BOOKS FIVE AND SIX

In Books 5 and 6, the narrative begins to focus on the Greek world, although it is still structured as an account of Persian expansion. Darius the imperialist turns his sights in dead earnest on the north-west corner of his kingdom, in his desire to expand into Europe. The basic outline of these two books (certainly in H’s mind one single stretch of narrative) is quite simple. It comes in three stages. First Darius’ henchmen subdue Thrace and generally try to establish Persian supremacy over the area around the Hellespont (5.1–27; c.513–510 BCE). Then Aristagoras, cousin and son-in-law of Histiaeus the tyrant of Miletus, who has been left in charge while Histiaeus is away in Susa, inveigles Artaphrenes, the local Persian satrap, into trying to conquer the island of Naxos in the Cyclades (Ionia itself has been under foreign domination since its conquest by Croesus, 1.26). The attempt to take Naxos fails, and Aristagoras, rather than account to his superiors, mounts a rebellion against Persia, and virtually all the Ionians and many of their neighbours join in. The campaign lasts six years (5.28–6.42; 499–494 BCE), and at its disastrous conclusion the great cultural efflorescence of Ionia that has defined the most advanced trade, art, and politics of the Greek seventh and sixth centuries has come to an end; Miletus for instance, one of the most powerful cities in the eastern Mediterranean, will become henceforth a sleepy, backwater town. After the battle of Lade (494 BCE) some of the population of Ionia is enslaved; Greek boys are castrated and girls sent in slavery east (6.9, 32). The third portion of this narrative (hard to separate cleanly from the narrative of the revolt proper) involves mop-up operations in the northern Aegean on the Persian side and the flight of the Athenian Miltiades back to Athens just in time to mount an Athenian resistance to Persia at Marathon. Book 6 ends with Miltiades’ death (489 BCE) and earlier exploits gaining Lemnos for Athens (490s?).

If H was himself writing in the 440s, the battle of Lade was about as far removed from his own day as the conclusion of the Second World War is from the late 1990s. Men of H’s father’s and grandfather’s generation vividly recalled the Ionian revolt; H was undoubtedly able to talk to survivors of this terrible six-year effort to resist Persian imperial domination. The descriptions of individual moments in these books capture some of that eyewitness immediacy, as far as times of day, details of the battles, and so on are concerned, but, perhaps because H’s informants were not themselves high up in the chain of command (they would have been young soldiers and sailors at the time), there remains a certain frustrating vagueness about Greek strategic and tactical decisions, compared with the narrative of Books 7 to 9.

Up to this point in the Histories the Greek world has always been a matter for the margins, parenthetical remarks or small essays inserted into the larger narrative; the main focus of the narrative has alternated between Persian aggression and an ethnographic approach to whichever people H shows the Persians to be attacking. But now the new people being attacked are Greeks; from 5.27 on the rest of the Histories will mostly consist of an account of Persian-Greek hostilites. H takes for granted that many things about the Greeks are already known to his Greek audience, although he does add local information about Ionia that a Greek from, say, southern Italy might not know. This makes the narrative of these later books more rapid but also sometimes a little harder to follow, since he is assuming a more intense and educated interest on his audience’s part about the matters being narrated.

What also makes the narrative bones of 5 and 6 somewhat harder to perceive is the enormous amount of additional background material inserted into the main story and the rapidity with which the narrative focus switches back and forth between two or more scenes. In the first stage (5.1–27), Darius’ activities in the Hellespont, the scene alternates between activities at the front and Darius’ own activities at Sardis and Susa. In the second, longest, stretch, the revolt proper, we follow Aristagoras of Miletus to Sparta and Athens asking for help against Persia; in each place H pauses to give extensive background on local developments. (The Athenian narrative, 5.55–96, is our first and most detailed account of the beginning of Athenian democracy under Cleisthenes in 508/7 BCE.) When he turns to narrating the campaigns of the revolt itself, H alternates between events on the Aegean coast and those in Cyprus, much further south and east. In the last section (6.34–140), the story of Miltiades begins and ends the account, but within it occurs a long excursus on Aeginetan-Athenian enmity (6.49–93) leading to a discussion of (among many other things) the career of King Cleomenes of Sparta. It is designed in part to show why some of the most important Greek cities acted as they did in the years between the Ionian revolt (499–494 BCE) and the Persian invasion of mainland Greece (480 BCE).

