Up until now the story of Persia has been one of military success and imperial growth. Despite the problem of Cambyses’ madness and death and the confusing interregnum that follows, by 515 or so Darius has put things back together again. In terms of effective governance, Darius’ reign (521–486 BCE) will turn out to be the acme of the Achaemenid empire. His prompt and rather ruthless disciplining of Intaphrenes, Oroetes, and Babylon in Book 3 has indicated how resourceful he will be; the geographical and financial survey of his vast empire in 3.89–97 has tacitly confirmed how vast and well organized is the power he wields.
Book 4, however, introduces a new element: it shows what happens to Darius’ army and his imperial ambitions when he ventures out of Asia into Europe, and encounters a people quite different from the highly civilized populations heretofore encountered. Structurally, the first and longer part of Book 4 reminds one of Book 2: it starts with a survey of the exotic land and people of Scythia before they are attacked, and then it recounts the Persian war against them. But Scythians are not Egyptians, and this war goes quite differently.
Book 2 has shown us that Egypt is organized into an intricate agricultural and highly civilized society; even the land is criss-crossed with man-made canals. H thinks that the Egyptians are among the oldest, most learned, most highly developed people in the world, and according to H the Greeks have acquired most of their religion and many kinds of learning from them. The picture is an organized and rather static one: Egyptians are categorized within functional classes and carry out a variety of specified and elaborate rituals. The Scythians of Book 4, on the other hand, claim to be the youngest people in the world. They want nothing to do with outsiders and have only one real skill—but it is worth a great deal—the art of not staying where their enemy can attack them. They move rapidly across their vast grasslands with their herds and their families in wagons, and they practise the art of war from horseback with a single-minded tenacity. Scythians make clothing, napkins, and quiver-covers out of the skin of their enemies, drink from their skulls, and build no shrines to any gods but Ares, god of war. Their sacrifices, from a Greek point of view, are sketchy. Where the Egyptians build elaborate stone pyramids, the Scythians bury their kings in huge pits in the ground and cover them with mounds of earth.
Scythians are nomads, and as F. Hartog has recently pointed out, in some respects H’s account of the Scythian expedition is an extended meditation on nomad power: ‘As Darius learns to his cost, throwing a bridge across the Ister does not suffice for truly entering Scythia’ (p. 61). The initial, long, ethnographic description shows us what Darius will encounter: a vast territory stretching north of the Euxine (Black) Sea and mostly consisting of grassland steppes, broken by a series of gigantic rivers, from the Ister (Danube) in the west to the Tanaïs (Don) in the east. Across these steppes ride the Royal Scythians, warrior nomads. Darius does not see how little he has understood them until the wonderful moment where he finally meets them army to army—and the Scythians, just as battle is about to be joined, catch sight of a hare and ride off en masse after it! (4.134) So Darius gives up his plans of conquest and retreats, back to the Ionians waiting to ferry him across the Ister.
Although the parallel cannot be pushed too far, in a number of ways the account of Scythia foreshadows the war Xerxes, Darius’ son, will fight in Greece in Books 7 to 9. There too Artabanus will warn the king, the king will kill the offspring of a man who had sought their release from the army, the king will contemplate his army on its passage from Asia to Europe on a throne, the relatively poor and disorganized European enemy will take pride in their freedom, the Europeans will have problems reconciling their differences and fighting the Persians together, the Persians will have problems provisioning their army, and the enemy will prove elusive—when their cities are burned, the Greeks will take to their ships, their ‘wooden walls’. Finally, the Persians will flee homeward, the king fearing for his life.
(For the discussion of Libya, see below, 4.145–205.)
4.1 It is curious that as Darius’ intentions/attentions are depicted, no reference is made back to the conversation with Atossa in which she apparently persuades him to turn his attention from Scythia to Greece (3.134). The Scythians in Scythia in 515 BCE are unlikely to have been the same peoples who terrorized Asia Minor with their lengthy and destructive incursions in the seventh century (1.15, 73, 103–6), although both were mounted élite war-bands originating in the eastern parts of the steppe (CAH iii/2. 555).
4.2–4 H begins with a story that performs some of the same functions as the story of King Psammetichus and the children without language that begins the story of Egypt in Book 2, in that it tries through story to characterize the people being introduced. The Scythians drink horses’ milk (cf.Iliad 13.5–6) and need slaves to do the complicated job of milking the mares. Since the Scythians are nomads or people on the move all the time, they cannot just lock the slaves up or shackle them as a Greek would do, but must blind them to keep them from running away. CAH iii/2. 568 suggests that behind 4.3–4 may lie a dim historical memory of one group of nomadic steppe peoples returning from Asia Minor to find another group inhabiting their previous territory. In any case, as well as taking up the narrative thread of the Scythians from 1.106, this story highlights several of the oddest salient characteristics of Scythians in a single picture: their nomadism, their use of milk (very strange to Greeks), their use of the whip (cf. the later Cossack or Tatar nagaica), and above all their ruthless single-minded logicality, given their premisses. We will meet it again in their efficient use of their enemies’ physical remains (4.64) and their judgement of Ionians as slaves at the end of the Scythian narrative (4.142). Slave rebellions are also the point in 6.83 and 138 and were a commonplace fear in the Greek world.
Lake Maeetis (3) is the Sea of Azov, and H refers again to the trench coming into it as the eastern boundary of the Royal Scythians (4.20). It is not clear what geographical feature he is describing, but it is unlikely to have been dug by rebellious slaves. The end of ch. 4 restates the topic of ch. 1; Darius’ invasion will not be narrated until ch. 83.
4.5–13 Four stories about the origins of the Scythians. As often with variant versions, some underlying features remain the same: in this case, common to two versions are the three brothers, of whom the youngest becomes king (cf. the Egyptian emphasis on being oldest, 2.2); common to two other versions are successive waves of nomads coming from the East and compelling their predecessors to move westwards. The Indo-European tripartite division of function into farming, fighting, and religion is suggested by the nature of the four gold objects falling from the sky in the native Scythian story (two of them are agricultural). The Scythians of H’s own day were of Iranian stock, CAH iii/2. 552. In 4.120 reference is made to three Scythian kings in charge of the army marshalled against Darius, but they are all from the Royal Scythians; there is no indication that they correspond to the lineages of the three sons sketched here.
