40 The Wealth and Customs of the Babylonians (§§192-200)

To show the power of Babylon Herodotus uses what Aristotle calls the “topic of the more and less” (ὁ τόπος ἐκ τοῦ μάλλον καὶ ἦττον: Rhet. 1197b8). The whole empire of the Persian king provides tribute for maintaining the king and his army; Babylon alone supplies one-third of the tribute. The satrapy of this part of the empire is the greatest and provides the satrap a salary of one artaba (about 14.5 gallons) of silver per day. The satrap has for his private use eight hundred breeding stallions and sixteen thousand mares. Four large villages pay no tribute other than dog food for the Babylonian satrap’s hunting dogs. If one satrap has such wealth for himself, one can only imagine the wealth the great king possessed.^[1]

The vast wealth that Cyrus has just acquired should be considered in the light of the famous conclusion to the whole History.^[2] Book Nine concludes with the brief account of Cyrus’s conversation with Artembares. Artembares was the grandfather of Artayctes, the Persian governor of Sestos who cheated Xerxes, lay with a woman in a holy place, and committed other offenses. Artayctes’s atrocities comprise the last extended story in the History; the link with Artayctes’s grandfather provides the transition to the conclusion of the History. Artembares counseled Cyrus to conquer rich, fertile lands. Cyrus rejected the advice: “From soft countries come soft men. It is not possible for the same land to grow both good fruit and good soldiers.”^[3] The last sentence of the History is: “So the Persians accepted this and went away; their opinion had been defeated by that of Cyrus, and they chose to rule, living in a wretched land, rather than to sow the level plains and be slaves to others” (9.122).

We might ask to what “wretched land” Herodotus is referring. With its conquests under Cyrus, Persia is incredibly rich, its gold and agricultural produce abundant. Did Artembares advise Cyrus before the conquest of Babylon, when Cyrus enjoyed a sounder moral and intellectual condition? Or, by the time we read the end of the book, are we expected to have forgotten this conquest of Babylon and that it was one of Cyrus’s last actions? I think that by the time a reader reaches the end of the History, Cyrus’s particular aberrations will have faded from the memory. In any case, the comparison with the later kings of Persia shows him rather tame, even rather wise, like Croesus after his defeat. But the point of the conclusion is not aimed at Artembares at all; it is aimed at Herodotus’s Greek audience. The wise words, coming as a pronouncement from the ghost of Cyrus the Great, constitute a warning to the Greeks not to repeat the errors of the Persians.

The description of Babylonian agriculture must have stretched Greek belief beyond any reasonable bounds.^[4] The lands, part of the crescent made fertile by centuries of human invention and industry, dwarfed the harvests of rocky Greece (194).^[5] But to Herodotus himself the greatest wonder (τὸ θῶμα μέγιστον) after the city itself is the circular boats made of skins that carry cargo downstream and then are carried back upstream to Armenia for more cargo. Perhaps no more need be said about Herodotus’s assessment than the observation of How and Wells: “Herodotus is always interested in means of navigation.”

The clothing of the Babylonians will not strike Herodotus’s readers as very remarkable. Perhaps their most peculiar personal customs are the saturation of their bodies in myrrh and the use of a staff with some kind of image, of an apple, a lily, a rose, or something else (195). That the historian himself spends so little energy in describing this apparel is a sign that he does not find it especially startling or that he is not interested in clothing.

Babylonian customs are another matter, and Herodotus devotes considerable attention to describing them. He ranks the customs, and in the ranking one perhaps learns something about the historian himself. The best custom (196) is the one whereby every village holds an annual auction to which all girls of marriageable age are brought.^[6] The auctioneer begins with the best-looking girl and then auctions off the girls one by one in declining order of beauty. The money from the good-looking ones is given to the men who accept the ugly and crippled girls, the auctioneer disposing of them by asking who would be willing to take the least money for the ugliest girl and then auctioning off the rest in decreasing order of ugliness. No man might choose husbands for his daughters; all the girls must be auctioned off. But, says Herodotus at the end of the description, in recent times, with the general ruin following the conquest of Babylon, all people devoid of a livelihood prostitute their daughters.

