in his explication of the story of Adam and Eve. “So pos­sessing indeed is this pleasure that, at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended.”^[16] So great is the desire for sexual union that it sometimes occupies the mind when the body is not eager for it; at other times desire fills the body and the soul has to fight against it. How much better it would be, Augustine exclaims, echoing Hippolytus, if men could propagate without sexual relations. Now, according to Augustine—because of original sin—but according to Plato—because of the evil inherent in matter and the body—the organs of procreation exercise an independent movement, regardless of the will of their possessor.^[17]

It is this independence of sexual desires which causes the distress. Here is a part of man’s animal nature which man, for all his rationality, cannot cast off. Now, when a man looks at himself and realizes that he is sexually aroused, despite or even against his own will, he becomes aware of the separation of himself from his body. No matter how latently, he has begun to see a division in his being; in a more philosophical turn of phrase, he has been awakened to the mind-body problem. With this awareness comes the notion of two selves, a self which is subject to the rational will, and a second self which is not. Thus, when a man operates according to the desires of his lust, he may act against his own rational will. Yet he could at any time, at any moment, stop himself, restrain himself, and subjugate his sexual passions to his reason. This division of wills, the rational and the sexual, creates a situation where hamartia can thrive. It creates in a vivid, striking way the opportu­nity for a conflict of simultaneously different wills, for a believing and disbelieving, for a knowing and not knowing.

When some rationality governs sexual conduct, Hero­dotus is lavish in his praise. When examining the customs of the Babylonians, he finds both their best and worst customs to concern sexuality. Their best custom (I, 196) sees to it that ugly girls are provided with dowries by the auction of beautiful girls at an annual village sale. This best custom was no longer practiced in the time of Herodotus, the histo­rian says, because poverty afflicted them all, on account of the conquest of Babylon; instead, those now lacking a living made their daughters prostitutes. The worst custom required every woman once in her life to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with a stranger (1,199).^[18]

Irrationality in Herodotus is not found only in improper sexual conduct. To be sure, Herodotus must feel that sexual impropriety is a great aitia of historical change, for he seems to use it as a structural device in his work. (He both begins and ends his history with tales of sexual mis­conduct.) But irrationality generates history by some purely intellectual hamartiae as well.

The principal character of the first half of Book I of the Persian Wars is Croesus, who Herodotus tells us was the first to commence hostilities against the Greeks. Croesus suffers two chief misfortunes: the death of his son Atys and the loss of his Lydian Empire to Cyrus. Both misfor­tunes involve intellectual hamartiae.

In the first case, Croesus dreams that his son Atys will die by being struck with an iron weapon. To avert this dream-predicted death, Croesus compels his son to marry, removes all decorative weapons from the palace walls, and prohibits Atys from engaging in military affairs. By attempting to avert the calamity predicted in the dream, Croesus shows that he believes the dream is false—for if the calamity is averted, the prediction of death. by an iron weapon is not realized; if not realized, not true. Yet, if Croesus did not believe the dream, there would be no point in trying to avert its fulfillment. So Croesus must both believe and disbelieve the dream’s prediction. To believe and to disbelieve the same thing is to violate the law of non-contradiction and hence to be irrational.

Later, Croesus receives the oracle that, “if he attacked the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire” (I,53). Then taking the oracle in the wrong sense, mistaking the oracle, he leads his forces into Cappadocia (I,71). Where is Croesus’s hamartia? Clearly he both knows and does not know the future. If one were to interrupt him and ask him, “Croesus, do you know which empire you are going to destroy?” he would answer that he did not. But no one asked, and so he both knew and did not know. He both knew and did not know what he knew and knew and did not know what he did not know. In both cases of prediction Croesus erred: when he tried to avert the dream’s fulfillment and when he tried to live in accordance with the oracle. Both mistakes were rooted in his pervasive, underlying irrationality. When Croesus, having lost his empire, sends a message rebuking the oracle, the oracle says in its defense that Apollo did what he could for Croesus: he postponed for three years the fall of Lydia, and he sent Croesus true oracles. The blame belongs to Croesus, “who neither understood what was said, nor took the trouble to seek for enlightenment.”^[19]

In his concluding paragraph on Lydia, Herodotus writes,

This was the answer of the priestess. The Lydians, having returned to Sardis, told it to Croesus, who admitted that the mistake was his, not the god’s. Such was the way in which Ionia was first conquered, and so the empire of Croesus ended. (1, 91)

It seems clear that Herodotus intends us to understand that it was Croesus’s series of hamartiae which participated in the carrying out of his fate. What was fated took place because of hamartiae; had Croesus not made so many hamartiae, it is difficult to see how any of the events could have taken place.