4.7 For the feathers, cf. ch. 31.
4.8–10 For the Greeks who live on the shores of the Euxine (Black) Sea, see CAH iii/3. 122–30. They are almost certainly H’s main source of information for 4.1–82. The Greek version has three brothers also, but these now represent the Scythians as an undifferentiated whole, their neighbours to the north-west towards the Carpathian mountains, the Agathyrsians, and those to the north-east, the Gelonians; cf. chs. 104 and 108. Heracles’ odd route from Gibraltar back home via Scythia makes more sense if we remember that for H the Ister (Danube) has its origins in Spain and flows eastwards across all of Europe before emptying into the west or north waters of the Euxine (Black) Sea—it reveals a great deal about the state of geographical knowledge for H’s contemporaries that H has to emphasize that Spain lies west of the Euxine (Black) Sea. H criticizes the notion of the circumambient Ocean also in 2.21 and 23, and 4.36 (cf. 3.115); the criticism is perhaps directed at Hecataeus. The snake-lady (9) perhaps owes something to Hesiod (Theogony 297 ff.), but there are also Scythian representations of a goddess with snake legs and snakes protruding from her shoulders. Her confident bluntness and easy ways with Heracles’ property in H’s story anticipate the behaviour of the Amazons who later become founding mothers of the Sauromatae (4.110–17).
4.11–12 For the Massagetae, see 1.201. The Araxes cannot be clearly identified; it is perhaps the Volga. According to A. Ivantchik, the Cimmerians were also probably, like the Scythians, in origin an Iranian people; the Tyras, near which the royal Cimmerians are buried, is the modern Dniester. Judging from archaeological remains, the Cimmerians inhabited Ukraine, south Russia, and the north Caucasus. See also n. 1.6–92.
4.13–16 If Aristeas is a historical figure, he probably lived in the sixth century BCE, pace H who places him more than 240 years before his own time. Aristeas’ home, Proconnesus, was an island in the Propontis. The fragments of his hexameter poem, the Arimaspea, that survive are a mixture of tales from Ionian geographical exploration and fable. H seems to think of the Issedones as a real people living far east and north of the Scythians near the Massagetae (1.201, 4.25–7, 32), but they do not come into the account of Darius’ Scythian campaign. Some have seen in Aristeas and other figures mentioned in Book 4 echoes of shamanistic practices (cf. Abaris in 4.36, the enareis in 1.105 and 4.67, Salmoxis and Pythagoras in 4.94–6). Metapontum (15) was a Pythagorean community in the Gulf of Tarentum in southern Italy close to Thurii, and H may have heard the story of Aristeas’ reappearance there. The story of Aristeas is a pendant that wraps up the mythic/historic account of Scythian origins; at the end of 4.16 H launches into a survey of the real peoples north of the Black or Euxine Sea.
4.17–36 This is the first of several narratives that catalogue the vast lands in which the Scythians and their neighbours live; H takes up the rivers again more systematically in 4.47–58, the shape and distances of Scythia in 4.99–101, and the various outlying peoples in 4.102–17.
4.17–27 A survey of land and peoples. H here begins not at the Ister, the most westerly point of the later narrative, but where the Scythian land begins, near the Greek coastal trading town of Olbia/Borysthenes on the Hypanis (Bug). From there he arranges his narrative much like a periplousor Greek travel narrative; he moves east and north clockwise around the north shore of the Euxine (Black) Sea, describing each river in turn and describing each people one would encounter moving upstream as far as one can go, before moving on to the next river eastward. The Hypanis (Bug), the Borysthenes (Dnieper), and the Tanaïs (Don) are the major identifiable rivers; the Gerrhus and the Panticapes do not seem to match current rivers in the area. This may be due to error (is the Panticapes the Ingul, on the other bank of the Borysthenes? is the Gerrhus merely a part of the Borysthenes?) or to changes in the terrain. The territory of the Royal Scythians (20) stretches from the steppe east of the Dnieper to the Donets and some parts of the Don (Tanaïs), as well as the Crimean Steppe. The steppe as a whole stretches about 4,350 miles (6,960 km.), from the foot of the Carpathian mountains east to Mongolia.
For a matching of H’s descriptions with the cultures unearthed in Soviet archaeological investigations of lower Ukraine, see CAH iii/2. 573–90; the problem is complicated by the migratory habits of the populations involved, the conservatism of the Scythian lower classes that sometimes makes dating of artefacts difficult, and clear evidence (judging from artefacts and skeletal remains) of mixing and blending of different population groups at different times. Both long- and round-skulled Europid skeletons have been found and, in greater numbers moving east, Mongoloid skeletons as well, sometimes as part of the same family group. Human bones have been found mixed with animal bones and kitchen refuse in the area east of the middle Dnieper where H puts the Androphagoi or Cannibals (18; cf. 4.106). The fourteen days’ journey from the Panticapes to the Gerrhus in ch. 19 cannot be reconciled with the ten days altogether from the Borysthenes to Lake Maeetis in 4.101; Legrand thinks it should perhaps be ‘four’ instead. From ch. 22 H moves off north and eastwards, perhaps reflecting an ancient trading-route, and the stories become increasingly improbable; H reassures us (24) that he is reporting accounts he has heard. In ch. 25 he is much less sanguine about the possibility that real information is being conveyed but nevertheless reports what he has been told. The Argippaei (23) may be a Mongolian people; the Kalmucks call a similar drink ‘atschi’. H shows no clear knowledge of the Urals or the Volga.
4.28–31 The climate of the steppes is for a Greek worth mentioning. There is in fact a hot, dry period in July and August, when the steppes dry up, but by late August fog and rain have begun again, and the winter lasts from late October until March. For another Greek’s dismayed account of the steppes and their effect on Scythian physiognomy, cf. the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places 19. Skeletons of hornless cattle have indeed been found in Scythian graves, probably introduced from the East, although H’s account of the cause is of course incorrect; the Homeric verse isOdyssey 4.85. Plutarch (Moralia 303b) confirms the absence of mules in Elis, due (he says) to an ancient curse from King Oenomaus. Ch. 30 is a valuable indication of H’s desire to attach as much information as he can to his ongoing account, whether or not it is strictly relevant. In ch. 31 H explains the mysterious ‘feathers’ of ch. 7.