5.1–10 Megabazus and the Thracians. Darius’ army has first crossed the Hellespont to the northern Aegean region of Thrace on the way to Scythia (4.89–93), and on his return to Persia he has left the excellent Megabazus behind with 80,000 men to consolidate his control of the region (4.143–4). Megabazus’ sons also play an active part in Darius’ and Xerxes’ armies (5.21, 6.33, 7.22, 67). For historical background on Thrace and Thracians, see CAH iii/2. 591–618; for the question of how much European territory Darius controlled by 510 BCE, see CAH iv. 243–53. The Persian presence on the northern Aegean coastline in the late sixth and early fifth centuries considerably shifted the balance of power among local tribes and certainly benefited Macedonia.

5.1 H does not always point the moral when wrongdoing leads to divine retribution (cf. nn. 1.8, 4.205); the story of. the Perinthians and Paeonians implicitly serves as background explanation for Darius’ outrageous treatment of the Paeonians in 5.12–15 (the Paeonians live in the upper valleys of the Strymon and Axius rivers). In the Iliad, resolution by duel is common (Iliad 3.15 ff., 7.22 ff.); for another resolution of crisis by limited combat in H, cf. 1.82. Exoticism is added here by the use of animals (cf. 3.32).

5.3 The Greeks were divided over what people was the most numerous; they were all quite clear that it was not Greek. (H himself also mentions Indians in 3.94.) Nenci comments that Ctesias (FGH 3c, 688 fr. 45, 2) names Thracians; Thucydides (2.97), Scythians; the much later Pausanias (1.9.5), Celts.

5.4 The Getae have been described in 4.93–4, in the context of Darius’ first invasion into the region. The evils of human life are a literary conceit; cf. Iliad 15.132, Odyssey 5.207, and Euripides’ Cresphontes, fr. 449 Nauck. (Cf. n. 5.96–7 for another Homeric idea, the ‘beginning of evils’.) ‘Homerisms’ dot the Histories; Longinus 13.3 calls H the ‘most Homeric’ of ancient writers.

5.7 The Thracian gods are even more limited in number than those in Scythia, 4.59.

5.9 The Ligyes (to the Romans, Ligurians) are the people of the region around Marseilles (Massalia); in 7.165 they help in the army of Terillus of Himera. Strabo (11.11.8) puts the ‘Sigynnae’ further east, in the region of the Caucasus, and Aristotle in the Poetics (1457^b) uses ‘sigynon’ as an example of a word that is strange to Greeks but normal in Cyprus. For the Eneti (Veneti) cf. n. 1.196.

5.10 For another climatological improbability cf. n. 4.7; here, however, H does not rationalize the ‘bees’, which may be gnats or mosquitoes.

5.11 Myrcinus is in the region of Thrace where the Athenians will later found Amphipolis (Thucydides 4.102; cf. n. 5.124–6). Histiaeus’ request (a reward for his actions in 4.137) may be a tacit recognition of how much the Persian/Phoenician conquests of the late sixth century have blocked traditional Ionian trade routes and opportunities for expansion in the southern and western Mediterranean. The story continues in 5.23.

5.12–15 There is an odd mixture of humour and horror in this story. The two brothers are almost a parody of a theme noticed before in the Histories, of ambitious underlings seeking personal advancement with the king (cf. n. 3.129–38). Here most in play is the incommensurability between the scope of Darius’ plans and anything these two rustics from the Thraceward region can imagine. The fate of the Paeonians (15) resembles what happens to the Eretrians in the coming war (6.119), although Aristagoras will later give at least some of the unfortunate Paeonians a return to the coast (5.98). Cf. other removals of whole populations, n. 3.149.

5.16 For H’s delight in other efficient and exotic ways of doing things, cf. for example the boats of 1.194 and the ‘self-cooking ox’ of 4.61. These are no doubt among the ‘remarkable things’ he has promised to report in the introductory paragraph to the Histories.

5.17–22 Most scholars are sceptical of this exciting tale, cf. CAH iv. 495–6. Macedonia prospered under Persian control, CAH iv. 246, 248–53, although it was found convenient in H’s day to downplay this fact. Alexander himself may well have been H’s informant; he ruled from c.498 to 454 BCE and was also a friend and patron to Athens (despite H’s claims (22), he is not found on the official list of Olympic victors). He plays an active role in the Persian Wars of Books 7 to 9 (7.173, 8.140, 9.44.) As H promises in ch. 22, he later argues the Greek descent of the Macedonians (8.137–9); Thucydides (2.99) also accepts their claim to Argive ancestry, but Demosthenes (9.31) contests it. The demand for earth and water (18), signifying formal submission to Persia, was probably made within a few years of the Scythian expedition, c.510 BCE. Bubares (21) is still in royal favour as one of the two men in charge of the Athos project in 7.22. The whole episode shows the philomacedonism of H (cf. 7.173, 8.143, 9.44). Some reports say that H himself died at Pella, the capital of Macedonia.

