4 Candaules and Gyges (§§7-14)

Though Herodotus makes it very clear that it was Croesus who commenced injustice on the Greeks, the starting place for the stories is Can­daules’s loss of the Lydian monarchy to the Mermnadae, Croesus’s family.

Now despite the praise lavished upon Herodotus for discovering aitiai beyond the “Big Bang,” he does in a sense go back to the Big Bang in his discussion of the Persian Wars, for the family of Candaules is descended from Heracles, and hence from Zeus, Heracles’s illegitimate father, and thus the family’s sovereignty is unquestionably legitimate. As the poet of “To the Muses and Apollo” proclaims, kings are from Zeus (Homeric Hymns 25.4). Moreover, the legitimacy of the Heraclidae was affirmed first by an oracle and secondly when the previous ruler ceded the government to them. They ruled for twenty-two generations, an exceedingly long period of steady rule,^[1] a period made more extraordinary by the fortuitous bequeathing of the rule from father to son in continuous succession. Herodotus stresses the legitimacy by calling attention to the suddenness of its end. How the family lost power is the first great story Herodotus tells in his own person.^[2]

Candaules fell in love with his own wife; because of his love he thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.^[3] He kept boasting to his spearman (αἰχμοφόρος) and confidant Gyges of her beauty, eventually—since “it was fated for Candaules to end ill”—asking him to believe his eyes rather than his ears and contrive to see her naked. Herodotus, who had just given us the old mythological accounts of the rapes of Io, Europa, and Helen, stories he declined to judge among, now tells us a story as poetical as those of myth. It becomes apparent that what Herodotus has rejected is not the romance of the stories or their fanciful quality,^[4] but rather that they were not the aitia of the conflict in Herodotus’s own knowledge. The motivations that the Persian logographers attributed to the various rapists either were left unexplained (in the case of lo) or were explained as revenge for an earlier rape. The motivation for Candaules’s conduct here is eros, sexual desire, and, in fact, sexual desire of an aberrant sort, the king’s desire for a man other than the king himself to see the queen naked.

What is the aitia for the eros? Herodotus never directly says; what could he say? Where do impulses arise? When he says that “it was fated for him to end badly,” perhaps the historian is suggesting that the gods bear the ultimate responsibility for what happens.^[5] Perhaps the Heraclidae, who kept the kingship for twenty-two generations, have violated the principle that happiness does not continue long in the same place. Five hundred and five years is a long time! Is it time for the gods-upholders of the rules of the universe-to correct the situation?

The question of initial motivation is one of the most complicated and fundamental in ethics. It is connected with questions of free will, responsibility, error, salvation, and all the basic questions of human conduct. Is Candaules responsible for his erotic fixation on his wife’s appearance? Even if he is not responsible for the fixation itself, is he responsible for his response? Let us examine the question.

We say that a person is responsible for an action if we can find no outside force or agency that compelled it. If, to use the example we used earlier, we find that Harold has put sand in the carburetor of our car and that no one made him do it, then, with justice, we blame Harold. Now Harold may have a number of possible motivations for his conduct: revenge, anger, to keep a competitor from arriving at the place of contest, and so on, motivations that we could explore until we found their root. Let us say that Harold wishes to put sand in the carburetor purely out of mischievous desire. Does it then make any sense to ask where the mischievous desire arose? Even if we can find some event motivating the mischievousness, can we find a motive for that motivation; in short, can we come to a first motive? Some Greeks seem to have had answers to this question. Plato, for example (in the Phaedrus [245c-d] and elsewhere) regards the soul as an unmoved mover, that is, as the originator of impulses that are themselves uncaused. But if the emotion arises spontaneously in the soul—without any conscious act of will—is the person responsible?

Even if Candaules, loving his wife, believed her to be beautiful, it does not follow that he should therefore want Gyges to see her naked. Candaules praised his wife’s beauty over and over again to Gyges, yet somehow Gyges did not seem to be convinced. Now how could Gyges have seemed satisfied? If he asked too many questions about the queen (who remains forever unnamed), it would have been unbecoming; after all, how interested in the queen’s beauty should a minister be? Candaules asks him to contrive some means to see her naked. This is a remarkable request, and one can only wonder why Candaules makes it. Herodotus supplies no motive.