4.32–6 With the journey of the Hyperboreans, legendary Apollo-worshippers from the far north, H may be recalling early archaic trade routes of amber from the Baltic, or grain from the Pontic regions. Delos (33), along with Delphi, is one of the two most important Greek cult centres for the worship of Apollo; cf. 1.64 for its sixth-century purification by Pisistratus (CAH iii/1. 769–70). Olen (35) is a name connected with early cult hymns, like Musaeus, Orpheus, Melampus, Pamphos; others call him too a Hyperborean. Abaris the Hyperborean (36), the Greek Aristeas (4.13), and the Thracian Salmoxis (4.95) are all later connected with the Pythagorean tradition. See n. 4.94–6.
4.36 As in 2.21, 23, and 4.8, the notion of an all-encircling Ocean is attacked. (Both the maps of Anaximander and Hecataeus (FGH I, frs. 36, 18, 302) had included it, Lloyd, i. 129.) Here H goes further and promises a description of the known world that is not based on a theoretical symmetry but on the observed relationship of land masses.
4.37–45 H tries to lay out the world as an irregular set of contiguous land masses, like a large jigsaw puzzle with five pieces. The first and central piece (37), a rectangle longer (north-south) than it is wide (east-west), consists of the territory of four peoples, moving bottom to top (south to north): the Persians, the Medes, the Saspeires, and the Colchians. This column represents the block of land from the Persian Gulf northward to the area south of the Caucasus.
He grafts to the top-left side of this column an irregular, horizontal, long piece extending west, and to the bottom-left side he grafts another, even longer and more irregular roughly horizontal piece also extending west, so the whole looks like an irregularly shaped backwards C with the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean lying between its two arms. The top or more northerly of these two horizontal pieces roughly comprises our idea of Asia Minor (38). The bottom, longer piece (39) heads west from Persia to include Assyria and Arabia west as far as the Arabian Gulf (our Red Sea) but also includes Phoenicia and the Levantine coast. This is where Asia ends, but to H’s thinking (41) this lower peninsula continues down into Egypt (where it narrows), and finally Libya (where it broadens out again).
A fourth piece of the puzzle (40) stretches off to the right (east) of the original (Persian) piece to India, with what he calls the Red Sea (here the Indian Ocean) forming its southern border. This is of course part of Asia. Finally (42), up on top or north of the original piece, stretching from an unidentified eastern boundary to the Pillars of Heracles in the extreme west, lies what H calls Europe. H’s notion of Europe included much of what we think of as northern or northwestern Asia.
The excursus on Phoenician, Persian, and Carian geographical explorations (42–4) seems designed principally to prove Europe the greatest mass of land, since both Libya and East Asia have been circumnavigated, and Europe has not. In the process of disbelieving what he has been told, H gives us a clear indication that the Phoenicians probably did sail around Africa, since they claim to have had the sun on their right while sailing west around the bottom of ‘Libya’, what we call the Cape of Good Hope (42).
The Persian Sataspes, who rapes Zopyrus’ daughter (43) is the brother of Pharandates, the Persian whose concubine will be returned to Cos by Pausanias after the battle of Plataea (9.76), and the cousin of Xerxes and Mardonius. The woman Sataspes outrages is from a family almost as powerful as his own; in H, Zopyrus achieves the conquest of Babylon for Darius (3.153) and is the son of one of the original seven conspirators, Megabyzus (3.81).
For Caspatyrus and Scylax’s voyage (44), cf. 3.102; the Indus does not flow eastwards. Scylax might have left from Pascapyrus (now Peshawar) where the Kabul flows east into the Indus (CAH iv. 201–3), but there are also other candidates for his starting-point. Some few fragments of his account of his voyage remain as well as a later forgery; Caryanda is in Caria, north of Halicarnassus; cf. n. 5.117–21.
The whole description of the way the continents fit together is of considerable interest; it has the same kind of associative logic behind it as H’s narrative style does, in which a number of different logoi are arranged as pendants off one main logos—which is (like the original Persian land-block) not necessarily the biggest one. In 4.45 H ends this geographical excursus by emphasizing the arbitrary and culture-bound way human beings designate land masses. H comments on the oddness of naming Europe after a woman, Europa, who was born in Tyre, was taken to Crete, and ended in Lycia with her son Sarpedon (1.2, 173 and 4.147). This restates a theme introduced at the very beginning of the Histories, the highly ambiguous connection that links countries and women from whom they take their names (cf. n. 11). Both as a narrator and as a geographer H’s priority is empirical, mapping, clarifying, and connecting up what he has been given as data, rather than seeking to make a rationalized and more systematic pattern from it. He inserts this geographical overview of the earth as a whole into the Scythian narrative at the point where the furthest northerly point of his knowledge has been reached.
4.46 For Anacharsis, cf. n. 4.76–81. H sums up the people through whose territory Darius will march, and again introduces the central fact about the Scythians: they are nomads. How does one fight nomads?
4.47–58 H reverts to the subject of rivers (cf. 4.17–35), this time beginning from the Ister (Danube) at the extreme west shore of the Euxine (Black) Sea. He uses the same principle of organization as before, moving north–east around the north shore of the Euxine, this time treating each river in turn without including much on resident populations. The thought that connects this river survey to 4.46 is probably that the rivers create the grasslands that allow the Scythians to live as nomads off their herds; certainly in conclusion to the whole narrative (58) he mentions the tendency of the grass to make the cattle bilious. (It is not clear from the Greek of ch. 58 whether dissection of dead animals is involved, or the observation of the orifices of living animals.) Apart from Heracles’ footprint (4.82), the rivers themselves are Scythia’s only remarkable natural feature (cf. n. 2.65–76). The Ister (49–50; cf. 2.33) does not of course rise in the extreme west of Europe; Aristotle (Meteorologica 350b) follows H here, although he makes ‘Pyrene’ no longer a city but a mountain (the Pyrenees). H is right that the Ister (Danube) does not flood in its lower reaches but he is (as in 2.24 for the Nile) wrong about the reasons. The flooding occurred farther upstream, in the Hungarian plains. In the rivers Carpis and Alpis (49) may be some echo of the Alps and the Carpathians, neither of which H overtly recognizes.
