37 Harpagus’s Conquest of the Carians, Caunians, Pedasians, and Lycians (§§171-76)

After he had subdued Ionia, Harpagus set about conquering much of southwestern Asia, and he employed Ionians and Aeolians in his army. Herodotus informs us about the peoples who were conquered but gives no details of the battles. Perhaps the battles contained no events of interest, or perhaps he had no information about them. What matters principally to Herodotus are the results and the characters of the conquered peoples.

About the Carians he tells two versions, one told by the Cretans and the other by the Carians themselves. The Cretans say that the Carians were once called Leleges and lived on Crete, where they paid no tribute to Minos but manned ships for him and, as a result, were highly esteemed by him. They also made three discoveries still in use: binding plumes to helmets, painting designs on shields, and putting handgrips on shields. Conquered by Dorians and Ionians, they were driven from the islands and settled on the mainland. The Carians tell a different story. They say that they were always called by the same name and were autochthonous, always having lived in the same place. They cite as evidence that at the temple of Carian Zeus in Mylasa Lydians and Mysians are admitted as brothers of the Carians. Herodotus does not himself declare whose version he accepts. In the next two chapters, however, he will confirm his belief in the autochthonous status of the Caunians and his view that the Lycians did in fact come from Crete, but his certitude in these claims should not lead us to reject claims about which he is neutral. Once again Herodotus is observing a proper and becoming diffidence, declining to assert more than he knows or to render judgments that are not supported by the evidence.

Herodotus is sure that the Caunians are autochthonous, even though they themselves say that they came from Crete (172). The historian gives no argument for why we should believe him to be right and the Caunians wrong (in contradistinction to his practice earlier, when he had given a reason for the opinion of the Carians). He makes a very broad comment about the Caunians: although their language is similar to that of the Cari­ans they differ entirely from them and from the rest of humankind in their customs. And what are the differences in their customs? Herodotus mentions just two: they believe that it is best to keep company with people of their own age and gender for the purpose of drinking, and though once they had adopted some foreign rites of worship, they have driven all foreign gods out of their land. They drove out the gods by donning armor and striking the air with spears up to their boundaries.

The passage about the Caunians is indeed strange. After the great pronouncement on their differences from the rest of the world, the actual customs seem anticlimactic. Perhaps the author is engaging in a bit of playfulness here: a big buildup for a very mild custom. The earlier custom concerning drinking—that the Persians deliberate when drunk and sober—seems a much more peculiar custom. But perhaps the very different νόμος (a strange word for something that has occurred just once) was their expulsion of foreign gods from their territory and the manner in which it was carried out. Thus, the text invites the question of whether gods, once having been engaged, can have their employment terminated. There are theological questions here, but Herodotus does not address or invite them.

The next of Harpagus’s conquests is the Lycians, of Iliadic fame. No one, neither they nor Cretans, disputes that the Lycians originally came from Crete. Sarpedon (according to Diodorus [5.79], the Iliadic Sarpedon’s ancestor (but on another possibility, see below) and his brother Minos-—sons of Europa—struggled for the throne of Crete; Sarpedon lost, was expelled, and migrated to Asia. The chief feature of this migration is a series of name changes. Sarpedon and his men arrived in a land called Milyas, now called Lycia. The inhabitants of Milyas were called Solymi. Sarpedon’s men were originally called Termilae, only later taking the name “Lycians” from an Athenian, Lycus who joined Sarpedon. Lycus shared the fate of expulsion, for he was driven out of his native land by his brother Aegeus. The very rapid name changes were perhaps confusing to Herodotus’s original aural audience. But the overall effect would be to stress the principle of vicissitude, which manifests itself in so many changes. One’s identity is intimately related to one’s name. What violent shifts in self-­image must have been involved in these changes!

The most remarkable custom of the Lycians, according to Herodotus, which they share with no other peoples, is that people take their names from their mothers. Citizenship too is established through the mother, as it is today among Orthodox Jewry. If a Lycian woman lives with a slave, her children are freeborn; if even an aristocratic man lives with a concubine, the children are dishonored. I wonder again whether Herodotus is not being playful in the passage. When he introduces Sarpedon and his brother Minos, he calls them “Europa’s sons,” omitting all mention of paternity—observing thereby the Lycian custom, Of course, the most famous Lycian of all is the Sarpedon who is killed by Patroclus in the Iliad. In the Iliad Sarpedon’s mother is named by Glaucus as Laodameia (6.197- 99), but there is another tradition, perhaps observed here by Herodotus, that he was the son of Zeus and Europa (see also Apollodorus, 3.6).^[1] Chronological difficulties in this account are resolved by the claim that he lived for three generations. In the Iliad Sarpedon is most famous for his death, when his father Zeus weeps tears of blood in order to uphold moira. That Herodotus would omit all mention of Zeus in observing the Lycian custom of naming the mother seems to be a humorous touch.