5.23–4 Darius’ decision to remove Histiaeus from Thrace and send him to Susa is one of the causes of the Ionian revolt; cf. 5.35 (cf. 5.106–7, 6.1–5, 26–30). As Book 3 shows extensively, part of the problem of empire is the way talented individuals are constrained by its structures and try in consequence to manipulate and even subvert its raison d’être (i.e. to provide basic stability and equity, cf. 1.96–100). Hence the advice Thrasybulus gives the young Periander in 5.92: to be a successful ruler, lop off the tallest ears of grain if you want things to go smoothly. The weakness of the system is the unspoken secret of the narrative of 3.80 ff.—everybody (or almost everybody) wants as much personal power as possible, and competent, energetic people are the hardest to keep subservient. From Darius down to Democedes the slave physician or Charilaus the madman, almost every actor in the Histories wants to have autonomy and opportunity for advancement for himself or herself and manipulates the system to get them; cf. n. 3.129–38.

5.25–7 The rapidity with which the Persians are establishing themselves in the northern Aegean is impressive and Aristagoras, Histiaeus’ ambitious son-in-law (5.30), will try to exploit the process for his own purposes. For the Otanes of chs. 25–6 see n. 5.117–21; he is different from the Otanes of 3.80 and 3.144. For Pelasgians, cf. nn. 1.56–7 and 6.137–40. We do not know why the brother of Maeandrius (3.143) is placed in charge of Lemnos in the last decade of the sixth century; it suggests that some aspects of the earlier Samian story remain untold. Lemnos does not stay Persian; Miltiades takes it for Athens during the Ionian revolt or the years leading up to it, although H mentions this fact only in telling of Miltiades’ later exploits and death (6.137, 140), CAH iv. 298. For Miltiades, cf. n. 4.137. In general, Otanes completes the conquest of the northern Aegean, which will stay Persian until the Ionian revolt begins in 499 BCE.

5.28–9 The prehistory of the Ionian revolt. A city at its acme, or height of prosperity, is in a dangerous position; cf. n. 3.57. Alone of the cities of Ionia, Miletus has preserved a measure of autonomy from before the time of Croesus’ and Cyrus’ initial conquests of the region c.546 BCE (1.22, 141, 169). For the beginning of evil mentioned in ch. 28 and restated in 5.30, cf. nn. 5.4, 5.96–7.

5.30–6.33 At this point the Histories largely abandon ethnography and begin to narrate a fairly continuous historical account of hostilities between Persia and the Greeks, having to do with the Persian imperial move westwards, c.499–479 BCE. Even though the Ionian revolt of Books 5 and 6 fails, its lessons will help us understand the narrative of the attempts of the mainland Greeks to mount a more successful defence against Xerxes in Books 7 to 9. Certainly the implications of the story H tells here—the consequences of disorganization and treachery, seen in the ruthless punishment Persians mete out afterwards to rebels—help organize our readerly perception of what the Greeks do right later and how acute the danger facing them in 481 BCE really was. The Ionian campaign shows how easily mainland Greece too could have fallen.

For a historical analysis of the revolt, see CAH iv. 68–9, and esp. 461–90. H narrates the Ionian revolt as a foolish and ill-organized catastrophe (and war is always worse than peace, 8.3), but the speed with which other states joined Aristagoras suggests that Aristagoras was only exploiting an already precarious situation, not creating it wholesale. See n. 5.37–8.

5.30–4 The attempt to subdue Naxos. H depicts Aristagoras as the evil genius of the narrative of the Ionian revolt; his arrival here in Sardis and then later in Sparta (5.49) and Athens (5.65) structures the whole plot of Books 5 and 6 as stemming from his self-interested machinations. Artaphrenes (usually called Artaphernes in modern scholarship) is Darius’ brother and the satrap of Lydia (5.25). He will supervise the foiling of a plot to unseat him by Histiaeus, the suppression of the revolt, and the reorganization of Ionia afterwards (5.100, 123, 6.1–4, 30, 42). It is possible that an important part of the initial revolt was a regional contest between Sardis and the Ionians (who would get the spoils of Naxos?). CAH iv. 475 suggests that the reforms on Naxos leading to the exile of their ‘men of substance’ (30) may have been inspired by the Athenian example of Cleisthenes in 508/7 BCE (5.66).

5.32 H refers parenthetically here to a later scandal, the behaviour in the 470s, after the end of the Persian Wars, of Pausanias, victor of the battle of Plataea (cf. n. 9.9–11). In Thucydides (1.128–35) Pausanias’ downfall is treated at length, although there he is said to aspire to the hand of a daughter of Xerxes himself. On the whole H treats Pausanias more respectfully (9.76, 79, 82; cf. 8.3).

