Ordenando el Conjunto

Only the Spartans, in Herodotus’s wide experience of the Greek world, preserved the old linguistic usage and refused to distinguish between Greek strangers (xenoi) and non- Greek ‘barbarians’, but then the literally xenophobic Spartans put their money where their mouths were and practised periodic expulsions of strangers, both Greek and non- Greek. The Spartans were odd Greeks in other ways too, so odd indeed that Herodotus reported some of their customs in his ‘ethnographic’ manner, almost as if he were describing those of non-Greeks (Cartledge 1993a). What is no less striking, though, is the relative disinterestedness with which he treated the customs of both Greeks and non- Greeks. Compare and contrast Herodotus’ practice in this respect with, say, the triumphalist and ethnocentric annals of the pharaohs and the Assyrian monarchs, or with the Hebrew Bible’s books of Samuel and Kings (Cook 1988: ch. 8). Herodotus was no mere sanctifying mythologer of an official Greek self-image (Momigliano 1966:127–42). In this impartiality he had Homer’s example to inspire him, but that by itself is unlikely to have been proof against the virulent new anti-barbarian prejudice. His own family background, with its close connections with non-Greek Carian families, may also have helped. But the primary explanation of his exceptional objectivity is to be sought rather in his acceptance of the revolutionary teachings of the itinerant Greek intellectuals known as the Sophists.

What was natural, what cultural or (merely) conventional in human social behaviour? To the ordinary Greek, as to most people in all societies, what was natural was right, and

what their culture believed right or took for granted and habitually practised was natural. It required therefore an unusually powerful intellectual self-confidence to resist the everyday prejudice that Greek norms were natural and good, whereas those of barbarian culture were innately flawed. That antinomian confidence was possessed by the Sophist who blankly asserted that, since Greeks and non-Greeks had the same human bodies, the differences between them had to be (merely) conventional.11 _{It was fully shared by}

Herodotus, who made the same point dramatically through the device of an emblematic (and ben trovato) anecdote set at the court of Persian Great King Darius and involving opposing Greek and Indian national burial customs. Every people, Herodotus taught by endorsing the praise-poet Pindar’s adage ‘custom is king of all’ (3.38), regards its own customs as best, but whether they are in fact so is a different matter, one that has to be investigated empirically through a balanced cultural history of both Greeks and non- Greeks.12

Two illustrations will have to suffice, his treatment of women, and his discourse on despotic power. Respectable Greek women of citizen status were not supposed to be talked about, or even named, in public among unrelated men; it was an important part of a male Greek citizen’s honour and self-esteem that he should be in a position to shield his womenfolk from such damaging talk (Cartledge 1993b).

No such taboo constrained Herodotus (though it did the more conservative Thucydides), who indeed manipulated the usages of women in Greek and more especially barbarian societies as a means of indicating the proper, Greek way to treat them (Rosellini and Said 1978). Copulation in public, in the manner of beasts, placed a human society that tolerated such shameful (or shameless) behaviour at the furthest remove from the normative Greek end of the spectrum. Copulation in private but without benefit of legal matrimony ranked it only a little nearer. Those barbarian societies which, like Persia, practised polygamy were both naturally and culturally unGreek, but at least the Persians did recognize legal marriage and outlawed adultery. However, when a society combined polygamy with despotic power, as did Persia, then it entered Herodotus’ alternative, political discourse of Greek self-definition.

The paradigm case for Herodotus’ purposes was that of Great King Xerxes, son of Darius, whose invasion of Greece he represented as a war for the extinction of Greek liberty and imposition of slavery. It is no surprise to find Xerxes at the climax of the history involved back home in Susa in a sordid and ultimately gory plot to seduce a brother’s wife, since one of oriental despotism’s stigmata was precisely such gross mistreatment even (or especially) of close female relatives.13 _{Another means employed}

by Herodotus to bring out the Greek-Persian polar dichotomy was to set against Xerxes ex-King Damaratus of Sparta, a political exile and formally a traitor to the loyalist Greek

11 The Sophist cited is Antiphon, possibly to be identified with the Athenian extreme oligarchic theoretician of 411: Gagarin and Woodruff 1995:244–5 (fr. 7a ‘On truth’).

12 Sophistic relativism: de Romilly 1992. Herodotus’ attitude to non-Greek religious customs: Gould 1994; Thompson 1996. R.Thomas has in preparation a monograph along the lines of ‘Herodotus the Sophist’.

13 Hdt. 9.108–13, with Cartledge 1993a:85–6. Add the mutilation of an anonymous sister-in-law of Xerxes, inflicted at the behest of Xerxes’ wife Amestris, to the catalogue of despotic oriental mutilations in Steiner 1994:154–5.

cause but nevertheless in Herodotus’ book an unwavering spokesman for Greek civic values. Speaking of his fellow-countrymen with a properly Greek freedom of spirit and expression, Herodotus’ Damaratus tells his incredulous Persian suzerain that, however greatly outnumbered, they will resist his horde to the death, since unlike his non-Greek subjects the Spartans acknowledge only one, non-human master—the law that they themselves have made and assented to as free citizens of a Greek community (7.104). That, in nuce, is Herodotus’ deepest explanation of why the relatively few loyalist Greeks were able as well as willing to resist Xerxes’ invasion, and to do so successfully.14

It was to Herodotus’ great credit that he in no way disguised the Greeks’ irreconcilable political divisions. Indeed, there is a tragic undertone to his despairing remark that ‘in the three generations of Darius the son of Hystaspes, Xerxes son of Darius and Artaxerxes son of Xerxes more woes befell Greece than in the twenty generations preceding Darius’ (6.98), since so many of those woes were self-inflicted. Following the Persian Wars the cause in chief was the rise of an Athenian Empire, many of whose more articulate Greek subjects felt—rightly or wrongly—that they had been delivered from an oriental despotism only to fall prey to a home-grown Greek tyranny (Tuplin 1985). Herodotus, however, who was himself for a time an imperial Athenian subject, did not scruple to state that in his view it was the Athenians who, on balance, had been the ‘saviours of Greece’ in the Wars, although he was careful to preface that contentious judgement by acknowledging that it would be ‘resented by many’ (7.139).

Moreover, it was to ‘the Athenians’ in an official response to their less than wholly resolute Spartan allies that Herodotus attributed a persuasive definition of Greekness which he clearly hoped would be found compellingly impressive far beyond its putative historical context of winter 480/79:

Many very powerful considerations prevent us [from going over to the Persians]: first and foremost, the burning and destruction of our temples and the images of our gods;…then, the fact of our being Greek—our common language, the altars and sacrifices we all share, our common mores and customs.

(8.144) Doubtless this was ideology, a conscious piece of retrospective mythologizing, but it was both symbolically apt and not without all purchase on fifth-century actuality, as Thucydides’ very different history allusively testified.