The Carians were enslaved without any noble deed, and so were the Cnidians, who were Lacedaemonian. colonists. While Harpagus was conquering Ionia, the Cnidians tried to dig a canal through their small peninsula to turn it into an island. The workmen injured themselves with splinters from the stone to such an unnaturally large extent that the Cnidians sent to Delphi to ask the oracle the cause of the splinters. The oracle gave them a verse answer, quoted by Herodotus, that they should not dig across the isthmus: Zeus would have made their land an island if he had wished. The Cnidians give up their digging and surrender themselves to Harpagus.^[2] Herodotus points out that the story about the oracle is told by the Cnidians themselves, a distancing that, as How and Wells suggest, is perhaps an ex post facto excuse to explain why they did not put up a fight. That Herodotus believes it to be an excuse may be the implication in his introduction of the passage, when he says that like the Carians, the Cnidians achieved nothing noble. And yet, given the very many digging projects that occur in the History, one might conclude that the oracle would discourage an unnecessary expenditure of such energy. One needs only to think of Cyrus’s foolish and impious punishment of the Gyndes River by dividing it into 360 channels (1.189), of the unnecessary digging to change the course of the river through Babylon (1.185), the canal through Athas (7.22), and so on. The gods do not seem to desire nature to be altered.

Harpagus also conquered the Pedasians (1.175), who gave him some trouble, having held a fortified hill for a good while. About these people Herodotus says only that when something bad was going to befall them, the priestess of Athena would grow a beard, a circumstance that, he says, happened to them three times (in 8.104, however, he says that it happened to them only twice). Pedasus, an area just north of Herodotus’s native Halicamassus, seems to receive a double distinction in this passage: on the one hand there is the implication that her citizens have suffered only three times, a remarkable scarcity given the vagaries of the human condition; on the other hand they are credited with fighting hard for their freedom.

This section of the History concludes with the lamentable fate of the Lycians. They also fought for their freedom, even though they were few against many.^[3] When they had been defeated on the plain of Xanthus, the men gathered their wives, children, and property (physical and living) into the citadel, set fire to it, and went forth to die in battle. Only the Lycians who happened to be away at the time remain of the original population. The Caunians, Herodotus says, acted “for the most part” like the Lycians, but exactly what they did differently he does not say. Thus, of the various groups Harpagus conquered, only the Carians are said to have done nothing at all that was gallant.

Again we see the terrible nature of war. A city founded by Sarpedon, a people that had always lived on the same land, and even the seldom disturbed Pedasians all fell victim to Cyrus’s lieutenant. Thus war, the great aitia of change, is able to erase the work of ages. Herodotus hardly pauses over these horrors. Indeed, he achieves his effect largely by understatement: Harpagus depopulated lower Asia (the phrase used is very powerful: τά μέν νυν κάτω τῆς Ἀσίης άνάστατα ἐποίεε).^[4] But, says the historian, he will not discuss every nation that was subdued, only those that gave Cyrus trouble or did deeds worthy of mention. How many cities there were that performed deeds unworthy of mention we never learn. Nor do we learn the numbers of people killed and enslaved. Yet the glimpses here and there of the devastation give pause to the careful reader. One might wonder why, when Herodotus declines to discuss every city that the Persians conquered, he does discuss those in southwestern Asia. The answer, I think, is two-fold. First, the area was well known to the Greeks and to Herodotus, a Halicarnassan, and the audience would be especially interested in hearing the fate of the Ionians. As far as Herodotus’s purpose is concerned, the tale of the Asiatic Greeks’ disunity and its outcome might be a good warning for the rest of the Greeks.^[5] Second, the tale has been told in such a way as to make the experience paradigmatic for the other small cities. The subjection of Asia by the Persians is the aftermath of Croesus’s fall, a fall, we ought to remember, that was the postponed punishment for Gyges’s slaying of Candaules.^[6]

In the description of all these conquests over the Greeks, a passage we might call “the aristeia of Harpagus,” we again see Herodotus’s Homeric style. The victims are enumerated in turn, but the vignettes of each city show real cities with distinct lives. And just as in Homer the vignettes of the dying warriors may be examined for their themes, so here the little accounts are full of meaning and pathos.