Gyges responds most intelligently:

Sir, what an unhealthy proposal (logos) you make, urging me to see my queen naked. With her clothes a woman puts off her modesty. Wise maxims have been laid down by men of old; from these it is our duty to learn: let every man look to things that concern himself. I am persuaded that she is the most beautiful of her sex, but I beg you not to require what is wicked.

Gyges’s speech is magnificent in its brevity and in its completeness. Gyges first appeals to his own place in the hierarchy—the fact that Candaules’s wife is the queen—for Candaules should remember the proper order of things. He next appeals to nature (physis) and explains that a woman by nature sheds her modesty with her clothes. He then appeals to custom, to nomos (and thus covers himself on both sides of the nomos-physis controversy, which was current in Herodotus’s time), referring to maxims handed down by the men of old. Finally, he concedes that the queen is the most beautiful of women so that there is no need for him to see her naked. The argument is thorough and compelling. If Candaules were rational, and if he could not refute the argument, he ought to abandon his demand. But “the other [Candaules] replied: ‘Cheer up, Gyges, and don’t be afraid that I’m testing you.’” Candaules neither refutes nor even addresses the arguments. He then prepares a plan by which Gyges will hide behind a door and watch the queen undress, one article of clothing at a time.

This story serves, then, as an introduction to the kind of aitia that Herodotus will offer. He will show people acting on impulses of often unexplainable origin;^[6] these actions will generate a chain of effects whose consequences could not have been guessed by the seeming triviality of the initiating events themselves.^[7] Who would have predicted that a dynasty of twenty-two generations would end because a man thought his wife beautiful? Yet this unexpected turn of events is the most perfect kind of proof for the proposition that happiness doesn’t stay in the same place for long. If Candaules had not had this peculiar impulse, indeed, if the queen had not chanced to see Gyges, it is possible that the dynasty would have remained in the hands of the Heraclidae, that Gyges would not have become king, that

Croesus would not have inherited the kingdom of Lydia, that Persia would not therefore have conquered Lydia, that the Persian Wars would not have taken place, and so on. In short, the history of the world would have been quite different.

Now Candaules is clearly irrational. He wanted to show his trusted confidant and advisor something that the friend did not want and ought not to have wanted to see. He rejected advice from a man whose relation­ ship to him was based on advice. To the extent that he did not trust Gyges’s advice, he should not have wanted to share his wife’s beauty with him; since he rejected Gyges’s advice, he should also have rejected the bond tying him to Gyges: it makes little sense to have an advisor whose advice is not even considered. If Candaules had either accepted Gyges’s advice not to insist on showing the queen naked or if he had rejected Gyges as an advisor, the situation would have been diffused. But Candaules’s inconsistency and the succeeding events cost him his throne and life.

In view of Candaules’s absolute refusal to reconsider the matter in the light of Gyges’s arguments, what was Gyges to do? He knew that he was being required to engage in wrongful conduct. Still, he watched the queen disrobe. Did Gyges feel a conflict of obligations: one obligation to obey the ancient laws and allow a woman her modesty and another obligation to obey a monarch? If one must perform a wrong action (looking at the queen) in order to perform a right action (obeying a king), is one committing a tragic mistake, a hamartia?^[8] I would argue that he is not, for there is no simultaneous belief and disbelief.^[9] If looking at the naked queen was not Gyges’s mistake, did he make a mistake? Could his mistake have been in killing Candaules rather than himself? Perhaps. For by obeying Candaules even to the point of violating the ancient laws, Gyges was acknowledging the obligation of a subject to his monarch, an obligation that extended even to wrongful actions. When he killed Candaules, however, he was denying the obligations of a subject to his monarch. Herodotus says that Gyges felt the force of compulsion, but, as Milton sang (Paradise Lost 4.394), necessity is the tyrant’s plea.