The Panticapes, Hypacris, and Gerrhus cannot be identified today. It is more puzzling that, after the fording of the Ister, not once do the rivers play a part in the actual narrative of Darius’ invasion of Scythia that all this is designed to introduce (4.83–142).
4.59–75 Scythian customs. H seems only to describe the customs of the Royal Scythians and perhaps the nomad Scythians here; the tribes to the south-west are more agrarian and some of them farm and live in houses, a fact he here ignores. He describes the Scythians’ gods (59), sacrifices (60–3), war (64–6), divination and oaths (67–70), and burial practices (71–5). The archaeological exploration of Ukraine over the last fifty years and more has largely substantiated H’s picture of Scythian nomad culture.
4.59 H does not even implicitly criticize the Scythian gods; cf. 2.3. The most important god is Hestia (Tabiti), the goddess of the hearth, and the most powerful Scythian oath is the one taken ‘by the king’s hearth’ (4.68). The list ends with Ares, the god of war, the only god to receive image, altar, or shrine in Scythia. (According to H, the Persians, another Iranian people, have no images, temples, or altars (1.131); the Egyptians, on the other hand, say that they invented these and gave them to the Greeks (2.4).)
4.60–3 Sacrifice among the Scythians is presented through a lens that assumes knowledge of normal, i.e. Greek, sacrificial customs (Hartog, 178–86). There are no fire, first-fruits, or libations, no consent of the victim, or cutting of the throat, and finally no setting apart of the portion for the gods, ceremonial consumption of the viscera, roasting of the meat, or distribution to the participants. The bones are burned when necessary, and the meat cooks inside the animal’s own stomach; H’s fascination with the tidiness of the ‘self-cooking ox’ (Hartog, 185) is comparable to his delight in Babylonian boats (1.194). The Scythians, like the Egyptians, avoid swine (2.47, 4.63).
4.64–6 Rolle (p. 64) comments: ‘no other people in history have provided archaeologists with so many objects of weaponry as have the Scythians.’ Scythian weapons include the composite bow, razor-sharp arrowheads with thorns attached, the lance, spear, axe, long and short sword, the miniature chain-flail, and the whip. The body armour is often metal, consisting of thousands of bronze or iron scales attached to a leather jerkin, and the shield can be worn on the back, with the arms left free for riding and shooting. The beheading of an enemy (cf. Tomyris the Massagete, 1.214) is a normal part of warfare, and the act of carrying about the severed enemy head by hand or fastened to the reins of one’s horse is one of the scenes from daily life found depicted on Scythian cups and belts. Aposkythizein, ‘to de-Scythianize’, is the normal Greek term for scalping; in the excavated fortified settlement at Bel’sk there has been found a skull-cup ‘workshop’, with the cup-handles made from temple-bones. Some skulls found in the kurgans (burial-mounds) show the marks of scalping; one beautifully tattooed warrior buried ceremonially in a Pazyryk kurgan had had a scalp sewn back on his head, with horsehair attached to it; perhaps his family had reclaimed his body after his death and scalping (Rolle, 83).
4.67–70 A similar divination by yarrow sticks is still practised in the East. The enareis (67) are perhaps connected with shamanism (cf. Lloyd, i. 78 and 1.105). The Scythian people as a whole is attached to the hearth of the king and there is an organic connection between the king’s health and the honesty of his subjects (68; Hartog, 125–33). This means the Scythians are not able to understand the selfish concerns of the Ionian tyrants at the bridge (4.140) and in consequence dismiss them as merely servile (4.142).
4.71–5 The kurgans or burial-mounds that dot the Ukrainian and south Russian steppes and the forest steppes bear testimony to H’s accuracy here. Sixth- and fifth-century royal tombs were as H describes, rectangular shafts between 33 and 49 feet deep (10–15 m.), within a raised mound above. Some later mounds are as high as a three-storey building, and the base of a mound can extend to a diameter of over 328 feet (100m.). Branching off the central shaft inside the mound are the burial chambers. The mounds themselves are built out of cut sod with the surface grass attached, often brought to the site from a considerable distance (Rolle, 19, 22, 32). H is correct that buried with the dead king are large numbers of human retainers and animals, particularly horses; some tombs have been found with hundreds of horse skeletons schematically arranged around the central chamber. The elaborate and beautiful golden objects taken from the Scythian tombs and stored in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg have made the term ‘Scythian gold’ well known in the western world.
The forty days during which the royal corpse visits his realm is a traditional Indo-European length of time between death and burial (73); tents and rugs for the purifying cannabis (hemp) sweat-lodge and hemp-inhaling equipment have been found in the Pazyryk kurgans far to the east, in the Altai mountains (Rolle, 94). Cf. 1.202 for a similar though less elaborate custom among the Massagetae; there the smoke is inhaled for amusement rather than hygiene or ritual purification.
4.76–81 Scythians and foreigners. H ends his account of the Scythian way of life with two stories, presumably both told by Tymnes, the deputy of Ariapithes, king of Scythia. Both show the Scythian dislike of Greek customs. Anacharsis eventually (though not expressly in H) becomes in some accounts one of the Seven Wise Men (cf. 4.46, n. 1.27) and is said to have held conversations with Solon. He is the uncle of Idanthyrsus, the king who replies to Darius (127). Scyles is the much later half-Greek son of Ariapithes, Tymnes’ former employer. Both worship foreign gods (the Mother of the Gods, Dionysus); both are slain by their countrymen for doing so. Cyzicus (76), where Anacharsis first celebrated his rites, is the city of the Propontis where the story of Aristeas’ initial resuscitation came from (14) and a great centre for the worship of Cybebe (the Mother of the Gods, n. 1.34); Olbia/Borysthenes (78) is the important Greek trading city at the mouth of the Hypanis (Bug) on the Euxine (Black) Sea. The variant version of the Anacharsis story complimenting the Lacedaemonians (77) is not to be taken very seriously. In this respect it is similar to the Greek version of the story of the Egyptian children’s speech in 2.2; H implies that it misses the whole point of Anacharsis’ life, that he was killed for consorting with Greeks and adopting Greek ways.
