39 Cyrus’s Babylonian Campaign (§§188-191)

Herodotus now turns to Cyrus’s actions. he pauses to tell his readers only one fact about all of Cyrus’s preparations and supplies: that Cyrus has brought along a supply of water from the Choaspes River to drink, for, the historian informs us, this is the only water in the world that he drinks. The introduction of this detail is quite startling. One might have expected a discussion of the number and variety of supplies for the army, the sort of catalogue that we find later in the description of Xerxes’s assault on Greece. Perhaps the size of Cyrus’s army is not particularly relevant here, for it is by wits and not by numbers that Babylon is taken. The discussion of the special water that Cyrus drinks has no bearing on military history. It directs our attention to Cyrus’s religiosity. We know from the description of Persian customs (138) that Persians do not spit, urinate, or wash in rivers, for they revere waters more than anything else. The discus­sion of the only water pure enough to suit the Persian king reminds us of their reverence for rivers even as it focuses our attention on Cyrus. We are thus prepared for the next chapter (189), which describes Cyrus’s abuse of the Gyndes River. Perhaps after the implicit contrast with Darius and Xerxes, a contrast to Cyrus’s advantage, Herodotus wishes to undercut the great king’s stature. In any case, the discussion of Cyrus’s special drinking water and the pains taken to keep it in supply even on long journeys renders more shameless the impudence toward the Gyndes, a brother river to the Choaspes.

On the way to Babylon Cyrus must pass over the Gyndes, crossable only by boats at the place where he wished to cross it. One of his sacred white horses tried to swim across and drowned in the river. Angry, Cyrus declares that he will so enfeeble the river that even women will be able to cross it without wetting their knees. He then orders his army to divide the river into 360 channels, a project that takes all summer and delays his campaign until the second spring (189-90). I think that Herodotus intends to describe the mental deterioration of Cyrus, for first the historian makes clear that the stream is passable here only by boats; it is not the fault of the river that the horse tried to swim, just as it would not be the fault of a swimming pool if someone who did not know how to swim dove in and drowned. Cyrus’s angry words to the river perhaps foreshadow his own demise, for he taunts the river by promising to make it weaker than a woman; the woman Tomyris will deliver Cyrus’s doom. And if the earlier mention of the pure water of the Choaspes River served to magnify the blasphemy of abusing the Gyndes, it also foreshadows Tomyris’s punishment of Cyrus, when she dips his severed head in blood, making him drink his fill. That he would lose an entire year’s campaign to avenge his horse, employing thereby his entire army, is testimony to his incipient madness. And even if these horses were sacred to the sun (hence the 360 channels, one to weaken the river for each day of the year), is it the job of a human to avenge one god by punishing another? Is Cyrus presuming beyond his own status as a human being? The question of Cyrus’s confusion over his humanity and divinity will come up again soon, in his fatal encounter with the Massagetae.^[1]

When Cyrus continues his campaign the next year, the Babylonians join him in battle. Worsted, they withdraw within their walls, confident that they could outlast a long siege, for, alerted to Cyrus’s conquests, they have laid in provisions sufficient for many years. Cyrus is at a loss as the siege grows longer and longer. Herodotus now uses the phrase he had used regarding Alyattes earlier (1.19): the king then acted either on his own or on the advice of someone else.^[2] As earlier, the phrase shows the faculty of intelligence. Cyrus does what needs to be done: he finds a way to enter the city. Herodotus directs our attention to Cyrus’s repetition of Nitocris’s actions in diverting the river from its bed. The king draws the water out of the river, and when the level is low enough, he leads his army into Babylon and takes the city. The historian points out that the plan could have been a catastrophe for the Persians if the Babylonians had had prior knowledge of it, for they could very easily have ambushed the invaders. But the invasion was a surprise. Because of the city’s great size three days passed before the whole city knew what happened. Many Babylonians, in fact, were dancing and celebrating a festival at the time of the city’s fall and continued enjoying themselves until they learned of the disaster. This last is a detail the Greek historian might easily have omitted, but he wishes to show the irony in the huge size of Babylon: the city was so big and diffuse that a proper defense could not be organized, not when it took three days for the whole city to hear the terrible news. Its size was part of its undoing. Something similar will happen later in the History, when Xerxes has suffered the defeat at Salamis and the report of the defeat reaches Susa as the Persians are still celebrating the earlier message about the burning of Athens (8.99). At Salamis too the size of Xerxes’s fleet is part of its undoing.

Thus, there is irony in “wise” Nitocris’s defensive works around Babylon. The watery fortifications proved to be the city’s weakness. Her corruption of the Euphrates was punished, and the reader can only anticipate that Cyrus’s abuse of the river, as well as his abuse of the Gyndes, will not go unavenged as well.

Various commentators (How and Wells, Sleeman^[3]) are concerned lest readers accept Herodotus’s and Xenophon’s [Cyropaedia 7.5] accounts of the fall of Babylon as true. There is evidence from cuneiform inscriptions that the Babylonian king, Nabonidus (not, as Herodotus says, Labynetus), was unpopular with his own people and that after he was defeated by Cyrus in a pitched battle the city joyfully opened its gate to the Persians. It is not possible, of course, to know whether Herodotus knew of these other accounts or whether he knew only an account that would glorify the Persians and the ingenuity of Cyrus. His version shares his lessons-that one must not reach beyond one’s human position and that one must beware lest fortifications become debilitations.