24 Background to Cyrus: Deioces (§§95-101)

Herodotus announces a new chapter in the History, the story of Cyrus and the rise of Persia to mastery of all Asia. He knows three other versions of the story besides the one he is going to tell, but his, he assures the audience, will avoid miracles and tell the truth. That Cyrus was the subject of much interest we know from numerous other sources. How thoroughly Herodotus avoids the miraculous is a matter that remains to be seen.

The first to gain freedom after 520 years of Assyrian rule were the Medes, whose story he tells at length. The story begins with a revelation of its conclusion: the Medes were at first all living under their own laws (αὐτόνομοι), but then they lapsed into tyranny (ἐς τυραννίδας περιῆλθον). The term used here, τυραννίς, is generally translated as “one-man rule” or “kingship” when it pertains to Persians and as “tyranny’’ when it refers to Greeks.^[1] It seems to me clear, however, that by using the same word, the historian is showing his political views: a Greek tyranny is as odious as a Persian monarchy. I shall here use “tyranny” because I think this term comes closer to evoking the way the Greeks of Herodotus’s time would have responded to it. The historian will now describe the progress of this tyranny and show how freedom may be lost. Although the story is told with special relevance to the situation of Media, it will serve as an object lesson to Herodotus’s contemporaries.

The tale concerns a certain Deioces, son of Phraortes, a man who had fallen in love with tyranny.^[2] The term for “falling in love” is ἐρασθείς—the same verb used at the beginning of the History to describe the erotic enthusiasm of Candaules for his wife, an enthusiasm that prompted him to show her naked to his bodyguard (1. 8).^[3] When this term is used, no further search into causality is necessary. An impulse arises, and the individual reacts to the impulse. As the mass of Medes were satisfied that their compatriots be autonomous, there was nothing endemic in their character to stir one of them to rule over the others. The impulse developed ex nihilo; or, even if not out of nothing, the historian feels no obligation to psychoanalyze Deioces to tell us how the impulse arose. Yet the impulse is not so strange as to defy credulity. For the purpose of understanding Herodotus’s own concept of history, it is sufficient to recognize that these passions simply arise in the human personality and, as in the case of Candaules, can lead to violent changes in the political situation.

Deioces is called σοφός, “wise,” and, in fact, aside from his ambition, he is not portrayed unfavorably. He set himself to a conspicuous practice of justice. In the Media of his day there was massive lawlessness (ἀνομίῃ). Could it be the result of the citizens’ independence? The historian seems to favor freedom and at the same time have anxiety about excessive independence: does autonomy lead to anomy? He would share this anxiety with many in the modern democratic world, who see that democracy must walk the tightrope between falling on the side of excessive or on the side of deficient liberty. Deioces behaved with consummate justice, believing that “injustice is hostile to justice.” The view attributed to Deioces has a proto­Zoroastrian belief in the war between the powers of light and of darkness. That Herodotus can get by with a simple allusion to the idea suggests that it was commonplace to his audience.

Because of his obvious honesty fellow villagers came to him to arbitrate their disputes, and since he was an upright judge people came from the surrounding villages as well. The appreciation of Deioces by “lawless” Medes shows that they are not completely lawless, for they can recognize and value justice in another. The story also shows how civilized life is impossible without basic justice. After a while, the people, freed from cruel and unjust judgments, finally came to rely completely and exclusively on Deioces. Herodotus does not detail how these other cruel and unjust judgments were made; since the people were independent, I would guess that they were made on the basis of brute strength. In any case, all adversaries in the various disputes recognize the rightness of Deioces’s decisions and so continue to refer all cases to him. That many relevant details are omitted from the story suggests that Herodotus is using the story as an object lesson and not as historical fact.^[4] No doubt his remarks on the truth of his forthcoming account applied only to what he was going to say about Cyrus.

At length Deioces felt his importance (97) and announced that he no longer intended to hear cases. In caring for the interests of everyone else, he claimed, he was neglecting his own, and he no longer went to the chair in which he used to listen to cases. As a result of Deioces’s withdrawal from adjudication, says the historian, lawlessness and robbery grew even worse than they had been before. Now the unlikelihood of this result—with its total dependence on one man for justice and the failure of anyone else to arise to take his place (despite the widespread knowledge, as indicated by the acceptance of Deioces’s rulings, of what justice is), and its complete congruence with Deioces’s plan to achieve absolute rule (when we know that most human things go awry)-suggests that the story is a parable and not actual history. Nor, I think, would Herodotus’s audience, with its own experience of life, have confused it for history. The audience would have understood the political lessons of the story, lessons that we shall examine shortly.

In response to the increased wave of lawlessness, the Medes assemble. At the assembly, the principal speakers (Herodotus supposes) were friends of Deioces, and they persuade everyone about the need for a king to restore order. This is the first of several discussions of the founding of political regimes in the History. The settlement of Miletus (5.29) and the Persian conspirators’ decision to continue a kingdom after dethroning the false Smerdis (3.80-88) are other examples. The people themselves show the truth of Deioces’s idea about a war between justice and injustice. Though they themselves are lawless, they desire justice in their land, and thus the war is an internal one inside the psyches of the Medians. This Heraclitean tension of opposites we see in Deioces himself, too, for he is wise and has a sense of justice; he is able to see that the rivals who come to him for judgment receive their due. At the same time, he has this erotic impulse for tyranny that manifests itself in his wanting more than his due. The oxymoronic situation in which he finds himself must cause him mental agony: he is a living paradigm of justice who wants injustice for himself.

