5 The Queen’s Revenge (§§8-12)
The queen caught sight of Gyges and somehow she immediately knew that it was her husband’s idea for Gyges to see her naked. This in itself is very peculiar. Would it have been impossible for Gyges to have crept into the chamber on his own initiative? Had Candaules spoken to her earlier of this sort of prank? Why otherwise should she assume Candaules to be the author of the plan? She stays silent, determined to punish Candaules, for “among the Lydians and among barbarians generally it carries a great shame, even for a man, to be seen naked” (1.10).
Here Herodotus draws a distinction between Greeks and barbarians concerning nakedness.[1] Is the distinction fair? Greek males, starting with Orsippos, competed naked in athletic contests.[2] But the contests were not open to women, so it is not as if public nudity between the sexes was common. In Sparta, to be sure, girls did parade and exercise naked along with the boys, but this was a source of scurrilous jokes to the Greeks (as we can tell from Republic 5.452B). Female nudity is a very late phenomenon in Greek art and was never part of everyday life. And surely it would not ever have been acceptable conduct among the Greeks to show one’s wife naked to other men.[3] Greek women were secluded in the home. So it does not seem that it was necessary for Herodotus to specify that nakedness carries a great shame among non-Greeks. Why then does he do so?
There are other questions that arise as well. First, what is the nature of the shame that attends one by being seen naked? Second, is showing one’s wife naked a capital crime, even in Lydia? Third, does killing Candaules and marrying Gyges eradicate the shame? What must have been the thoughts of the queen as she plotted the murder of a royal husband who was guilty only of thinking her beautiful and of lacking the sense not to show her off? All these questions show the complex disorder that arises from Candaules’s irrational impulses. As for Herodotus, perhaps he emphasizes the Lydian shame of nakedness in order to provide the motivation for the intensity of the queen’s fury.[4] Perhaps too this is a way of casting some of the guilt for what follows onto her. How different is the unnamed wife of Candaules from Io, Europa, and Helen! The Persians blamed the Greeks for making a fuss over a woman, who, as they said, would not have gone off against her will; how much fuss the Lydian queen makes here over being seen naked!
The queen offers Gyges the choice of killing Candaules and taking his queen and throne or of being killed himself. Unable to persuade her by entreaty not to compel such a choice, he decides to save his own life.[5] No doubt thinking that argument would be pointless, as it had been with Candaules, Gyges does not even try it upon the woman. He is as unsuccessful in changing her mind as he was in changing the mind of Candaules. With a kind of poetic revenge (for I cannot use ‘Justice” for so severe a penalty) he is to kill Candaules while he is sleeping in the very room where Gyges looked “on what he should not.” The queen gives him a dagger, he hides behind the same door, and he slays the sleeping king.[6]
Herodotus adds that Gyges is mentioned in the iambs of Archilochus; Archilochus’s line says, “I don’t care about the possessions of Gyges” (οὔ μοι τὰ Γύγεω τοῦ πολυχρύσου μέλει). Is there an irony here? Do the possessions (tantalizingly hidden in the inexplicit τὰ) include the menacing wife and the anxiety of a future revenge?
- ].D. Pedley (Sardis in the Age of Croesus, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968 [36]) suggests that the story is Greek since no oriental monarch would summon a courtier to see his wife naked. But, of course, neither would a Greek. J.A.S. Evans (“Candaules, whom the Greeks name Myrsilus... “ Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 26[1985]: 232) cites as parallel the Book of Esther (1.10-12), when Ahasuerus orders his wife Vashti to show her beauty to his court, but, as Evans points out, she is to appear in her royal apparel. ↵
- See my article, “Nudity in Greek Athletics,” The Classical World 68(1975): 431-36. ↵
- Benardete (Herodotean Inquiries, [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969], 12), accepting Herodotus’s statements about the special shame among the Lydians of being seen naked, thinks that the Greeks were not fussy about seeing the wives of others naked. He cites, as do others, Thucydides 1.6.5-6 and Plato, Republic 457a6-b5, but these texts refer, in the case of Thucydides, to athletic contests among males, and in the case of Plato, to the scandalous behavior of the Spartans in allowing their women to exercise naked along with the boys. For a full discussion of the Platonic text and its punning humor, see my book, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama, 244, n. 14. ↵
- D. Konstan (“The Stories in Herodotus’s Histories: Book 1,” Helios N.S. 10[1983]: 12) suggests that since Candaules has violated the convention that only a husband may see his wife naked, Candaules’s wife regards her marriage as dissolved. In his interesting article, Konstan sees actions as wrong because the perpetrators transgress the boundaries of what is their proper sphere (in Konstans’s term,”concentric circle”) of activity. ↵
- S. Flory, “Arion’s Leap: Brave Gestures in Herodotus,” AJP 99(1978): 421, finds rightly, I think, in the description of Gyges’s choice (αἱρέεται αὐτὸς περιεῖναι) contempt for the decision: “Herodotus’ terse phrase reveals his disdain for Gyges’s cowardly choice, a choice which violates the fealty a soldier customarily owes his king and which betrays Gyges’s unwise preference for life over death.” In a personal correspondence, D. Lateiner has expressed his disagreement. Gyges’s decision, he says, represents “ ‘good Odyssean survival’ values, since his king had acted unkingly.” ↵
- Flory (37-38), stresses Gyges’s passivity (he takes his orders and his dagger from the queen) and the dishonor of slaying his master. He contrasts Gyges with Arion, Prexaspes, and Boges, who faced death nobly. ↵