It appears at first glance that Herodotus holds an egalitarian fondness for leveling the various ranks of men: those who are wealthy find good­looking wives; those who accept ugly wives find compensation in money.^[7] It seems also that Herodotus shares the ancient view that a primary quality in a wife is beauty, for no quality other than beauty is necessary to fetch a pretty sum. Even Agamemnon had more liberally claimed for Briseis both beauty and skill (Iliad 1.115). Nor does Herodotus yield anything to the wishes of the parents (not to mention those of the girls themselves). The arrangement seems to make for a contented community. Yet several elements of humor in the description—the hyper­poetical term “grew ripe for marriage” (αἱ παρθένοι γινοίατο γᾶμων ὡραῖαι), the unquestioned ranking by the auctioneer of the girls’ relative beauty (can there be no debate about who is more beautiful and less beautiful?), and again Herodotus’s breaking into direct quotation of the auctioneer’s speech—“Who will take the least money for this one?”—suggest perhaps that Herodotus has his tongue in his cheek. Of course, he may be using a rhetorical device: if this is the best custom, how horrible must the other customs be! Perhaps, too, the jolly good humor of the description is meant to be a foil to the dramatic and dreadful conclusion: now, because of the poverty resulting from conquest, parents must prostitute their daughters. Again, he warns and reminds his readers of the terrible devastation wrought by war and conquest. Is there here yet another hint to the Greeks to unite in order to repel the next invasion?

The second wisest custom of the Babylonians is the practice of carrying the sick to the marketplace. All who have had some disease similar to that of the sick man must talk to him about the illness and tell him what they did to recover. In passing, Herodotus mentions that the Babylonians do not use physicians.^[8] Again there seems to be some element of humor in the description, and the custom seems reasonable enough until one actually thinks about it and realizes how wholly unscientific the practice is. Given what seems in the fifth century, and in Greek culture generally, to have been a sincere respect afforded medicine as an art, Herodotus’s audience would find Babylon’s cavalier rejection of medicine’s value as a techne quite striking.^[9] Does Herodotus himself think that physicians are useless? The most prominent physician in the History is Democedes of Croton (3.130-33), whose cures are effective. The only other reference in Herodotus to medicine is the Egyptian custom of having a different doctor for every disease (2.84), a degree of specialization nearly duplicated in modern times. The physicians whom he discusses, Democedes and an unnamed, vengeful one in the opening of Book Three (3.1), both operate out of selfish motives and are very willing to sacrifice the happiness of whole nations to satisfy their own purposes. But Herodotus does not seem to doubt their medical ability. I think he is yet again using the same rhetorical figure: if this is the second-best custom—and it is profoundly bad—how much worse must the other customs be?

Herodotus juxtaposes mention of the burial custom of embalming the corpse in honey—can it be that the Babylonian medical practices lead to death? He also follows with the practice—shared by the Arabians—of sitting by burnt incense and washing after sexual intercourse. Presumably these particular customs would be of interest to a Greek audience that did not share them.

Finally, he turns to their basest (αἴσχιστος) custom (199). Not surprisingly, their basest custom involves sexuality. Once in the lifetime of every woman she must go to the temple of Aphrodite and have sexual intercourse with the first stranger to toss a silver coin into her lap. The value of the coin may be large or small, but the woman is not permitted to refuse. A great many people pass through the temple. And as in the best custom the beauty of the women was important, so here Herodotus says that beautiful women fulfill the obligation quickly, but ugly ones have stayed for years in the temple waiting.^[10]

Thus, Herodotus frames his discussion of the customs of the Babyloni­ans in their best and worst customs, both of which deal with sexuality. The historian seems fond of sexuality as a framing device, for the whole History is framed by stories of barbarian sexual misconduct—the stories of Candaules’s erotic fixation on showing his wife’s naked beauty at the beginning (1.8-12) and of Xerxes’s adultery and the mutilation of Masistes’s wife at the end (9.107-112). So also is the history of Egypt framed between the stories of the potent Sesostris (2.102) and the impotent Amasis (2.181). Perhaps such tales and customs help Herodotus to identify responsibility and define character. He is well aware of the place of sexual desire in human conduct. Perhaps he focuses on sexuality because all people, stripped of rank and title, are in their sexual lives simply people. Alexander the Great is said to have remarked that there were only two occasions in which he felt like a man and not like a god: when sleeping and when having sexual intercourse (Plutarch, Life of Alexander 22). It is not surprising that sexual desire and sexual practices, which in private life can cause so much distress, should cause correspondingly more distress when in the palace or when they shape the ethos of a people. As Hesiod says, “Eros, the most beautiful of the immortal gods, who in every man and every god softens the sinews and overpowers the prudent purpose of the mind” (Theogony 120-22). In short, the sexual customs reveal much about a people’s character.

The discussion of Babylon concludes with a brief account of three Baby­lonian tribes that eat nothing but fish and the method they use for pound­ing the fish into cakes. No doubt this last story, combined with the others, will render Herodotus’s readers very glad that they are not Babylonians. Indeed, if one can damn by praise then Herodotus has artfully damned Babylon. For all its walled wealth, for all its vastness and luxury, who would choose to live with any of their customs? Their best custom involved the auctioning of girls, and even this custom was replaced by prostitution.

The second-best custom involved relying on whomever you met while waiting miserably in the street for medical care. In short, none of the customs makes Babylonian life particularly attractive. Can the historian be hinting through all this at the wisdom of being satisfied with a churlish land such as Greece, which, despite its poverty, offered a better life?