34 The Story of the Phocaeans (§§163-67)

Mazares had waged war on Priene and the plain adjoining the Maeander River; Harpagus attacked the powerful coastal city of Phocaea farther north. Herodotus pauses to tell some of the city’s maritime history. Phocaea was the first of the Greek cities to engage in long sea voyages, and she opened up the Adriatic, Etruria, Iberia, and the far-off city of Tartessus, on the coast of Spain. These voyages were made in penteconters, a speedy warship, perhaps suggesting that buccaneering was one of the intended activities. At Tartessus, the Phocaeans became friends of the king, Arganthonius, who lived to be 120, having enjoyed a reign of eighty years. Arganthonius invited the Phocaeans to settle in his lands, an invitation they refused. When he heard that the power of the Medes was increasing, he gave generously so that the Phocaeans could build a wall around their city, a long wall made of well-fitted stones. The details that Herodotus provides are not insignificant. Arganthonius’s age and length of reign certainly qualify as a great and wonderful matter, worthy of record: his reign alone lasted more than 3 percent of recorded history (counting from Herodotus’s time until our own). The invitation to the Phocaeans to become a part of his people surely indicates his high esteem for them, as, perhaps even more so, does the funding of a superb wall around their city.

But the power of Herodotus’s principle that happiness does not stay in one place long is proved even here. Despite its beauty and cost, the wall proves sadly inadequate for the defense of the city.^[1] Harpagus lays siege to the city and announces that he will be satisfied if the Phocaeans tear down just one part of the wall and dedicate just one house. It is not clear exactly what the meaning of these actions is (I suppose it is something akin to satisfying the request for earth and water—an indication of surrender that ensures against the destruction of lives and dwellings)—but the request so disturbs the Phocaeans that they ask for one day to deliberate upon the matter. Though he claims to know what they intend to do with the day, Harpagus nevertheless gives the Phocaeans permission. They put all their easily carried possessions into ships and then all their women and children (this is Herodotus’s ordering) and sail to Chios. Persia takes possession of the town (164).

When earlier Arganthonius had invited the Phocaeans to settle in his lands, the advantage to the Phocaeans lay in enhanced opportunities for wealth and prosperity. Yet they had refused; now, when the crisis concerns the loss of freedom, the Phocaeans do leave their ancestral homes. Before Salamis, when the Athenians choose to stay and fight the Persians instead of migrating, they also act in the interest of freedom, in this case, the free­dom of the whole Greek world.^[2] In both cases, Herodotus approves of the behavior, for the end is freedom—one of the values the historian is endeavoring to inculcate.^[3] For the Phocaeans there is no general Greek alliance and there will be no rescue. The entire population must depart from its home.

The Phocaeans try to buy some islands from the Chians, but the Chians will not sell for fear of losing one of their markets. This refusal shows once again how disunited the Ionians are, how unwilling to come to another’s aid, how self-interested. But Herodotus leaves it to the reader to draw the moral judgment; he himself says nothing other than to report what happened. The Phocaeans therefore decide to sail to Corsica, where twenty years earlier they had founded the city of Alalia. Herodotus reminds us that Arganthonius is now dead, so going to Tartessus is not an option. On the way to Corsica they stop by Phocaea one last time, where they kill the Persian guards left by Harpagus. They also declare a curse on any Phocaeans who would stay in Phocaea, and they drop an iron bar into the sea, swearing not to return until the bar floated to the surface. But, says the historian, more than half of the citizenry, overcome with homesickness for their old city, were “untrue to their oaths” and sailed back to Phocaea. The rest traveled on to Corsica.

The uprooting of a population imposes a terrible suffering, and the reader would be inclined to sympathize with the poor Phocaeans. Their actions, however, temper our sympathy, for they seem to engage in need­ less treachery to themselves and others. Why, for example, kill the Persian guard if they have no intentions of retaking their city? And why do so many violate their oath and sail back to the city instead of moving on to Corsica?

It seems as though Italy is to be filled with Asians. Lydians have already founded Etruria, we have been told, and now displaced Phocaeans are to settle Corsica. When they arrive there, they live with earlier Phocaean settlers, and together they harry and plunder the neighboring peoples. These peoples, the Etruscans and Carthaginians, unite and fight a naval battle against the Phocaeans in the Sardinian Sea. Though the combatants are equal in numbers, the Phocaeans win. It is, however, a Cadmean victory because the Phocaeans lose as much as those they have defeated. They pick up their families and as much as they can carry and sail to Rhegium. Meanwhile the Carthaginians and Etruscans cast lots for the Phocaean crews they have captured, and an Etruscan people, the Argyllaeans, win the greatest number. They stone the Phocaean sailors to death. Soon, everything that passes the site of the slaughter becomes twisted, crippled, or paralyzed. Sending to Delphi, the Argyllaeans are told to celebrate religious games in honor of the Phocaeans. The other Phocaeans go to Rhegium and found a city, convinced by a man who tells them that the instructions they had received from the Delphic oracle called for them to found a cult for a hero Cymus, not settle in the Corsican city Cyrnus.

In just two pages Herodotus has packed a tremendous number of details, hinting at many episodes that no doubt he could have expanded to enormous length. Instead, he distills the events to mere sentences, leaving it to our imaginations to flesh out the hints. The effect is to suggest the complexity and interrelatedness of the historical events. Surely no people is exempt from shameful action, as we see those who suffer cause others to suffer and again suffering themselves in turn. And in accordance with the method we have already observed, Herodotus constantly tells something that wins our sympathy and balances it with something that causes our sympathy to depart. This undulating response seems an important part of his historical method: it shows the principle of vicissitude and also that no human beings are exempt from wrongdoing. It is a mark of the surviving literature on antiquity that we do not find any wholly good characters. The Biblical figures such as Adam, Noah, Jacob, Moses, David—despite their nobility and relationship with God—are all portrayed with frailties, insecurities, errors. So too the great figures of pagan literature, who, even when they are, like Agamemnon, “more good than bad,” commit remarkable errors. And all, from Heracles to Oedipus, experience the profoundest suffering, the memory of which gives meaning to their lives. Perhaps this is the chief function of history: to give meaning to human actions by remembering them.^[4]

Let us glance briefly at the conclusion that Herodotus gives to his account of the Phocaeans, his report about the error in the location of Cyrnus. Let us assume that the unnamed man of Posidonia, the one who made the suggestion that there had been a mistake in identifying the proper Cyrnus, is right, as the story’s closure indicates. We will recall the lunatic Cambyses’s mistake in killing the wrongly identified Smerdis. If we haven’t read so far in the History yet, we will nevertheless see how many of the unfortunate events in the lives of the Phocaeans after their flight from their beloved city are the result of an insignificant error. Five years of raiding the Carthaginians and Etruscans, the awful sea-fight in which so many ships were destroyed, the stoning to death of their citizen-sailors, the second flight from Alalia with its uprooting of the children and families­ all might easily have been averted. So much sorrow, so much waste, for nothing. Though Phocaea is a minor city in the History, Herodotus has provided us with all we need to understand the misery of her citizens’ lives.