This tension, this war between justice and injustice, is, I think, one of the ways Herodotus himself sees great humans generally: the characters of his History are not simple folk devoid of ambivalent desires and behaviors. Perhaps the greatest hero of the Persians Wars, the man who saved West­ ern civilization, is Themistocles, whom Herodotus portrays as a genius and patriot but also as a conniving, rapacious scoundrel.^[5] Croesus, as we have seen, is both a sympathetic father and a callous imperialist. Darius is both a heroic purger of false kings and a devious thief of royal authority. Aristotle said that the corruption of the best is the worst and showed how the best regimes could degenerate into the worst. In Herodotus we see that best and worst unite in the same human character by the victory of one and then the other.

What is most unusual here is the claim that the people themselves choose the monarch rather than having, as in the case of Miletus, the decision made by outsiders or, as in the case of the conspirators, by an oligarchic group. They are like the mythic people Plato’s Protagoras discusses (Protagoras 322A ff.), who join together for a mutual war against the dangers of ungoverned life.^[6] We may grant that Deioces’s friends were the chief speakers at the congregation; nevertheless, they used persuasion to win over their countrymen, not force.

As later, when the Persian conspirators decide to have a king, the question to be settled is the actual selection. Deioces is the one most discussed, and at a meeting, all agree that he should rule (98). And now he begins to reveal the kind of king he is going to be. He makes numerous demands upon the Medes, to all of which they comply without protest. His first demand is for houses throughout the country worthy of his royal status and a bodyguard to protect his person. Upon receiving power, he demands one fortress, his other new houses to be neglected. Again, the caprice with which he abandons the houses he had asked for shortly before is tolerated quietly. The great fortress, Ecbatana, consists of seven colored concentric circles; its setting on a hill as well as its engineering strengthened its structure.^[7] In case Herodotus’s audience may be drifting, he shocks them with a comparison to Athens, the walls of which are about the same length as the outer wall of Ecbatana. The battlements of the walls are different colors, the smallest being of silver and gold. These walls were built only around his own palace; all the other people had to build their own houses outside of these walls (99). We must think, therefore, that his own palace was the size of Athens! It was no small price the Medes paid for justice!

In addition to his demands for a protected house and bodyguard, Deioces established an elaborate royal ceremony, the first to do so, accord­ ing to the historian. It took several hundred years of principate before Diocletian established his ceremonial; elaborate ceremony is an immediate feature of Median authority. All business had to be carried on through messengers and no one conducting business could see the king directly. No one could laugh or spit in the presence of the king—a strange concatenation of prohibitions: perhaps both show an unseemly lack of self-control and respect. Herodotus provides the motive for these requirements: Deioces fears that those who are of his social class and age might, if they should see him, resent his rank and privilege; if they do not see him, they will imagine that he has become something quite wondrous and unlike themselves. Omne ignotum pro magnifico est, as Tacitus says. The attribution of this motive is quite revealing. Herodotus’s liberal audience will wink to one another that great kings, for all their pomp and circumstance, are merely men, their elaborate ceremonial mere pretense.

And yet, since the more common view—certainly among non-Greeks— is that kings are of divine origin, the story of Deioces and how he  compen­sates for his human beginnings is quite remarkable. Candaules, we recall, the first king to be treated, was one of the Heracleidae and could trace his ancestry back to Heracles and thus to Zeus. His usurper Gyges had to be confirmed by the Delphic oracle, which granted him a kind of divine legiti­macy,  though that legitimacy was given a temporal limit of five generations. Later, Herodotus will discuss the Heraclean origin of the Scythians (4.8-10), and, when he discusses Babylon, he hints that the priestess had sexual intercourse with a god, an action that may have produced the Babylonian kings.^[8] Where kings are divine or receive their authority from the divine there can be no questioning of their power and sanction to rule.

But what is the attitude of Greeks who do not have monarchies toward kings claiming divinity? Surely these Greeks had great familiarity with tyrants who were lowly human, in their greed, their self-aggrandizement, their revenge, their lust. Herodotus does not fail to record the public presumption of divine authority by kings, and he communicates his own awareness that they are putting one over on their citizens. When Darius, though he pretends to let the choice of king fall to the god in the operation of chance, actually cheats to have his horse neigh first, it is clear to Herod­otus’s readers that Darius is no god but a conniving, scheming man; yet Darius is a god to his people.

Herodotus also portrays the conflict that the kings themselves suffer when they try to act like gods though they are only men. The excesses of Cambyses and Xerxes indicate men acting like gods. Perhaps kingship has the effect on character of making the anointed ones believe that they are actually divine. Who knows for sure whether Alexander the Great, fresh from Ammon, actually thought himself a god? Herodotus and the tragedians document the arrogance that results from too much success. Perhaps self-delusion is the greatest punishment for those who celebrate their own success.

Herodotus continues the tale with a very generous description of Deioces’s practice of justice (100). The king judged lawsuits from written pleas. He also heard criminal cases and punished according to the offense. Herodotus concludes with what sounds almost like an afterthought: “and there were watchers and hearers through all the land he ruled.” Thus a state that started out with people governing themselves ends as a police state.

Deioces gives the Greeks a model of how Oriental despotism can take place. It shows how human life depends on some kind of order and justice; if that justice is not realized by people acting on their own, then it will be imposed by a strong power whose own justice will be suspect. Spartans in Herodotus’s audience will see their own constitutional system of checks and balances as some protection against a Deioces arising in their midst. Athenians will surely have some confidence in their complicated legal apparatus and courts. But the specter of an Oriental tyranny ought to serve as a reminder of what could happen.^[9]

Deioces ruled only over the Medes, a group composed of six tribes. Herodotus stresses (101) that Deioces ruled only this one nation, perhaps suggesting a difference from his successors.^[10]