4.81–2 H finds the idea of population interesting as part of the Scythians’ general elusiveness in their huge territory; in contrast, he does not report investigating the number of Egyptians. The peculiar simplicity and visual concreteness of the Scythian way of life is shown by their pointing at the giant bowl that embodies the number of Scythians; for the bowl itself, n. 1.51. Cf. the message they send Darius in 4.131, which they also refuse to decode. (For Pausanias (81), see n. 9.9–11, and for his stay at Byzantium after the Persian Wars, see CAH v. 46.)
4.83–4 Darius probably marches from Susa about 513 BCE, although this westward expedition against the Scythians cannot be dated or even confirmed from Persian records. Artabanus will also later advise his nephew, Xerxes, at much greater length, expressly referring to the advice given here (7.10–12, 15–18, 46–52). Oeobazus (84) is also paralleled in the Xerxes story by Pythias (7.27, 38); H implies in passing that Darius has paid assassins in his employ. Cf. the conclusion of the Deioces story, 1.100, Otanes’ comments in 3.80, and Thrasybulus’ advice described in 5.92.
4.85–6 For the ‘wandering’ rocks at the opening of the Euxine (Black) Sea, see Odyssey 12.61. Not surprisingly, given the lack of precise tools and standards of measurement, H’s figures for the length and breadth of the Euxine, Bosporus, Propontis, and Hellespont are somewhat off; he tends to overestimate the speed of the sailing ship. The Euxine is c.700 miles long (1,120 km.) and c.300 miles wide (480 km.); he exaggerates the width somewhat, but makes it about twice as long as it really is; cf. 2.6–7. The Bosporus he makes a little shorter than it is, the Propontis longer and wider. The Hellespont is 290 stades long (about 32 miles or 51 km.) rather than 400. For H’s distances and measurements, see App. 2.
4.87–8 The pillars look like good circumstantial evidence that Darius at least made the expedition; the figures for his troops, however, are a conventional number and probably exaggerated (cf. 6.9 and 95, the battles of Lade and Marathon, also assigned six hundred Persian ships each). The relative permanence of the pontoon bridges at the Bosporus and the Ister suggest that Darius’ real aim was the creation of new satrapies or parts of his empire to the west and the north rather than just an invasion in retribution for depredations a century earlier by the Scythians. H had probably seen Mandrocles’ painting at Samos.
4.90–3 In Europe now, Darius subdues Thrace before marching with his army up to the Ister (Danube) to cross into Scythia; the Getae are the only Thracians who resist him, and they must therefore become part of his army (4.96).
4.94–6 The Hellespontine Greeks rationalize the Thracian Salmoxis as a slave and pupil of Pythagoras. Pythagoras, a contemporary of Polycrates of Samos, lived in the later sixth century BCE, obviously (as H points out) much later than Salmoxis; he migrated west to southern Italy, where he founded influential philosophical communities at Croton and Metapontum. This is the final reference in Book 4 to something like shamanistic practices, one of the remarkable things that fascinated H and that he considered it his duty to mention (cf. 4.13, 32–6, 67, and n. 2.65–76). It is not clear, however, that H considered Aristeas, Abaris, the Hyperboreans, and Salmoxis as aspects of a single phenomenon, or what he meant to imply by mentioning the Pythagorean connection. In the fourth century, Plato’s Charmides 156d-158b depicts Socrates in conversation with a Thracian physician who calls Salmoxis his king and god and practises a form of psychosomatic healing.
4.97–8 It is not usually possible to discern H’s source for a particular story, but here and at the end of the bridge story (4.133, 136–42) we can safely claim a Greek contribution. Darius is not inexperienced in fighting nomads from the East; he had fought and subdued the eastern Sacae inc.519 BCE (they fight as part of the Persian army at Marathon in 490 (6.113)). Given this experience, it is most unlikely that in 513 Darius, a skilled and seasoned campaigner, leaves his supply lines and return route untended; it is almost as unlikely that he has recourse to the primitive system of a knotted leather strap to count off the days until his return, or tells the Ionians to disband after sixty days.
Coës does later receive from Darius the tyranny of Mytilene but is killed by the Mytileneans (5.37–8). In the story of the bridge as a whole the Ionians play an unlikely central role in determining Darius’ overall strategy; see also n. 4.133–42 below for Miltiades the Athenian, and nn. 5.23–4, 5.105–7, 5.124–6, 6.1–5, 6.26–30 for Histiaeus the Milesian.
4.99–101 H measures off Scythia, making it a square of twenty days’ march on each side. The left side and top are inland; the bottom and the right side are both coastlines. He makes the Ister (Danube) come down to the north shore of the Euxine (Black) Sea from the north (forming the western border), he gives the Sea of Azov a long, straight coastline running north-south, and he has no understanding of how the Crimea is shaped. He visualizes the Crimea as simply the lower right-hand corner of the big square, and comments how odd it is that the triangle comprising that corner is inhabited by the non-Scythian Taurians—as though some foreign people inhabited Cape Sunium in Attica, or the heel of Italy (99). The double comparison suggests both the scope of H’s own geographical imagination and its necessary limitations—regional maps did not yet exist that might have shown how different the Crimea, Sunium, and southeast Italy looked (for Anaximander’s famous map, see n. 4.36 and the bottom of n. 5.49–51). This part of H’s Histories might have been delivered orally in both southern Italy and Athens. The principles on which this picture is constructed do not seem to be the same as those of the previous geographical descriptions of Scythia in 4.17–27 and 47–58; those are constructed around the observed course of the rivers (cf. the very different course of the Ister in 4.49–50) and this is instead a schematic overview, perhaps taken from an earlier written source.