5.33 For the notion of destiny or fate, cf. n. 1.8. Here it seems to mean little more than that Naxos in fact did not fall. Myndus is on the west coast of Caria, a region familiar to H. The controversy here between Megabates and Aristagoras (499 BCE) implicitly highlights differences in the way Persians and Greeks treat people of lesser rank, a theme that will become more prominent in Books 7 to 9; cf. Xerxes’ diatribe against Pythias the Lydian at the outset of his campaign (7.39). It is unlikely that the Naxians had to wait for Megabates’ treachery to learn of the preparations against them. A Persepolis treasury tablet names Megabates as a high official (admiral?) some time between 492 and 486, so he did not suffer for the failure to take Naxos (CAH iv. 473).

5.36 H considers some synchronisms significant; cf. 9.90 for the synchronism of Plataea and Mycale, and 7.166 for that of Himera and Salamis. This episode and a similar one in 5.125 are the only times the geographer Hecataeus of Miletus enters the Histories as a historical agent, although H mentions him as a source of information in 2.143 and 6.137, and probably used him as a source for ethnographic information elsewhere (Lloyd, i. 127–39). H’s treatment of Hecataeus’ judgement is respectful: because Hecataeus knows useful information, he is not swayed by the enthusiasms of the moment. He is another Herodotean wise adviser (cf. nn. 1.8 and 1.71) and H implies that his advice ought to have been heeded; Hecataeus here acts in the role of a Herodotus to his fellow conspirators. Myous is at the mouth of the Meander River, north of Miletus.

The cross-reference back to the mention of the treasures at Branchidae ‘in the first of my narratives (logoi)’ suggests that H thinks of the Histories as a sequence of separate narratives that have been carefully dovetailed into one another through numerous either implicit or explicit interconnections. The reference is to 1.92.

5.37–8 For the role of despots in Ionia at this time and their relations with Persia, see CAH iv. 474–6. Histiaeus has already pointed out to the other Ionian tyrants in Scythia that the Ionian cities would choose democracy if they could (4.137). Dissatisfaction with Persian rule did not just involve the Persian maintenance of tyrants at a time when tyranny was becoming unpopular; Persian military levies and disruption of traditional Ionian trade routes in the Mediterranean were also seriously affecting the prosperity of the Ionian cities, and regional rivalries (esp. with Sardis) may have been involved. Cf. nn. 5.11, 30–4.

Isonomiē, ‘political equality’, is not strictly speaking democracy (it is also used by H in 3.80, 83, 142). For its Athenian implications under Cleisthenes, see CAH iv. 323–4; in Athens it seems to have been a slogan for the new form of government adopted in 508/7 BCE but even in Athens it principally meant that legislation was valid only if ratified by the people as a whole in council and assembly. In H’s day isonomiē was an ambiguous concept in Ionia, because in its name the Athenians had taken over and were controlling the Ionian cities much as the Persians had earlier,CAH iv. 474.

Darius gave Mytilene to Coës for his advice at the outset of the Scythian expedition, 4.97, 5.11.

5.39–48 Aristagoras goes to Sparta, and H takes the opportunity of inserting material on the early years of King Cleomenes of Sparta and the colonizing adventures of his half-brother Dorieus. Fraternal tensions dog the Spartan kingship; cf. n. 4.147 and the longer account of the origins of the Spartan dual kingship in 6.51–2. Dorieus’ son Euryanax will serve as his cousin Pausanias’ joint commander at Plataea (9.10, 53, 55); both of them are grandsons of King Anaxandridas and his second wife. H is in error that Cleomenes’ reign was short (48); Cleomenes seems to have reigned from c.520 to 490 BCE (cf. n. 3.148).

For Dorieus’ attempts to found a colony first in North Africa and then in Sicily in about 514 BCE, see CAH iv. 751–3; cf. the end of n. 4.150–3. Thera was itself a colony of Lacedaemon (4.147 ff.) and from Thera Cyrene had been successfully founded (4.150 ff.), so Dorieus’ choice of Therans to guide him in settling North Africa is a reasonable one. Sybaris in southern Italy was destroyed in 510 BCE (44) and refounded in the late 440s as Thurii, the Panhellenic colony in southern Italy where H himself is supposed to have lived as a citizen. H refers briefly again to the destruction of Sybaris when Miletus falls, 6.21.

Croton figures in the story of Democedes the famous doctor (3.137) and is the only western Greek city to support mainland Greece against the Persians in 480–479 (8.47). One of the Iamidae of Elis (44) will also serve as a diviner for Lacedaemon at the battle of Plataea (9.33) and four important battles thereafter (9.35). As often when the narrative turns to the western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians and their colonists, the Carthaginians, are part of the story (42, 46; for the role of Phoenicians in Sicily in this period, see CAH iv. 742–53).

