Reginald Walter Macan, Herodotus: The Seventh, Eighth, & Ninth Books with Introduction and Commentary

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TRIBUS VIRIS ILLUSTRIBUS
HENRICO STEIN
HENRICO VAN HERWERDEN
ALUREDO HOLDER
HOC VOLUMEN
D.D.D.
EDITORIBUS EDITOR [p. vii]

PREFACE

THE present publication completes a task undertaken upwards of twenty years ago, and but partially absolved in 1895 by the issue of an edition, in the same series, of The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books of Herodotus. The most obvious difference in method between the two works is the addition of an Apparatus Criticus to this volume. That Apparatus, however, makes no pretence to independent authority. Fully aware that fresh collations of some of the Codices are desirable, I could have wished in particular to have had something better and more recent in relation to the Sancroft MS. than Gaisford³ (1840) to work upon. Non omnia possumus omnes. I dare not face such further delay of this publication as was involved in a thorough collation, and I could not guarantee the results of a perfunctory reading. If the present work have any special or novel merits, they will be discovered in some other directions; yet I am not without a hope that the printed text may prove a convenience, and the synthesis of the labours of previous editors, presented by the Apparatus, lack neither interest nor utility for those to whom these volumes are addressed.

Commentary and Appendices may claim to present a good deal more than a mere synthesis of the labours of others; yet I despair, even with recourse to an Index Auctorum, of acknowledging adequately my obligations to previous and contemporary scholars and historians. I have nowhere consciously exploited another man's work without acknowledgement; but [p. viii] now and again virtue has peradventure flowed over me from masters unknown or forgotten. Thirty years have I lectured and taught in the University upon the topics treated in these volumes, and have doubtless profited directly and indirectly by the winged words of fellow-students, at home and abroad: I am no longer able to father my every thought upon its ‘first and only begetter.’ Moreover, what scholar has not known again and again old ideas rediscovered and proclaimed as novelties, in perfect good faith? It has happened to me also to encounter, in print or viva voce, points or parallels which I could almost have sworn were my very own. The jealous scramble for priority of publication in the well-worked fields of Herodotean research were a little difficult to justify; and the attempt here to enumerate items, which I believe to be fresh and original in my own work, a sorry speculation: so woefully would omitted articles and unconsidered bagatelles depreciate the claim. I shall be more than content if the comparatively small number of readers--all I can hope for--who are capable of a judgement in the matter, find my work serviceable and interesting. It is addressed to the friends of Hellenic studies: except for that appeal, it has been accomplished through long years, amid many conflicting duties, and latterly under some physical disabilities, purely for its own sake, and as a debt of honour--almae Matri nutricia--to the University of Oxford, which in according me a quasi-professorial position upon her staff, laid silently upon me (as I understood) an obligation to diminish, so far as in me lay, the reproach--perhaps a trifle antiquated--of sterility, still too often levelled against her resident sons.

Somewhat full analyses, or Tables of Contents, are prefixed to the Introduction and to the Appendices in these volumes; but, without recourse to the Indices, it will not be possible for those who consult the work to assemble all the references bearing upon the almost innumerable topics discussed. In particular, the argument of the Introduction is constantly enforced, and supplemented, in Commentary and Appendices, and it is only, [p. ix] for example, in Index IV. that the fuller references for ‘the priority of the last three Books’ in Composition, or the hypothesis of the ‘three Drafts,’ and so forth, are to be found. I fear, indeed, that I have not always succeeded in avoiding unnecessary repetitions: at least one such case of superfluity affronts me in the parallel passages on the Hellespontine Bridges. The passage in the Commentary was printed first; and yet it seemed impossible, when the Bridges loomed up in the Appendix, to be content with a simple reference back to the Commentary, leaving an obvious lacuna and inconsequence in the sustained argument of the section: but I would fain hope that this case is all but unique. Exception may be taken to my inconsistencies in transliterating proper names, and to discrepancies between the spelling in my text and that upon some of my Maps. Such objections in part affect the mystery of book-making, and your author is hardly quite a free agent, or responsible: in part, such discrepancies, which never leave the real objective in any doubt, seem to me almost negligible quantities. If that is not enough, I will make bold to say that, had I the whole work to do over again, I would be, if you please, even more pedantic in such matters, and enforce a transliteration of Greek proper names as exactly as Grote and Browning did: ‘Herodotus,’ though I have adhered to it, is an abomination to me, and ‘Thucydides’-- which the Anglo-Saxon pronounces ‘Theusydidese’--an absurdity.

