15 The Search for Allies: Preliminary Ancient History (§§56.2-58)
The oracle told Croesus to find out who were the most powerful of the Greeks and make them his allies. Why doesn’t the king simply ask Delphi? Is there something inappropriate about the question? Later on (1.91), the oracle explains that if he did not understand which empire he would destroy he could have asked again for more information, suggesting a willingness to answer further questions. The reason, I think, must be Herodotus’s, not Croesus’s. Herodotus needs an excuse to introduce us at length to the histories of Athens and Sparta, for he wants us to recall the characters of these cities in an earlier age, before the evils-and the glories-of the fifth century.[1]
Before entering upon that history, however, Herodotus recounts some of Greece’s prehistory.[2] The description seems to be controlled by a need to address his contemporary audience. He begins with the claim that the two most important Greek peoples were the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians, a backcasting from the historian’s period. The stress on the different races—Athens as Ionic and Pelasgian, Lacedaemon as Doric and Hellenic—points to a focus on ethnicity that was perhaps a prominent feature in the heated atmosphere of Herodotus’s time; it is referred to repeatedly during the Peloponnesian War. Throughout Thucydides’s History the participants explain the war in terms of a confrontation between Dorians and Ionians, the Spartans especially eager to mention the diversity of races at every opportunity.[3] Thus it seems likely that the division of Greeks along these lines is of consequence to Herodotus’s audience. The racial difference, extending back to the dawn of history, is a non political cause of the coming Peloponnesian War and is another way by which in these introductory stories Herodotus sharply contrasts Athens and Sparta. Like any good author, his eye is always on his audience; the anthropology is no digression.[4]
Having established that the Spartan and Athenian races are distinct, Herodotus confuses the issue tremendously in his discussion, suggesting that they are indeed sprung from the same stock:
εἰ τοίνυν ἦν καὶ πᾶν τοιοῦτο τὸ Πελασγικόν, τὸ Ἀττικόν ἔθνος ἐὸν Πελασγικόν ἅμα τῇ μεταβολῆ τῇ ἐς Ἕλληνας καὶ τὴν γλῶσσαν μετέμαθε [57.3] . . . . τὸ δὲ Ἑλληνικόν γλώσσῃ μέν, ἐπείτε ἐγένετο, αἰεί κοτε τῇ αὐτῇ διαχρᾶται, ὡς ἐμοί καταφαίνεται εἶναι· ἀποσχισθὲν μέντοι ἀπὸ τοῦ Πελασγικοῦ ἐὸν ἀσθενές, ἀπὸ σμικροῦ τεο τὴν ἀρχὴν ὁρμώμενον αὐξηται ἐς πλῆθος τῶν ἐθνέων, Πελασγῶν μάλιστα προσκεχωρηκότων αὐτῷ καὶ ἄλλων ἐθνέων βαρβὰρων συχνῶν (58.1).
If this were so [that all the Pelasgians spoke a barbarous language] for the whole Pelasgian race, the Attic race, being Pelasgic, at the same time as [their] change into Greeks, changed [their] tongue. … The Hellenic [race: the Dorians], on the one hand, when it came into being, always has used the same language, as it seems to me; however, having been separated from the Pelasgian [race] while being weak, starting [with respect to] its beginning from something small, it has grown to a multitude of races with Pelasgian races and numerous other barbarian races joining it.
He concludes with the claim that it is the Greek language that enabled the Pelasgians to become great. The passage ends, then, with a reminder that the Greeks are, after all, Greeks, united by a common language and by a common ancestral stock. The confusion arises perhaps because Herodotus is conscious of having to do several things, not altogether compatible, at the same time. On the one hand, in order to have credibility with his audience, he must show a knowledge of the traditional differences of which they are aware, even proud—that they are Dorians and lonians. On the other hand, his purpose is to stir up pan-Hellenic feelings and to persuade his audience to live in peace with one another; to achieve this latter end he must try to find ties to unite rather than quarrels to separate the parties.
- There has been a long debate among scholars about whether Herodotus was a parti san of Athens. Herodotus’s encomium of Athens in Book 7 (139), when the historian says that the Athenians were the saviors of Greece, has usually been taken as evidence of his partisanship. H. Strasburger’s article “Herodotus und das perikleische Athen,” Historia 4(1955): 1-25, was a corrective to the view of Herodotus’s unbounded enthusiasm. I think that J.A.S. Evans (“Herodotus and Athens: The Evidence of the Encomium,” Antiquité Classique 48[1979): 112-18) is correct when he says that “Herodotus was anything but a mouthpiece for Athenian propaganda” (117) and instead treats both Athens and Sparta as the champions against Persia. I shall argue in these pages that Herodotus is a pan-Hellene who wishes to warn both cities against replicating the errors of Persia. So also W.G. Forrest, “Herodotus and Athens,” who sees the whole History “as a justification of the Athens/Sparta dualism”-that is, Athens the preeminent power on the sea, Sparta on the land (8). The discussion of Athens and Sparta here is, as K.H. Waters observes (“Herodotos and Politics,” Greece & Rome 19[1972): 136-50), parallel to the later discussion in Book 5, when Aristagoras is looking for allies. Waters believes that Herodotus introduces the account here because “it is necessary for the comprehension of the particular stage of Greco-Persian relations which the main narrative has reached” (138). I shall try to show exactly why it is necessary. ↵
- The passage is confusing. As D. Grene points out in his footnote to the passage (57), Herodotus first says that the Pelasgians were co-dwellers with the Athenians in Attica; a few lines later he says that the Attic race was Pelasgian. ↵
- One of the most striking examples in Thucydides of Athenian consciousness of the racial (or linguistic) difference between themselves and the Dorian Spartans is reported in 7. 44.6; there the Athenians at Syracuse are terrified when they hear a Dorian paean sung even by their allies. See also Thucydides 1.124, 5.9.1, 6.77.2, 6.80.3, 6. 82.2, and 7.5.4. ↵
- We tend nowadays to think of the Greeks simply as Greeks, and we do have to make a special effort to distinguish among Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians, but the ancients themselves were constantly aware of the differences and, it must be supposed, were unable to dissociate their prejudices (whatever they might be) from each group. Thucydides, for example, discussing the allies of the Athenians and the Syracusans (7.56-57), is careful to observe the racial origin of each ally; Brasidas, in his exhortation to the Spar tans before the Battle of Amphipolis, reminds them to fight like the Dorians they are against their enemies, who are Ionians (Thucydides 5.9). An old high school history text, P.V.N. Myers’s A History of Greece far College and High Schools (Boston and London: Ginn & Co., 1900), itself full of the prejudices of its age, summarizes the stereotypes thus (13): “The Ionians were a many-sided, enterprising people, singularly open to outside influences The Dorians, in their typical communities, present themselves to us as a conservative, practical, and unimaginative race. The Æolians formed a rather ill-defined division. In historic times the name is often made to include all Hellenes not enumerated as Ionians or Dorians.” On the various divisions of Greeks, see also the comments of A.W. Gomme, Vol. 1, 94-98. P. Cartledge, The Greeks (Oxford, 1993), 38, claims that Herodotus had an anti-Ionian bias, which he says “contrasts so vividly with his tolerance of or even admiration for non-Greek barbarians.” ↵