Since, as we have observed, war is probably the greatest single source of historical change, it is fitting to look at the aitiae of the various principal wars in Herodotus to see whether any kind of hamartia or other irrationality figures in them.

The power of irrationality to generate history is shown in the victories and defeats of Cyrus, the next great figure in Herodotus. The victory that makes Persia wealthy and therefore great is the victory over Croesus; the defeat which destroys Cyrus is his loss to the Massagetae. Herodotus records Cyrus’s motivations for attacking the Massagetae thus:

Many strong motives urged him on—his birth espe­cially, which seemed something more than human, and his good fortune in all his former wars, wherein he had always found that against whatever country he turned his arms, it was impossible for that people to escape. (1,204)

A bit later, when considering what strategy to use, Croesus advises Cyrus:

If you deem yourself an immortal, and your army an army of immortals, my counsel will doubtless be thrown away upon you. (I, 207)

Cyrus follows the advice of Croesus and crosses the river to attack the Massagetae (rather than waiting for the Massagetae to cross the river and attack him). We should remember one last bit of information. When Croesus was taken off the pyre on which the Persians had placed him, after Croesus had explained his reasons for invoking Solon, and had explained how his “happiness” had proven brief, Cyrus, debating what to do, is described thus by Herodotus:

Then Cyrus, after hearing from the interpreters what Croesus had said, relented, thinking that he too was a man, and that it was a fellow man, one who had once been as blessed by fortune as himself, and he was burning alive; he was afraid, too, of retribution, and was full of the thought that whatever is human is insecure .( I , 86)

Keeping this history in mind, what shall we make of Cyrus’s motives for attacking the Massagetae? His motives, according to Herodotus, were his birth and his good fortune; the advice he followed from Croesus was to be followed contingent on his being a mere mortal: ^[20] indeed, Cyrus knew himself to be mortal when he freed Croesus from the pyre; yet his very reason for following Croesus’s advice would require him  to give up his attack on the Massagetae.^[21] If Cyrus agrees to follow Croesus’s advice—advice predicated on Cyrus’s being a mortal man subject to the vagaries of fortune—then his motives for the attack disintegrate. If, in fact, Cyrus is a god or in possession of unchanging good fortune, then he need not and should not follow Croesus’s advice: to follow the advice (advice predicated on Cyrus’s mortality) and to go on with his planned campaign (a campaign predicated on Cyrus’s divinity) are contradictory. Cyrus must clearly believe that he is both mortal and immortal simultaneously: he commits a hamartia; he violates the law of noncontradiction: he is irrational. The irrationality causes him to attack the Massagetae.

Herodotus emphasizes Cyrus’s mistakes when he records the Persian monarch’s misinterpretation of a dream. Instead of seeing that the vision warns him of his death at the hands of the Massagetae and predicts the accession of Darius, Cyrus thinks the vision to warn that Darius is plotting against him. It is as though his belief in his own divini­ty—a belief repeated even in this dream episode (he says the gods are always protecting him)—keeps him from seeing the truth (I, 209-210). And the reader cannot help but realize that Herodotus is reminding us of the fact that, although Cyrus seems to acknowledge his own humanity by following Croesus’s advice, he nevertheless believes he is divine.

The most conspicuous example of irrationality in The Persian Wars is the insane Cambyses, who murders his sister and brother and the son of his most trusted counselor, and attempts to murder Croesus when Croesus has given him some good advice.