But perhaps what might most loudly call for an apology is the audacity of my dedications. I have ventured to inscribe the first volume of this Ex voto to the three distinguished Editors on whose foundations my Apparatus is in the main erected; and with the second volume I have dared couple the names of three distinguished fellow-countrymen of my own, all brilliant expositors of old Greek life and letters. They will not, I hope, be shocked if I say in defence that Herodotus had in him the makings of a very decent Irishman, just as Thucydides might pass, of course, for a typical John Bull. But, as I may call them in some sort, all three, friends of long standing, they will forgive [p. x] me when they find their names--that is, their good examples and courageous spirit--associated with my work. Had Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb been still within hearing of such an Ave, I might have claimed a like indulgence for the unauthorized use of his name.

I have to acknowledge with cordial thanks the care and acuteness with which an old friend and former pupil, Mr. George Buckland Green, now a Master at the Academy School in Edinburgh, has assisted me in the correction of the proofs of this work. My gratitude is due to Messrs. R. & R. Clark, of Edinburgh, and to their accomplished and learned staff, for the accuracy and unfailing courtesy with which the lengthy business of printing these volumes has been conducted, and to the House of ‘Edward Stanford,’ for the pains bestowed upon the maps in the second volume. Last, and not least, I desire to record my grateful sense of the patience and kindness with which my publishers, and in especial Dr. George A. Macmillan, have endured a long-drawn engagement, from which neither publisher nor author can expect to derive pecuniary advantage!

REGINALD W. MACAN.

OXFORD, December 1907. [p. xv]