5.49–51 Aristagoras’ attempt to persuade King Cleomenes of Sparta, probably in 498 BCE. Cf. n. 3.148 for Cleomenes’ other rejections of the opportunity for Lacedaemonian overseas engagement; his reappearance throughout Books 5 and 6 also testifies, however, to his willingness extensively to meddle in the affairs of other Greek cities. Cleomenes here is typically Spartan in his brief reply to Aristagoras’ long-winded arguments; cf. n. 1.152 (in 1.152 the purple coat is expected to entice; here the object is a map). The humour of this account comes in part from the way the map, the physical object, transmits truths its owner wants kept hidden, under Cleomenes’ acute questioning. Cleomenes’ acuity also stands in sharp contrast to the later credulity of ‘30,000 Athenians’, who will fall for Aristagoras’ optimistic pitch (5.97). Cleomenes’ daughter, Gorgo, will marry King Leonidas, her half-uncle, who dies at Thermopylae (7.205). She has something of her father’s ability to decipher objects (7.239).

In 3.148 Cleomenes’ character is portrayed as unblemished; here it is shaky but still virtuous, but cf. the difficulties the other Greeks have in deciding which of his many moral transgressions have brought about his gruesome death in 6.75. There clearly was a divided tradition (perhaps even in Sparta itself) about Cleomenes, and H draws on both strands without trying to make them cohere into a single consistent portrait.

Some scholars think the map here is Hecataeus’ improvement on the famous map of Anaximander. H calls it a gēs hapasēs periodos, perhaps an allusion to the title of Hecataeus’ great written work. Cf. 4.36 for H’s criticism of Ionian maps in general. (Nenci mentions a Babylonian document, known in three versions, that tells of Semitic merchants who ask Sargon to embark on an expedition against Nur Dagan, king of Purushanda, who is oppressing them; they show him a map. Such a scene may have already been an old literary topos in the Near East; it may also have been a recognized way of being persuasive that Aristagoras actually adopted.)

5.52–4 H uses the opportunity offered by the map to give his own account of the posting-stages of Darius’ Royal Road. Aristophanes may be parodying it in Acharnians 68 ff. (425 BCE); he also has Strepsiades in Clouds 515–16 (423 BCE) make the same error in reading a map that Aristagoras here hopes Cleomenes will make.

Like the list of satrapies in 3.89–97 and of the various contingents in Xerxes’ army in 7.61–99, the description in 52–4 may well come from Persian documents. A parasang is 30 stades or about 3.3 miles (5.3 km.), so H’s total for the length of the road, taking into account the distance from Ephesus to Sardis as well as that from Sardis to Susa, is just under 2,000 miles (3,200 km.). The extensive description of the route to Susa from the sea helps to make it clear how very optimistic and misleading Aristagoras’ original presentation is (not to mention the underlying notion that an empire of such vastness in its western half alone could be easily defeated!). For Cyrus’ division of the Gyndes see 1.189.

There are problems matching H’s account here with actual geographical data. Macan’s app. XIII (pp. 289–303), and H & W and Nenci, ad loc. discuss them extensively. There may be textual corruption (the totals in ch. 53 do not agree with the figures H gives as he goes along for the number of stages and of parasangs), there are major dislocations in the placement of several rivers (perhaps because of textual corruption), and a number of individual difficulties arise both in locating the course of H’s road and in confirming the accuracy of his reporting. None the less, it is clear that H is making use of actual and detailed information in compiling his account.

For the historical implications of the great network of royal roads that held Darius’ empire together and allowed the movement of information, armies, and goods across the empire, see CAH iv. 90–1, 178–9, 216–17. As the account in Book 7 of Xerxes’ preparations for his invasion of Greece will make clear, the Persians are skilled highway engineers, CAH iv. 526–32. If the road from Sardis to Susa described in chs. 52ff. really did make the pronounced bend northward that H describes, however, it was probably built originally for the use of the earlier Hittite empire in the late second millennium BCE.

5.55–96 Without more ado, H follows Aristagoras to Athens and launches into a massive background pendant on the formative years of the Athenian democracy. Within this long and rather complicated tale of the relations of Athens with its Greek neighbours occur several further substantial pendants: the Phoenician background of the slayers of Hipparchus (58–61), the deeds of Cleisthenes’ grandfather, the tyrant of Sicyon (67–8), the background of Athens’ longstanding hostility towards Aegina (82–8), and a long speech by the Corinthian Socleas about the Corinthian tyrants, Cypselus and Periander (92). The narrative is very well organized but makes confusing reading if one does not take into account how a Herodotean pendant works; cf. the Introduction, p. xxii.