4.102–9 The Scythians decide to ask neighbouring tribes for help (cf. 7.144 f.), so H describes them, beginning with the Taurians who inhabit the Crimea, and then the others, who mostly live north of Scythia proper, beginning again in the west and moving east. The locations of the Neurians, Cannibals, Black Cloaks, Sauromatae, and Budinians have been mentioned in H’s first geographical description (4.17, 18, 20, 21), those of the Agathyrsians, Neurians, and Sauromatae in the second (4.49, 51, 57). Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris later makes use of a version of the story H tells about the religion of the Taurians (103). Concerning the Neurian werewolves (105), A. Ivantchik comments that the idea of bands of warriors as savage dogs or wolves was an old and widespread Indo-European notion that was particularly important to the Scythians and their descendants, the Ossetes. As mentioned above (n. 4.17–27), east of the middle Dnieper, where H puts the Cannibals (106), human bones have been found mixed with animal bones and kitchen refuse. Gelonus, the city of the Budinians (108), may be one of the hundred or more fortified settlements found in the forest steppe region, the largest of which is at Bel’sk (Rolle, 117; Bel’sk, however, is on a tributary of the Dnieper, not beyond the Don, where H puts the Budinians); the wooden ramparts are 20½ miles (32.8 km.) long, in the form of an irregular triangle. Darius burns Gelonus down (4.123).
4.110–17 The Amazons are a foreign band of warrior women who appear regularly in Greek myth. They are the ancestresses of the Sauromatae, who appear at the end of H’s list of the Scythians’ neighbours, and whose half-Amazon origins H relates, again developing his interest in the blending of cultures through marriage (nn. 1.1, 3.159). The Sauromatae are the eastern neighbours of the Royal Scythians. According to Rolle (p. 88), graves of women warriors are found throughout the steppe region. They are buried with armour and weapons, and the skeletons bear evidence of wounds taken in battle. In Sauromatia, the region of the lower Volga, 20 per cent of graves containing weapons and harness are those of women, but sizeable numbers have been found in western Scythia as well.
4.118–20 The narrative resumes from 4.102, and the Scythians decide on a strategy; a number of their hoped-for allies reject them. Cf. 7.144, 148, 157, 168, 169, 172—the Greek neutrals in 480 BCE are both less honest and more variously resourceful in their explanations than the neighbours of the Scythians. The strategy of retreat, for which the Scythians become so famous (4.46), is here presented as a counsel of desperation. The Tanaïs (Don; ch. 120) comes in from the north to the northern tip of the Maeetian Lake (Sea of Azov), and it and its tributaries roughly form the eastern border of Scythia; the Scythians intend to draw Darius to the extreme north and east of their territory.
4.121–32 The campaign proper: Persian aggression. H makes it about two months total in length, but the giant loop north and east and then back to the Ister again covered by Darius was more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km.) in all, and for an army consisting of both horse and foot surely more like three months was required, CAH iv. 242. Darius and his army march east from the Danube all the way to the Don, north and east of the Sea of Azov. The four rivers in 123 have not clearly been identified; they may be tributaries of the Don or the Volga (which flows into the Caspian Sea but at its westernmost bend is c.50 miles (80 km.) from the Don). The eight forts (124) have not been identified, and scholars generally doubt that Darius built them; perhaps they were earlier kurgans, or funeral mounds, on the banks of the Volga.
The Scythians loop back into Scythia (124), and Darius pursues them westwards all the way to the land of the Agathyrsians, north of the Ister, and then back through the land of the Neurians (north and east of the upper Tyras (Dniester)) and back into Scythia proper (125). Finally Idanthyrsus gives Darius a rationale for the puzzling behaviour of the Scythians (127); cf. the retort of Demaratus to Xerxes (7.102 and 209), that of Tomyris to Cyrus (1.206), that of the two Spartan heralds to Hydarnes (7.135)—even, a little further afield, that of Astyages to Harpagus (1.129). Here as else-where H enjoys showing the incommensurability of different people’s basic assumptions. The thought here is very similar to the one expressed more gnomically in 4.197: ‘Most of them are not now and were not then concerned in the slightest about the Persian king.’ Darius has encountered a people he cannot control with the threat of arms, because he cannot hold their towns and families hostage. Darius’ wishful thinking affects his common sense in ch. 132; he finally realizes this when he sees the Scythians chase off after the hare.
In Moscow in 1812, Napoleon is supposed to have exclaimed in horror, ‘Quels hommes! Ce sont des Scythes!’ as he watched the Muscovites burning down their own city. The looming threat of an intolerable winter without normal housing was an implicit but important part of both the Scythian and the later Russian strategy to force the invader’s withdrawal. Notice how ch. 129 makes a brief cross-reference back to 4.29; the long ethnographic survey has been designed to underlie and support the narrative of the Persian campaign, even if they look like two completely discrete narratives.
4.133–42 The campaign: Scythian countermoves. Here the division of Scythians sent to the Ionians left at the Ister (4.98) make their approach and are rebuffed (137) but also deceived (140). Cf. the Scythians’ own feeling of organic attachment between king and people (4.68) and H’s interest in the incommensurability of different people’s assumptions commented on just above. According to H’s narrative, Darius does not realize until the end of ch. 140 the degree to which his fate has been left in the hands of the Ionians; this is an echo of a theme developed in Book 3, where relatively marginal actors in affairs effect large changes; cf. n. 3.129–38.
Ch. 137 is the first appearance in the Histories of the adventurous Athenian and tyrant of the Hellespontine Chersonese, Miltiades the younger. Miltiades’ advice to the other tyrants to accept the Scythian offer was almost certainly invented years after the fact (perhaps in Athens?), because otherwise Darius would not have left him in place after the Scythian campaign, as he seems to have done; cf. 6.39–41 for his story. Miltiades will later play a decisive role as one of the ten Athenian generals at Marathon (6.109), and will come to grief after a dubious conquest of Paros (6.136). His son, Cimon, becomes a famous Athenian politician and general of the early fifth century, and the historian Thucydides is almost certainly a later collateral member of the same family.
The consequences of Darius’ decision to reward Histiaeus of Miletus for his role in Scythia (5.11, 23, 35) are not particularly emphasized here, but H makes it clear later that they will play a large part in Histiaeus’ decision to help foment the Ionian revolt (the narrative of Books 5 and 6).
4.143–4 Megabazus is left behind (cf. 5.1, 10, 12) as Darius returns to Asia. Cf. the role of Mardonius later (8.115), although Megabazus is much more successful in subduing the Thracians c.513 BCE than Mardonius will be in Greece in 479 (CAH iv. 67–8).