INTRODUCTION

Unity of the last three Books of Herodotus

The seventh, eighth, and ninth Books, or ‘Muses,’ constitute a distinct part, or section, of the work of Herodotus. They form a whole in themselves, separate from the preceding Books, and closely continuous and related with each other. Though comprising in actual substance a full third of the work, the narrative in this volume presents but a single short war, of two campaigns, and is free for the most part from digressions and excursuses, such as bulk so large in the earlier Books. The chronological conditions of the continuous narrative are complete in a dyad, or at most in a decade, of years. A somewhat larger demand is made in the geographical interest; but the requirements of the narrative, or of the composition, are satisfied without serious interruption of the main theme, and geography rarely, if ever, in these, as often in the earlier Books, becomes an end in itself. Nor is the story proper much neglected, or often deserted, for purely narrative digressions, stories within or beside the story of the war; if anecdotes or tales are brought in which break the strict sequence or continuity of the main narrative, yet they have mostly some bearing upon the subject in hand, as antecedents, consequents, or illustrations. There is, indeed, as compared with the preceding Books, a remarkable closeness in the texture and argument of this last trio. The subject proper comprises the story of the invasion of Greece by the Persians, the ‘Barbarians,’ under Xerxes, a well-defined and well-understood episode, or climax, to which Thucydides, for example, afterwards applied the title ta Mêdika, ‘the war with the Mede,’ as a technical term.¹ In dealing with this special [p. xvi] subject Herodotus undertook to cover a good deal of ground, and to organise a large mass of material; the result is a treatment upon a scale for which the preceding six Books have afforded no parallel. How curt the stories of the Marathonian campaign, of the first expedition of Mardonios, of the six years' struggle with Ionia in revolt, compared with the scale on which the invasion under Xerxes is delineated! Even the invasion of Europe by Dareios in person, which might more nearly challenge comparison, is dwarfed beside the story of ‘the great Expedition,’ much more the other and earlier adventures, of Greek against Greek, or Greek against Barbarian, or of Barbarians among themselves, whereof the former Books of Herodotus have preserved a memory. So great, indeed, is the contrast in scale, method, and interest between the last three Books of Herodotus and the first three, that it would be difficult to relate these two sections of the work to each other, or to believe them parts of one whole, governed by one single plan and conception, if accident had divorced them, or if, say, the middle portion of the work, Bks. 4, 5, 6, like the middle Books of the Annals of Tacitus, had been lost in the lost archetypal manuscript.² The distinct and independent unity of the last three Books is further accentuated by the clear stylistic break between the sixth and seventh Books on the one hand, and the total absence of any stylistic break between the seventh and eighth Books and between the eighth and ninth Books upon the other. Nowhere, indeed, is the existent division into Books less justified than in the last section of the work of Herodotus.³ The break between Book 7 and Book 8 seems indeed inevitable from the otherwise unruly dimensions of the former, and a distinct pause is marked in the narrative, after Thermopylai, by the record of the erection of monuments, subsequently, upon the spot, and by the author's clear severance of the operations by sea off Artemision from the operations by land at Thermopylai. This justification or call for a convenient division is emphasized by the Spartan anecdote, probably a later addition, and hardly from the [p. xvii] author's pen, with which the Book now concludes; but neither in the original nor in the final draft of this section or volume of the work was there any grammatical or stylistic break or pause between our Book 7 and our Book 8. The same observation is exactly true of the break between Books 8 and 9; grammatically the breach is ignored, and materially it is purely artificial, not to say unnatural. Least of all do the existing divisions correspond to a chronological skeleton, such as underlies the division of the work of Thucydides into Books.⁴ The action of the last forty chapters of the seventh Book is synchronous, so to say, with that of the first twenty-five chapters of the eighth Book, just as the events narrated in the first half of the ninth Book are ex hypothesi synchronous with the events narrated in the second half. If the ‘Book of Artemision’ was to be separated from the ‘Book of Thermopylai,’ so might the ‘Book of Mykale’ have been parted, and with more justification in the nature of things, from the ‘Book of Plataia.’ The purely artificial or arbitrary nature of the divisions, plainly dictated by merely external convenience, is a witness to the essential coherence of the record as a whole. This coherence is further attested by the observation of the overlaps between Book and Book: thus the narrative of the naval operations is taken up at the opening of Book 8 from Book 7 c. 196, and again in Book 9 c. 90 from Book 8 c. 132; what would otherwise have been purely a naval story has been interrupted, we may say, in the one case by the story of Thermopylai, in the other by the story of Plataia. No other equal portion of the work of Herodotus exhibits so remarkable a coherence, continuity, and freedom from digression, interruption, or asides as this the third and last volume, or trio, of Books. Other particular and considerable portions of the work do indeed reveal an equal closeness and unity of structure, the Egyptian Logoi, the Skythian Logoi, the Libyan Logoi, each severally; but the size and separateness of the Egyptian Logoi, for example, destroys by its position the unity and continuity of the MedoPersian history into which it has been inserted, and the smaller but substantial unities of the Skythian and Libyan Logoi have [p. xviii] combined to form a unity in Book 4, which has destroyed apparently for most students and editors the inner continuity of Herodotus's narrative from the passage of the Bosporos by Dareios to the battle of Marathon, and its immediate sequelae. Moreover, the bewildering kinematograph of Hellenic histories developed in Books 5 and 6, and especially in the latter, throws into all the greater relief the comparative simplicity and unity of interest and story in Books 7, 8, 9. If that unity and that simplicity are not conspicuous to a fault, the result is due in the first place to the dividing and conflicting interest of actions conducted synchronously on land and on sea, and not always in sight of each other; it is due in the second place to the ubiquitous methods of the author, who is equally at home among invaders and invaded, and narrates with equal confidence deliberations and doings in the Persian court and camp on the one hand, and combinations and conduct among the Greeks on the other, passing from sea to shore and from side to side with a regularity which amounts to a principle, or at least a trick, of composition.

¹  Thucyd. 1. 23. 1 tôn de proteron ergôn megiston eprachthê to Mêdikon, kai touto homôs duoin naumachiain kai pezomachiain tacheian tên krisin eschen. Cp. ho Mêdikos polemos 1. 90. 1; 95. 7; 97. 1; 3. 10. 2. ta Mêdika 1. 14. 2; 18. 3; 97. 2; 2. 16. 1; 21. 2; 8. 24. 3 (cp. 1. 41. 2; 69. 1; 73.2; 142. 7; 6. 82. 3).

² 1 Cp. my edition of Books IV.-VI. (1895), Introduction, § 4 (vol. i. pp. xii. ff.).

³ 2 Cp. the Oekonomie des Herodotischen Werks in A. von Gutschmid's Kleine Schriften, iv. (1893), pp. 183 ff., where the whole work is divided into twelve Aogoi, of which the last three comprise, indeed, the last three Books, but with new divisions (Aogos i' = VII. 1-177; Aogos ia'=VII. 178-VIII. 129; Aogos ib' =VIII. 130-IX. 122).

⁴ 1 The second, third, and fourth Bks. of Thucydides each contain the annals of a triennium: the eighth, ninth, and tenth might have shown almost the same scheme, had the work been completed, not by Xenophon but by the author. The division into Books is, of course, posthumous.