5.55 Here H takes up the story of Athens roughly where 1.59–64 leaves off. Hipparchus was killed in 514 BCE. Thucydides treats the episode twice (1.20, 6.54 ff.); both Thucydides and H believe that Hippias was the elder brother and succeeded to the tyranny on Pisistratus’ death in 527 BCE. Hippias was ousted in 510. Cf. 6.123, where H claims that the family of the Alcmaeonidae was much more influential in getting rid of the tyrants than were Harmodius and Aristogiton. Harmodius and Aristogiton, however, quickly became legendary figures to conjure with, in the young Athenian democracy (6.109).

5.56 The Athenian tyrants take dreams, oracles, and the like very seriously; cf. 5.90, 6.107, 7.6. The Panathenaea here mentioned is the great festival held in Athens in the third year of each four-year Olympiad (in the other three years a simpler festival was held). It was made quite elaborate by the Pisistratidae, presumably in order to strengthen civic identification among the Athenian population with Athens itself, rather than with their local cult centres.

5.57–61 The alphabet probably did come to the Greeks through Phoenicians but not precisely as H says; cf. CAH iii/1. 794–833 for the development of the Semitic and Greek alphabets, and CAH iii/3. 1–7, 24–31 for cultural connections between Phoenicians and Greeks in the archaic period. H puts the introduction of the alphabet into Greece at least four centuries too early.

For H’s use of inscriptions, cf. S. West (1985). In the Histories H uses 13 Greek inscriptions (1.51, 4.87, 4.88, 5.59–61 (3), 5.77, 6.14, 7.228 (3). 8.22, 8.82); 2 Lydian (1.93, 7.30); 1 Babylonian (1.187); 3 Persian (3.88, 4.87, 4.91); and 5 Egyptian (2.102, 106, 125, 136, 141). The serpent-column mentioned in 8.82 and 9.81 may be found in M-L 27 (Fornara, 59), and the Athenian epigram of 5.77 in M-L 15 (Fornara, 42). H’s method of using inscriptions is certainly not that of the trained modern historian and epigrapher (see nn. 2.102–10, 8.22, and 8.82), but he does use them as evidence to answer historical questions. In this passage it is not clear what relation H understands to have existed between Cadmus the Phoenician in Boeotia and the Ionians who, he says, first adopted Phoenician letters into the Greek language.

Thucydides (1.12) dates the Phoenician migration to Boeotia to sixty years after the Trojan War; H places it six generations before the Trojan War. Amphitryon (59) was the human father of Heracles. H here gives the mythic genealogy linking Cadmus, the Phoenician founder of Thebes, to the house of Laius, father of Oedipus. For Cadmus and the Cadmeans, see n. 1.56–7. Laius lived in H’s chronological system three generations before the Trojan War. Scaeus (60) was killed by Heracles for helping his father Hippocoön drive Tyndareus, father of Helen, Clytemnestra, and the Dioscuri, from Sparta. He had no connection with Thebes, as H himself sees. The third couplet, in ch. 61, has to do with Oedipus’ grandson; the Encheleis are in southern Illyria (cf. 9.43). H may well have seen some very old tripods with peculiar inscriptions on them at Thebes, but from what we know of the history of early Greek writing, the inscriptions were not added to the tripods earlier than the mid-eighth century BCE.

5.62–3 The family of the Alcmaeonidae was intimately connected to the establishment of Athenian democracy. Its most famous members were Cleisthenes (5.66 f.) and, in H’s own generation, Pericles (through his mother, 6.131). For the founder of the family’s fortunes, Alcmaeon (c.550BCE), see 6.125, for their connection with the temple at Delphi burnt in 548 BCE (cf. 2.180), see CAH iv. 301, and for their hereditary curse, see n. 5.71. H also presents the Alcmaeonid Megacles and his family as enemies of the Pisistratidae at 1.60 and 64. However, 1.61 presents a picture of ambiguous opportunism, and an archon-list fragment (M-L 6) shows that a Cleisthenes, son of the Alcmaeonid Megacles, was archon 525/4, and thus the Alcmaeonidae were not exiled throughout the later years of the tyranny, as they claimed. Leipsydrium is in northern Attica near Mount Parnes.

It is possible that the Lacedaemonians took much more of an initiative than H claims here, alarmed by Pisistratid friendships with Persia and Argos, CAH iv. 301. Cf. nn. 1.152, 3.44, 3.148 for Lacedaemonian hostility to Persian influence in Greece. The sons of Pisistratus were in power from 527 to 510 BCE, and Anchimolius’ expedition took place about 511.