4.145–205 The story of Cyrene and Libya. The basic structure is much like that of the Scythian narrative: H begins with an announced Persian expedition, then spends a great deal of time describing the people and land against whom the expedition is sent; the actual Persian expedition is recounted briefly at the end (200–4, with 205 as a pendant). Here, however, the population against which the Persians march is Greek. In the story of Cyrene we see a Greek colony in Africa negotiating relations with other Greek cities and drawing on the powers of Egypt and Persia when convenient. At the end, Darius’ army in Egypt is called on to prosecute the vengeful designs of an angry Greek queen mother, whom the gods punish for her excessiveness (205). That is, whereas the Scythians successfully band together against the Persians, the Greeks’ dissensions among themselves draw Persian attention to Cyrene and Barca (c.512 BCE) and bring about the eventual treacherous and bloody downfall of Barca, with the population dispersed to Bactria in Central Asia. This episode provides a fitting transition between the Scythian narrative and the story of the Ionian revolt to come in Books 5 and 6, since it is a foretaste of what Persian imperial power can do to a Greek population.
H’s decision at this point to focus on North Africa and the founding of Cyrene is of enormous value for our understanding of the process of Greek colonization. For H’s views on Libya as a continent, cf. 4.42.
4.145–53 The prehistory of Cyrene: the founding of Thera and the Theran version of the founding of Cyrene.
4.145–6 In myth, Jason and the Argonauts helpfully repopulated Lemnos after the murder of its men by the women; the sons of Tyndareus from Sparta, the twin brothers of Helen of Troy, were among the Argonauts (see also 5.75, 6.127, and 9.73). For the later story of Lemnos, and the abduction of Athenian women by Pelasgians who had by then expelled the Minyans and settled Lemnos themselves, see 6.137. For Pelasgians, see n. 1.56–7.
4.147–8 Thera, modern Santorini, was in fact founded from Lacedaemon, probably in the tenth century BCE. (The much earlier culture, perhaps Minoan, had been destroyed in a volcanic eruption c.1500 BCE). According to the mythic genealogy used by H, Theras, the founder of Thera, is the brother-in-law of that Aristodamus, the great-great-grandson of Heracles, who led the Spartans back to the southern Peloponnese (in the ‘return of the children of Heracles’, 6.52, 9.26; cf. n. 8.133–44), and thus he is the maternal uncle of the twins who begin the Spartan royal line. The mythic genealogy used here is in approximate agreement with the genealogies of 5.59 and 6.52. For Cadmus and his sister Europa as peripatetic Phoenicians see n. 1.56–7. Theras and his sister are Cadmeans descended from Oedipus’ son Polynices, a fact which mythically helped explain the rivalry of the two royal families of Sparta in the historical period (cf. 6.52). Note that Theras (148) intends in Calliste or Fair Isle to make the same claim that the Minyans have just made in Sparta, that as distant family he has the right to settle. The six towns settled by the Minyans who do not sail with Theras are located in the north-west Peloponnese.
4.149 The Aegeidae were a famous Dorian clan who held the priesthood of Apollo Carneus, with branches in Boeotia, Sparta, Thera, Acragas, and Cyrene (CAH iii/1. 737); the Theban poet Pindar claimed descent from them (Pythian Odes 5.75–6).
4.150–3 The Theran version of the founding of Cyrene, c.630 BCE. Here the Theran paternity of Battus is emphasized, while, in the version from Cyrene that follows, his maternal descent is more important; like Archilochus on Paros, Battus is the son of a concubine and a member of the local aristocracy. (Euphemus, from whom Battus’ Theran ancestors are descended via the Minyans of Lemnos, was for Pindar (Pythian Odes 4.23 ff.) the particular mythic Argonaut to whom land in Libya had been promised; cf. 4.179, where he is not specifically identified.) The drought on Thera (151) seems to have happened around 640 BCE. Both the version from Thera and the version from Cyrene below make clear how difficult and risk-filled it actually was to found a successful colony; cf. 1.164–7 and 5.42–8. For a general description of Greek colonization in the archaic period, see CAH iii/3. ch. 37.
4.152 For Colaeus of Samos and Sostratus of Aegina as vastly successful Greek traders, see CAH iii/3. 20 and 428, and iv. 364–5 and 456–8. Colaeus journeyed to Spain c.638–6 BCE, and H would have seen his dedication in the temple of Hera at Samos. In recent years a stone anchor dedicated by Sostratus c.500 BCE has been found in the Greek sanctuary at Gravisca, the port of Tarquinia; the first letters of his name also occur on late sixth-century Attic pots found extensively in Etruria. Sostratus’ prominence as a sixth-century trader is the kind of odd fact, not part of the literary tradition, that H sometimes preserves and that we unexpectedly later find independent confirmation for; it should give pause to those who claim that the Histories are a tissue of pure invention by H himself.
4.153 A fourth-century inscription from Cyrene claims to transmit the original settlement decree passed in the seventh century at Thera (M–L, 5, and Fornara, 18).
4.154–64 The history of Cyrene from the reign of Battus I (c.632 BCE, according to Eusebius), down to that of his great-great-great grandson, Arcesilaus III (c.525–520 BCE); cf. CAH iii/3. 134–8. As the oracle (163) implies, Cyrene had four kings named Battus, alternating with four named Arcesilaus (c.630–c.440); Pheretime (162) is the wife of Battus III, the mother of Arcesilaus III, and the grandmother of Battus IV.
Cyrene owed its great prosperity to the export of natural resources, in particular silphium (4.169), a plant perhaps connected to the modern asafoetida but extinct already in the Roman imperial period; it was valued in the ancient world for its medicinal properties. Cyrene was also famous for its horses. Battus II, the Prosperous, seems to have invited settlers in from Greece, c.580 (159); this created the strains with the local Libyan population that led to the battle at Irasa, c.570. H has already mentioned that Apries’ massive loss of Egyptian troops against Cyrene was in large part responsible for the disaffection of the army that led to Apries’ downfall; in 2.161 he explicitly sends the reader ahead to this passage.
Note that dissension in the royal family of Cyrene is responsible for the foundation of Barca, probably before the middle of the sixth century (160), and civic dissension of various kinds leads to the decision to call upon outside powers, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian (2.181, 4.161, 162–3, 165). In 3.91 both Cyrene and Barca are included in the survey of tribute-paying parts of the Persian empire under Darius.
