38 The Description of Babylon (§§178-187)

The scene turns to the military actions of Cyrus himself, who, Herodotus says, now attacked the Assyrians. It is possible that there is confusion in Herodotus’s mind about the Babylonians^[1] and Assyrians. It is also possible that the historian is using a more generic term, one including both peoples under the same name, which would not be unnatural since the two were often subject to one another. In the same way, until the breakup of the Soviet Union, Westerners often referred to the whole as Russia, disregarding the various regions.^[2] Given his knowledge of the destruction of Nineveh, it is likely that he is well aware of Babylon’s political status.

Babylon, according to Herodotus, is a very large city, a square whose sides are nearly twenty-four kilometers (14.4 miles)-more than twice the length of Manhattan. There is a broad and deep moat around it, as well as a wall twenty-three meters (eighty-five feet) thick and ninety meters (335 feet) high. These sizes are enormous and almost defy credulity.^[3] The wall would be over thirty stories high and nearly as wide as an Olympic swim­ming pool is long.

Eager to provide more information about so remarkable a wall, Herodotus explains that the bricks were made from the mud taken out of the surrounding trench, that they were baked, that mats of reeds were stuffed in periodically, and that asphalt was used for cement. At the top of the wall were single-room houses facing one another. One hundred bronze gates punctuated the wall at intervals. Workmen conveyed asphalt for the wall from the Is river, eight days away. These details multiply the wonder one feels in contemplating the labor and myriads of workers who produced it. The description must have seemed even more dazzling to Herodotus’s audience than it does to us, for it had never seen New York. The fact that the Persians could conquer so mighty a city was a testimony to their military genius. Of course, for the Greeks to conquer such mighty warriors as the Persians spoke even more favorably of the Greeks. Indeed, in conquering Persia, the empire that had conquered Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt­ the mightiest and most magnificently successful realms that had ever existed-the puny Greek world had achieved a miracle great and wondrous.^[4]

Herodotus points out that the walled city had streets that are cut straight (180), even the streets that cross the river.^[5] He may point out this feature for two reasons. First, the streets contrast with the winding, chaotic streets of Greek cities. The second reason is related to the first. Winding, maze­-like streets make it difficult for an enemy to battle in foreign cities. Espe­cially during night battles, when only residents are able to find their way about, the streets add a measure of protection to city life. That the Babylo­nians would dare to build straight streets attests to the security they felt from their high walls.

The great tower in the middle of the gigantic temple square shows the magical character of Babylon. At its summit, the eight-storied, stepped tower supports a temple in which there are a great bed and a golden table. One lone woman, chosen by the gods, spends the night there. The Chal­daeans say that the god visits this bed, a story that Herodotus says he does not believe. Yet he points out that in similar temples in Egyptian Thebes and Lycian Patara sleep women who have no relations with men. Herodo­tus implies that the Chaldaeans believe the woman to have sexual relations with the god when he makes his nocturnal visit. As such relations between deity and mortal always result in offspring, the question naturally arises as to who were the offspring. On this matter Herodotus is silent, perhaps because he does not wish to elaborate a story he does not believe.^[6]

The question arises as to why Herodotus will believe one story about gods, even speculating about divine motives, and not believe another. Why will he initiate the theory that the gods punish Croesus for thinking himself happy but refuse to believe that the god lies with a woman in a temple? Is the standard of his belief his experience or his own religion? Herodotus does report the religious views of numerous different peoples, all having different views. He does say that the same gods have various names, and he seems sympathetic to the idea of the Pelasgians that there is an underlying generality to the divine (2.52).^[7] Indeed, the great diversity of religious practice and belief that nevertheless shared the conception of a supernatural transcendent force may have led to this view. Our own day, which has seen the multiplication of denominations and the sprouting of new religious sects, could benefit from a similar broad outlook.

The description of the temple includes the huge statues made of gold. The great statue of Zeus, say the Chaldaeans, was made with 800 talents of gold (46,400 pounds [21,091 kilograms]), a figure that requires some perspective. At the 1995 price of about $400 per ounce, 46,400 pounds of gold would have a value of $296,960,000. A bar of gold the size of a brick weighs about 25 pounds. Gold weighing 46,400 pounds would yield about 1,850 bricks, or about the number to build one wall of a medium-sized house. Though we are discussing a lot of gold, it is not an unimaginable amount, nor would it represent a great proportion of the empire’s wealth.