5.64–5 The second and successful Lacedaemonian expedition in 510 BCE. The ‘Pelasgian Wall’ was a Mycenaean fortification wall around the Acropolis. The thirty-six years of the rule of the Athenian tyrants were from c.546 to 510, dating from Pisistratus’ second and final return from exile to Athens (1.64). Sigeum is near Troy. For the careers of Pisistratus and the Pisistratidae, see CAH iii/3. 392–416 and iv. 287–302. Nestor son of Neleus was the famous king of Pylos, Agamemnon’s senior adviser at Troy in the Iliad.

5.66–96 The exploits of the young Athenian democracy, from 510 down to 499 BCE, when Aristagoras of Miletus arrives in Athens to ask for help, having been rejected at Sparta.

5.66 For a modern historical account of the events leading up to the establishment of Athenian democracy in 508/7 BCE, see CAH iv. 303–6. Probably Cleisthenes initially ‘allied himself with the common people’ only to gain the edge in his struggle for political dominance with Isagoras; ‘It was not a contest between opposing principles of government’, CAH iv. 305. The abandonment of the old traditional Ionian four tribes as the basis for government (family units, perhaps originally organized by function: geleontes (cultivators), aegikoreis (herdsmen), argadeis (workers),hopletes (warriors) ) and the invention of ten new Athenian tribes based on geography will have had revolutionary consequences many of which were unintended by Cleisthenes himself; see n. 5.69. Ch. 66 is the first time the demos of Athens is presented as a political entity in H.

Ajax is included as one of the ten new Athenian tribal heroes because the Athenians have laid claim to Salamis from the seventh century, CAH iii/3. 372–3; cf. the notorious interpolated line in the Iliad which places Salaminian Ajax’s ships next to the Athenian contingent (Iliad 2.558). According to the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens (21), the Delphic oracle was given a list of a hundred heroes, and picked the ten that would identify the new Athenian tribes. For heroes in general, see n. 5.108–17 below; for the battle order of the ten Athenian tribes, n. 6.111–17.

5.67–8 The family of Cleisthenes of Sicyon, the Orthagoridae, ruled Sicyon in the northern Peloponnese from c.665 to 565 BCE, and Cleisthenes himself ruled from c.600 to 570. For the famous occasion of his choice of an Athenian and Alcmaeonid husband for his daughter, see 6.126–31.

Adrastus was an important character in the lost Cyclic epic the Thebaïs and was the Argive father-in-law of Oedipus’ son Polynices; Cleisthenes’ treatment of Adrastus testifies to the seriousness with which the Greeks regarded their poetry and the celebration of dead and mythic heroes (cf. n. 5.108–17). Melanippus was a local Theban hero who was one of Adrastus’ opponents in the war of the Seven against Thebes. H’s comment about ‘tragic choruses’ at the end of 5.67 is suggestive of some sixth-century developments that may have led in Athens to the invention of Attic tragedy.

It is hard to believe that the official names of the three Dorian tribes were terms of contempt in Sicyon, particularly because they were maintained for a number of years after Cleisthenes’ death. Perhaps they were nicknames; perhaps they were not originally derogatory but merely rustic in nature. The story suggests an enduring division in Sicyon between the pre-Dorian and Dorian population, one that Cleisthenes perhaps exploited to maintain his tyranny.

5.69 The thinking seems to be that Cleisthenes the grandson changed the Athenian political system because he despised Ionians as his grandfather had despised Dorians; it is improbable. In 6.131 H acknowledges Cleisthenes as the founder of Athenian democracy, but he is not interested in the details of how the system he devised worked or the remarkable breakthrough in human political economy it represented. (The year 1993 CE was widely noted as the 2,500th birthday of democracy, dating from Cleisthenes’ reforms in 508/7 BCE.)

For a detailed account of the new, Cleisthenic constitution, see CAH iv. 309–46. Cleisthenes’ reforms established isonomiē (cf. n. 5.37–8) and isēgoriē, ‘equality of speech’ (5.78), in Athens (CAH iv. 309, 323). In order to break the regionally based power of the traditional aristocratic clans and to stop the factional fighting which had previously crippled Attica (cf. 1.59 for earlier Attic factions), each of the new ten tribes drew its membership from all three different regions of Attica: from the city, from the coast, and from the inland regions. Thus neighbouring villages or demes which had previously served their own regional interests or a particular locally powerful family’s interests now frequently found themselves scattered into different tribes. The 139 or possibly 140 demes (not ten per tribe, as H claims) became centres for local cults, and one’s deme was the place where citizenship was registered and military service organized. The council of Five Hundred (50 members from each tribe, drawn by lot and changed annually) was the administrative body which prepared the agenda for the assembly and handled various civic business. The system lasted, essentially unchanged, for about 300 years.