Herodotus reminds us of Cambyses’s madness frequently (111, 25, 29, 30, 34-38). Cambyses slays those who tell him the truth, those who appear to slight him ever so slightly, as well as many who have done nothing at all to provoke him. As lmmerwahr observes, Cambyses, who holds in esteem the ideas of loyalty to dynasty and legitimate succession, comes to pollute both conceptions.^[22] A few examples will illustrate the nature of his madness, which repeatedly keeps him from admitting the truth—and it is failure to acknowledge truth which is Cambyses ‘s ultimate undoing. Only when Cambyses is dying does he come to his wits and see alI the errors he has made (111, 64-65). When attacking the Ethiopians, for example, before he is one-fifth of the way to his target, he runs out of provisions(111, 25); rather than acknowledge the truth, that he has made a mistake, he presses onward and only retreats after his men resort to cannibalism. He refuses to believe Egyptian priests (111, 27-29) and slays one of their gods, Apis, the calf of a cow that never afterwards is able to bear young. He then has a dream in which a certain Smerdis is to take over his throne, but without taking the trouble to find out which Smerdis it is, he kills his full brother who bears the name. Herodotus then tells us of Cambyses’s questioning of Prexaspes, his most trusted advisor, the very man who had been entrusted with the killing of Cambyses’s brother. What, Cambyses asks, do the Persians think of him? When Prexaspes replies (111, 34-35) that the Persians think he perhaps drinks a bit too much, Cambyses remembers earlier responses which were more favorable, among which was that of Croesus, who in comparing Cambyses to his father Cyrus, said that Cambyses had not surpassed Cyrus because he had not had a son so great as the one Cyrus had. Cambyses, recalling these responses enraged at Prexaspes and shoots Prexaspes’s son through the heart, maintaining that a man too much in his cups could not have such a good aim. Croesus rebukes Cambyses for his hot temper, and Cambyses orders his servants to slay Croesus. The sentence is not carried out, for the servants fear that Cambyses will change his mind and repent of his decision. He does change his mind, and is glad that Croesus is still alive, but, angry at his servants for their failure to carry out his plan, he has them slain.

There is, then, a plethora of stories concerning Cam­byses, who, Herodotus says, is afflicted with epilepsy, the sacred disease. They illustrate Cambyses’s irrationality. ^[23] He wants to kill those whose opinions he likes one minute but does not like the next. He refuses to accept the state­ments of those whom he finds most trustworthy. He both suspects and simultaneously trusts the same men. He slays his sister for her brief lamentation at her brother’s death. To be reminded of his own actions drives him into a rage. Yet it is perhaps by virtue of his incomparable madness that Cambyses achieves a certain greatness—not in any moral sense, but the greatness of a plague or an earthquake—and becomes a thauma, a wonder, and hence worthy of inclusion in a history.

The principal action of the Persian Wars is Xerxes’s invasion of Greece. What are Xerxes’s motives? Is Xerxes moved by irrationality? The’ evidence seems to show that here too Herodotus observes the irrationality of men and its grave consequences.

During a council Mardonius urges Xerxes to conquer Greece; Xerxes’s wise uncle Artabanus warns him not to, for the Greeks are abler than they appear, and god loves to strike down the larger animals: lightning strikes down the large but leaves alone the small (VI I,10). Xerxes initially is angry with Artabanus for this advice but soon begins to see its wisdom, and after an evening’s thought he decides it is better to follow the good advice of Artabanus and cancel his plan to attack Greece. During the night, though, Xerxes has a dream in which a tall and beautiful man tells him to go forward with the plan to attack Greece (VI I, 12). The next day, Xerxes has the dream again. Terrified, he consults his uncle. Artabanus correctly explains to him the nature of dreams and why they should not be believed. “Whatever a man has been thinking during the day is likely to hover round him in the visions of his dreams at night” (VI I, 16).^[24] Xerxes insists that Artabanus wear Xerxes’s clothes and fool the dream into thinking Artabanus is Xerxes so that Artabanus may himself hear the dream. Though Artabanus says it is impossible to fool a dream, he is pre­ vailed upon by Xerxes to try this experiment. The same dream comes to him during the night, recognizes him, and scolds him for trying to dissuade Xerxes from the expe­dition. Despite his earlier warnings concerning the nature of dreams, Artabanus accepts the dream and urges Xerxes to attempt the hoped-for destruction of Greece.^[25]