Herodotus describes the other accouterments and altars of the temple and concludes with rather telling comments about Darius and Xerxes, the two later attackers of Greece. Darius, he says, lacked the courage to steal a fifteen-foot solid gold statue of Zeus; Xerxes stole it and also killed the priest who forbade him. The comparison of Darius with Xerxes at this particular point in the History is significant. While it is only the History’s second mention of Darius (he was mentioned in 1.130 in passing, when Herodotus writes that the Medes tried once to rebel from the Persians during the reign of Darius and were subdued) and the first mention of Darius’s actually doing something, it is the very first mention of Xerxes. As the first mention of an important character is especially significant,^[8] Herodotus wants us to see how utterly despicable is Xerxes, the main Greek enemy. Darius was wicked enough in merely having the desire to steal a statue of Zeus; he shrank from doing so out of cowardice and fear, not out of piety. His son Xerxes lacked the cowardice but possessed the effrontery; he possessed, too, the added savagery to kill a priest. Thus Xerxes is bathed in moral blackness in his very first appearance.^[9] Why does Herodotus choose to introduce Xerxes here, in the discussion of Babylon? The reason, I think, is that he wishes his readers to calculate that if Xerxes can so blaspheme the gods of his own Asia, how much worse would he have been to the gods of the Greeks! There is, too, the reminder that gold means more to Persians than piety.

Herodotus promises to discuss the many kings of Babylon who built and adorned temples and fortifications in his Assyrian logoi (184).^[10] For now he confines himself to the two queens who ruled Babylon. The first was Semiramis, who built dikes on the plain to keep it from flooding. The second, Nitocris, was wiser than the first, and the historian devotes considerable attention to her. About Semiramis, the subject of an opera by Rossini, Herodotus says nothing beyond the construction of the dikes.

Nitocris, however, provided for external, internal, and private security. She had the straight-flowing Euphrates altered so that people sailing to Babylon would first pass the village Ardericca outside Babylon three times. She also diverted the river and excavated so as to create a huge lake. Her motive for both of these massive building projects was to slow the pace of the river. She feared the power of the Medes and built these protective works on the side of the city facing Media.

How and Wells claim that the real motive for these projects was irriga­tion, not defense. They believe that Herodotus attributed only the defen­sive motive because of the Greek fear of Persian invasion. I think How and Wells right, but their scolding of Herodotus unfair. Herodotus, after all, is under no obligation to enumerate every motive that the queen may have but only to propose those that may be of value to his audience.^[11] The rela­tive praise he affords Nitocris is for her military defenses; perhaps he is here quietly suggesting that his fellow Greeks follow her example and provide for their defense.

She provided internal security and convenience by building a bridge to unite the two parts of her city separated by the Euphrates River. Before, the inhabitants had been obliged to cross the river by boat. When she had dug the reservoir outside the city, she drained the river and built the foundation for a bridge in the bed. On the foundation were placed planks that enabled easy communication by day between the parts of the city. At night the planks were withdrawn to prevent citizens from stealing from each other.

Finally, she provided for her security by placing her own tomb over a gate with a notice there that no one should open her tomb for the treasure inside except in a case of dire need. Darius did not use the gate because he did not wish to pass under a dead body, but he was annoyed that he should not make use of the wealth. He opened the tomb and found an inscription chiding him for the greed that led him to open a coffin of the dead.

In the account of the temples, of Xerxes’s theft of the statue, and of Darius’s violation of Nitocris’s tomb, Herodotus links Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon with the later invaders of Greece. He implicitly draws a sharp contrast between Cyrus and his successors. Though Cyrus conquered Babylon, he did not steal the statue of Zeus, and he did not violate the tomb of a dead queen.

Yet Herodotus has implanted a bit of uncertainty in the wisdom of Nitocris, notwithstanding her wit and her military preparedness. In order to defend Babylon she built a lake and violated the natural course of a river. Affronts to bodies of water and the punishments of those affronts consti­tute an important motif throughout the History.^[12] From Croesus’s drain­ing of the Halys (1.75) to Xerxes’s lashing of the Hellespont, the actions never go unpunished.^[13] So it will not be surprising, perhaps, when in the Herodotean account the very altering of the course of the river for defense becomes the means by which the city is taken, for the punishments of crimes against water are uncannily appropriate.^[14]