2 The Various Tales of Rape (§§2-5)

Herodotus has told us in the proem that he will discuss the grounds of what we take to be the Persian War, but the first sentence of Chapter One clarifies the subject matter. Here Herodotus says that, according to the Persians, Phoenicians began the feud (διαφορή), and it becomes clear that the history will be about Greeks and barbarians generally-not just about Persians.^[1] Some Phoenician merchants landed at Argos and kidnapped King lnachus’s daughter Io and took her to Egypt.

Some time later, a few Greeks, probably Cretans (Herodotus guesses), landed at Tyre and took away the king’s daughter Europa. Now a number of questions arise that are not addressed by Herodotus. How many years later did the second incident occur?^[2] This is a matter of some consequence, for there is a question of how long an injustice can simmer and rancor. Is there some point after which the injustice is forgotten? Herodotus and the history of the world would suggest not, for people remember even ancient grudges and await satisfaction over millennia: hence the lingering disputes among Moslems over the successors of Mohammed, the varying hostile claims on Jerusalem, the continued bitterness among the ethnic groups in the Balkans, and so on. There arises also the question of why the Cretans felt they should avenge a wrong done to the Argives. Or perhaps Herodotus—or, rather, the Persian logographers—-is treating all Greeks as the same, as he seems to do the Barbarians.

Next, some Greeks (Jason and his Argonauts, who, however, are not named, despite their fame) went to Colchis and carried off Medea, for which they sent no restitution, justifying their crime by referring to the absence of reparations sent to them when Io was raped.

The next incident, according to the Persian logographers, arises from the wish of Alexander, son of Priam, to get a Greek wife by means of kidnapping. Since the Greeks had never paid any reparations, he reckoned that he would not have to either. Now it seems to me that we ought to examine the motive attributed to Alexander, as it is the first motive attributed in the History and is, moreover, at great variance with the traditional stories about Alexander and his desire for Helen.

In Greek mythology Paris Alexander’s claim on Helen is attributed to the choice of Aphrodite as the loveliest goddess in the famous ‘‘Judgment of Paris.” Paris Alexander, a red-blooded randy Trojan, is filled with sexual passion for the most beautiful, most sexually desirable woman in the world. This motive formed part of the cultural substrate of the Greeks. But the motive attributed by Herodotus’s Persian source is wholly different: a desire to acquire with impunity a Greek woman by kidnapping. I think that Herodotus’s intention here is to establish a preliminary characterization of the Persians through their logographers. That the Persians would attribute this low motive is the way they show their own ethos: this is the way, says Herodotus, they see humans acting, this is the way they explain human behavior. They explain it so because this is the way they themselves would behave. It is important to recall that the tales of the rapes of women are not given to us in Herodotus’s own person, but are reported as the views of others. We shall, of course, have to compare the kinds of motives Herodotus himself attributes to others.

The Persians, at least according to Herodotus, go beyond merely attrib­uting motive; they also deliver their moral evaluation of the events. Carrying off women, they say, shows a man to be unjust (ἄδικος), but to make a fuss over a woman who has been carried off shows him to be mindless ἀνόητος 1.4]). Such women, after all, could not be carried off without their own consent. Again, I think, we see a characterization of the Persians.^[3] According to them, less stigma attaches to being unjust than to being foolish. Even at this very early point in the History, then, Herodotus is establishing the Persians as a people who do not refrain from an action because of its injustice.^[4]

The question will arise of whether the Persians, by their own standards, behave correctly. How is their attempt on Greece to be judged? Will they think it less evil because it is unjust and not foolish? And yet, throughout the History we shall see the Persians over and over again operate foolishly, ignoring good advice, acting on whim or caprice, engaging in all manner of irrational actions.

Herodotus also gives the Phoenician account of the rape of Io, which claims that she freely had intercourse with the Phoenician captain while his ship was in Argos for trade, and that thinking herself pregnant, she ran off with the Phoenicians to escape shame and parental reproaches.^[5] Io’s rape or indiscretion occurred a millennium (roughly) before Herodotus; since it is unlikely that the Phoenicians would have preserved any accurate history about the event, which must have been fairly common (there is another tale of Phoenician rape in §2.54 ), the Phoenician tale is a way of characterizing the Phoenicians, while showing their support for the Persian view that women cannot be abducted against their will. As we shall learn in the later tale of Phoenician rapes, we do not have to credit their views very seriously.

The series of stories are baldly told and rather uninteresting. They are infinitely less absorbing than the poetical accounts of the same incidents.^[6] Herodotus’s History, as Longinus noted (On the Sublime 13.3), is “most Homeric,” most poetic and absorbing. Perhaps there is truth in the theory that Herodotus is here criticizing Hecataeus and other rivals, writers who by their rationalizing accounts strip the humanity and passion and life from the events;^[7] perhaps what he is criticizing is the anemic character of their accounts, so unlike the passionate true-to-life folk we meet in poetry and in Herodotus’s History.

Rather than decide about these archaic stories, Herodotus claims that he will go immediately to the first he knows who commenced unjust actions against the Greeks.^[8] Why then has he told these tales? The reason, I think, is by now clear: first, he wished to characterize the Persians and Phoenicians by their version of the events; second, he wanted to draw as sharp a distinction as possible between the kind of understanding of human events that the Persians or other rationalizing historical writers use and that which he will exhibit.