25 Phraortes and Cyaxares (§§102-106)

As Deioces established a hereditary monarch, the results of his impulse toward one-man rule continue for many generations. After fifty­ three years, his son Phraortes becomes king. Phraortes, we are told, was not pleased to rule only the Medes. Why was he not so content? We are not told, and the absence of any further motivation leads us to think that the only motive was his own pleasure, his own will. When one’s will becomes its own rationale, we have left the realm of morality and decency. Here we see dramatized one of the chief defects in hereditary monarchy: even if Deioces contented himself with one-man rule over his own, such restraint could not be forced on his son; indeed, Phraortes would seem to have inherited his father’s erotic impulse for power.

He first attacked and subdued the Persians. Yet this conquest did not satisfy him: he began to subdue all Asia until he was killed attacking the Assyrians, who, though their strength was much diminished from earlier times, were as strong as he. The very brief description of the Assyrians shows that they, like everyone else, were subject to the vicissitudes of fortune, having lost their allies little by little. We learn no more about Phraortes, but if Aristotle is right that the lives of one’s descendants affect one’s happiness even in the underworld, then surely Deioces has suffered a reversal there: the son’s much shorter rule and ignominious death (together with the deaths of the greater part of the army) are not a testimony to his happiness (or to the ideals with which he brought up his son).

The son of Phraortes, Cyaxares, is a much better military man than his father or grandfather and organizes his soldiers according to their function as archers, spear-carriers, and cavalry. He deploys them in orchestrated maneuvers rather than letting them fight pell-mell. And it is he who conquers most of the territory east of the Halys River.

We see that a monarchy that begins from the desire of the people for domestic tranquility soon develops into an imperialistic engine. We can suppose that Phraortes and his son were like the later Alexander the Great, who feared lest his father leave him nothing to do. When it comes to Cyaxares, Herodotus does not feel obligated to offer even the faintest motive for conquest. Perhaps the mere fact that the new king is capable militarily is enough to explain why he pursues a plan of empire. Herodotus reminds us of the tale concerning Cyaxares that he had told us earlier (73-74), about his abusive temper toward some Scythian suppliants who had not brought him game from a hunt and how they had chopped up a boy entrusted to their care and fed him to the king. It was over these suppliants that he fought a war with Alyattes of Lydia, when, as the historian pointed out, anxiety about an eclipse brought peace. The reminder about Lydia comes at a critical moment here, for it keeps the idea of vicissitude, embodied in Lydia, fresh in our minds, and it also makes the immediate story of Cyaxares’s war with Scythians more richly ironic.

In order to avenge his father’s defeat by the Assyrians, Cyaxares attacks and wishes to destroy Nineveh, to which he lays siege. But just then a great army of Scythians, still in pursuit of the Cimmerians whom they had expelled from Europe, engage the Medes in a decisive battle, deprive them of their rule, and take possession of Asia. In view of Cyaxares’s early kind­ ness to a few Scythians, it probably comes as a great blow to him to be defeated by a much larger group of them.

Herodotus devotes little space here to the Scythians, about whom he has nothing good to say. They marched on Egypt but were bribed by ­ Psammetichus to go away. On their way back through Syria a few Scythians went out of their way to plunder the temple of Heavenly Aphrodite, the oldest of all the shrines to the goddess, even older than the one on Cyprus, which was in fact a colony of the Syrian temple. Upon the perpetrators and their descendants the goddess sent the “female disease.” It is not at all clear what this disease is; it is possibly pederasty or impotence.^[1] It is possible that Herodotus himself did not know. The uncertainty makes this punish­ment even more horrific, for it is left to us to imagine the particular form this affliction took. Later on (4.67) he suggests that these people, called Enareis, are androgynous, but it is not possible for androgyny to be acquired as a disease. Whatever the disease, it is something dreadful and a punishment for plundering the temple of a god. As the punishment has something to do with sexuality, it appropriately comes from the goddess of sex and fits the motif of divine punishments.

The Scythians ruled Asia for twenty-eight years, exploiting and destroying the land with their hubris and insolence (ὑπὸ τε ὕβριος καὶ ὀλιγωρίης). In addition to collecting the required tribute, they cruelly plunder whomever they wish. At length Cyaxares, whose whereabouts and activities during the years of Scythian subjection have not been discussed, invites most of the Scythians to a banquet. He gets them drunk and massacres them, regaining for himself and the Medes the lordship of Asia. The Medes also conquered Assyria, including Nineveh, a subject Herodotus promises to take up later (but never does).

Whatever we may think of the Scythians, how are we to respond to the violence done to them when they are guests? Cyaxares, whose glory has been his military prowess, wins back his kingdom through treachery and the killing of intoxicated guests, behavior very different from that of his just grandfather Deioces. How the line of kings is deteriorating morally! As Herodotus tells the story, we are not able to “root for” any of the ­ participants. What does it matter whether the masters be Syrians, Medes, or Assyrians? They all behave pretty much the same way, with the same rapa­cious greed for the possessions of others-so unlike the restraining words of Cyrus that end the whole History.

This sequence of stories beginning with Deioces and ending with Cyaxares prepares the stage for the tale of Cyrus that follows immediately. It reminds us of the vicissitudes inherent in dynastic succession, of the caprice that motivates so many human activities, and of the unchecked greed and self-interest that prevail in Oriental tyrannies.^[2]