Irrationality here is manifested less by the habitually superstitious Xerxes than by his wise uncle Artabanus. Artabanus, it appears, believes in the power of dreams when he urges Xerxes on; yet when he gave Xerxes advice, he discounted the power of dreams: to believe and disbelieve in the power of dreams is surely a hamartia. And yet one may argue that Artabanus has simply changed his mind; if he has, perhaps Herodotus is suggesting that his good advice was better before his mind was changed. But as is more likely, Herodotus is showing the foolishness of even the wisest of the Persians. Since they do not rely on good counsel, they must rely on fortune. But as Artabanus says, good counsel is superior to fortune (VI I, 10).

It is the episode with the dream that gives Xerxes his zeal to continue towards Europe. Had there been no dream, he would have followed the sound advice of Artabanus and stayed in Asia.

Two other actions show Xerxes’s irrationality quite clearly. The crossing of the Hellespont and the preparations for it are surrounded by many portents and warnings. For the reader of Herodotus these warnings show clearly how Xerxes’s behavior generates the flow of events. An eclipse alarms the Persian army (VI I, 37). An interpreter reassures Xerxes: “God is foreshadowing to the Greeks the destruction of their cities; for the sun foretells for them and the moon for us.” Herodotus continues, “So Xerxes, thus instructed, proceeded on his way with a glad heart.” But just as the army reaches the other side of the Hellespont, there are other portents (VI I, 57): a mare gives birth to a hare; and Herodotus reminds us of a similar portent which had occurred earlier in Sardis: a mule dropped a foal with double sexual organs. But Xerxes ignores these omens. As Herodotus says (VI I, 58): “So Xerxes, despising omens, marched forwards.” The similarity of expression and the proximity of these two episodes, the glad heart at good omens (the eclipse) and the ignoring of bad omens (the odd births), requires that we consider them together. What is Xerxes doing except believing and disbelieving in the power of omens? Why should he believe one omen and not another? The only principle of belief or disbelief seems to be whether or not the omen be favorable.

A final example of Xerxes’s irrationality occurs in one of the loveliest passages in the entire history. As Xerxes looks over the Hellespont, busy with his fleet, he congratulates himself, then weeps. He explains to his uncle Artabanus—the very same man, Herodotus reminds us, who spoke so freely when he advised the king not to invade Greece-­ that he is sad at the shortness of man’s life. Artabanus replies that, as sad as that shortness of life is, sadder still is the fact that death is often preferable to life. Xerxes agrees with his uncle but says, “For this very reason, let us not talk about it” (VI I, 47). Xerxes reminds him of their mutual dream and asks whether Artabanus is still anxious. The King’s uncle then repeats his earlier objections to the attack. Xerxes interrupts, “There is reason, Artabanus, in everything you have said; but I Pray you, do not fear all things alike, nor reckon every risk’. For if in every matter that comes before us you look to all possible chances, you will never achieve anything” (VI I, 50). In short, Xerxes repeats what he said earlier: let us not talk about the difficulties or obstacles. It seems a repetition of “let us not pay attention to unfavorable omens.” And yet is this not the very heart and soul of irrationality: to acknowledge the truth of a better way and to choose the worse? For it is certainly one thing to choose the worse course out of ignorance, but to acknowledge that one action is best and not to do it is not in keeping with reason.

And yet, is there not truth in what Xerxes says? Is it not true that, if all obstacles are considered, nothing will ever be accomplished? Are these not the very words the mad mechanic uses in Rasselas when he defends his flying machine? Indeed, what would be the consequences of following Artabanus’s advice? Henry lmmerwahr observes, “There are in fact many warners in Herodotus accompanying kings and their advice is always sound, but it is usually also negative.”^[26] Can this be the reason for its negative quality: history would not be driven forward—nothing new would happen—if men followed good advice? Good advice is always conservative.

Is it possible that, in Herodotus’s view of the irrationality of kings, we have an answer to the Ionian philosophers who maintained that change was impossible in the ordered universe? Perhaps if the universe was as Parmenides described it—and the laws of reason followed—there would be no change of any kind, not least historical change. But nature is full of disordered events and so is the life of men. Men are irrational, and their irrationality is what generates history.