Demonax (161) is one of a number of sixth-century adjudicators and lawgivers; cf. the more famous (much earlier or mythic) Lycurgus (1.65), Solon (1.29), Periander (5.95), and also the anonymous Parians in Miletus (5.28–9). (For the origins of the institution in the seventh-century Greek colonies of the western Mediterranean, see CAH iii/3. 236.) The Delphic oracle in 163 was surely produced after the fall of Arcesilaus IV, the last Battiad in Cyrene, c.440 BCE.
4.165–7 Aryandes was the satrap placed in charge in Egypt when Cambyses left to quell the revolt at home in 522 BCE (3.64). Aryandes was deposed by Darius, probably in about 496 (CAH iv. 64–5, 266). This narrative is resumed in 4.200. For the ‘daric’, see App. 2.
4.168–99 The formal pretext for this long excursus on Libya is H’s statement at the end of 4.167 that in aiding Pheretime the Persians actually hoped to subdue Libya. Like the description of Scythia in the first half of Book 4, the Libyan chapters come as a series of smaller essays that have not been entirely integrated with one another. The backbone of the account is the survey of Libyan peoples from east to west (cf. H’s description of Scythia, n. 4.17–27), from the Egyptian border (168) to beyond the Pillars of Heracles (196). This account, however, is split into two halves, 168–80 and 191–6 (cf. the account of the history of Cyrene, just above, interrupted for this narrative and resumed in 4.200, or the description of Babylon, split between 1.178–87 and 192–200). In the description of Libya H takes his main account westwards to Lake Tritonis (perhaps a little west of where the border between Tunisia and Libya is today, though the lake cannot now be identified). There (180) two smaller narratives are inserted. First H describes a chain of oases that, he claims, stretch from east to west all the way across the continent, at more or less regular intervals of ten days’ journey each, south of the coastal region previously described (181–5). Next he launches into a more general description of nomad Libyan mores (186–90), presumably because Lake Tritonis marks in his opinion the end of nomad Libya and the beginning of cultivated Libya.
At ch. 191 he resumes the second or western half of the survey of Libyan peoples. He integrates into this description of Libya’s more westerly parts a description of the animals in Libya (191–2) and detailed descriptions of five western Libyan peoples, only three of whom are named. H concludes this account with some general observations on the fertility of the region of Cinyps and of Cyrene’s harvests. The whole passage begins (167) and ends (197) ring-composition style, with the thought that at the time that the narrative concerns, most Libyans neither knew nor cared at all about Darius king of Persia.
Like the descriptions of Egypt in Book 2 and Scythia in the first part of Book 4, this passage offers us a chance to observe H at work as a naturalist, geographer, and ethnographer. For Libya he draws more on the reports of others than on his own observations, and it is clear that his information came from a variety of sources; Hecataeus was probably one of them. As usual, H’s basic geographical assumptions show a tendency to over-schematization, especially in describing the chain of oases in chs. 181–5 (which he does not name as such; ‘Oasis’ is used once, as a proper noun, in 3.26). The oases really begin on the latitude of Memphis, not Thebes, and H has clearly not seen them. H does not recognize the unevenness of the North African coast or the extent of the Syrtis, and has no notion of sub-Saharan Africa. He largely presupposes here the reader’s familiarity with the geographical descriptions already set out in 2.28–34 and 4.37–45: ‘Libya’ (Africa) is longer east-west than it is north-south, is smaller than Europe, and surrounded by seas, and the Nile is assumed to run from its extreme west towards the east until, in Egypt, it bends sharply north and heads towards the coast. It is odd that the Nile does not come into the geographical description of Libya in Book 4.
It is also puzzling that Carthage is omitted from this description, although H uses Carthaginians as sources for Libyan material (explicitly in 4.43, 195–6); see CAH iii/2. 490–8. No Lake Tritonis or River Triton (178, 186) can now be found where H indicates they should be; they were either entirely mythological (cf. Pindar, Pythian Odes 4.20) or a phenomenon of the shifting coastline of the western Syrtis. H does not actually say he has been to Cyrene, and is vague in his description of the surrounding region. Some of the names of tribes are either doublets (Atlantes, Atarantes of ch. 184), confused with each other (the Garamantes of ch. 174 are not the same people as those of ch. 183, based on H’s own description), or otherwise nicknamed or unknown (ch. 169, the Giligamae; ch. 177, the ‘Lotuseaters’); most of the others are mentioned by other ancient writers on Libya. Much of the ethnographic description is no doubt accurate, although also subject to Greek interpretations of what was seen and reported. The oracle of chs. 178–9 was clearly circulated by sixth-century Sparta to encourage the colonization of Libya by Greeks; the story of the tripod was invented to explain why the colonization did not take hold.
4.200–5 This is the continuation of the story of Pheretime and the Persian expedition to Barca (4.167); H has made it contemporaneous with Megabazus’ reduction of Thrace (4.145), that is, c.512–510 BCE.
4.201 H thinks it relevant to report people ruthlessly juggling with conventions of oath-taking and religious practice; cf. 1.160, 4.154, 5.71. Cleomenes the king of Sparta is notorious for his creative behaviour in this realm: 6.66, 75, 76, 79, 82; his co-conspirator against Demaratus, Leotychidas, gives a long speech on the subject of keeping one’s word and respecting one’s oaths in 6.86. H often, as here, reports the breaking of the oath or promise without much comment on its morals.
4.203 Not much credence is given to this tale as history; more likely, Cyrene was firmly under Darius’ sovereignty in the 510s but by H’s day found it politic to downplay the fact.
4.204 Euesperides has been mentioned in 4.171; it will later be renamed Berenice by Ptolemy III, c.246 BCE, whence the modern Libyan name of Benghazi. For conquered people transplanted by Darius, see n. 3.149; a threatened transplant occurs in 6.3.
4.205 Tisis, the gods’ repayment for human excess, is the focus of this pendant. H plays with the term since he does not mention tisis itself here, but uses the participial form tisamenē, ‘having taken revenge’; by taking excessive revenge, Pheretime has usurped the gods’ function. See nn. 1.8, 1.91, 3.127–8, and Lateiner, 141–3, 193–5, 203–4.