5.71 Eusebius’ list of Olympic victors dates Cylon’s victory to 640 BCE (CAH iii/3. 369). Thucydides (1.126) gives a fuller account than H. Cylon’s father-in-law was tyrant of Megara, and with the encouragement of the oracle at Delphi and help from his father-in-law he tried to seize the Acropolis in an Olympic year (636? 632? 628?). In Thucydides’ account Cylon and his brother escaped and the others were killed although they had been promised life; Megacles the Alcmaeonid was one of the nine archons of the city responsible (perhaps tacitly correcting H, who calls him one of the presidents of the naucraries or naval boards, Fornara, 22) and was exiled in consequence. This was the origin of the hereditary curse on the Alcmaeonidae. The fact had particular relevance in H’s day because the Lacedaemonians invoked the curse against Pericles in 432, on the eve of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 1.127).

5.72–4 Timesitheus (72) was twice an Olympic victor and three times a Pythian victor in the pancration (Pausanias 6.8.6). On the banishment: the population of Attica in the late sixth century was probably about 120,000 (30,000 adult males), so seven hundred families represents a substantial part of the city. The demos or people as a whole show loyalty to the new Cleisthenic reforms but are not willing to accept Persian overlordship as the price of their freedom from Sparta. The behaviour of Cleisthenes’ supporters in Persia (73) may help explain why the Alcmaeonids’ loyalty was suspected by other Athenians after the battle of Marathon (6.115, 121–4), CAH iv. 340, 521–2.

Cleomenes’ invasion came in the spring of 506 BCE; Oenoe is on the Boeotian border. Chalcis is on the island of Euboea, facing Attica.

5.75–8 For the continuing story of Demaratus’ lack of loyalty to Cleomenes, his fellow king, see 6.50–1 and 61 ff.; Cleomenes ultimately has him removed from the kingship, and he flees to Persia in about 490 BCE. He will be one of Xerxes’ advisers in the war on Greece (7.3, 101–4, 209, 234–7). For the Tyndaridae, see nn. 4.145–6, 5.80.

For H’s habit of enumerating important repeating events, cf. n. 1.92. The first Peloponnesian invasion of Attica was in the distant past, the second and third in 511 and 510 BCE, and this fourth some four years later. The enumeration had topical importance in H’s own day, given the invasions of Attica in 446, 431, 430, and 428 BCE, in the Peloponnesian War.

The victory over Chalcis and Boeotia (77) is the first victory of democratic Athens. Cleruchies, or settlements of Athenian citizens abroad, were subsequently used extensively by the democracy during the heyday of the Athenian empire; the cleruchs, or settlers, both guarded Athenian interests locally and often became more prosperous themselves while relieving Athens of the pressures of over-population.

Fragments of two monument-bases bearing the epigram celebrating Athens’ victory over Chalcis and Boeotia in 506 have been found on the Acropolis (the original and a later copy) and both the text and a discussion of the site can be found in M-L 15 (Fornara, 42). H celebrates the strength of the young democracy in ch. 78; this is one of his most important personal statements, on the power of isēgoriē, ‘freedom of public speech’, and eleutheriē, ‘freedom’.

5.80 The Asopus is a Boeotian river whose daughter Aegina gave birth by Zeus to the Aeacidae. Like the Tyndaridae of 5.75 the Aeacidae are cult figures, images, to be carried as talismans into battle. Aeacus had as sons Telamon and Peleus, who in turn had as sons Ajax, Teucer, and Achilles. The Thebans use the mythological connection to draw the Aeginetans into their quarrel with Athens.

5.82–9 The prehistory of hostility between Athens and Aegina, dating back perhaps to the early seventh century (CAH iii/3. 372). Damia and Auxesia were obviously fertility deities, ‘Earth’, and ‘Increase’. The story as H reports it is aetiological, meant to explain why the two carved statues are kneeling, and it also explains in passing why contemporary Athenian women use no brooches while Argive and Aeginetan women use very large ones (88). Historically it is relevant only in suggesting the length of time and the complexity of the ill-feelings that divided Athens and Aegina by about 500 BCE.

H does not mention it, but surely commercial rivalry played a large part in this war, especially for control over the Saronic Gulf. Corinth and Athens at this time were united in mutual hostility towards Aegina (cf. 5.92 and 6.89). The Aeginetans were famous traders; H describes the merchant Sostratus of Aegina as the richest Greek of all time (4.152). For Aegina’s aggressive trading policies and an overview of this controversy, cf. CAH iv. 364–7. The narrative of Aeginetan-Athenian hostilities is taken up again by H in 6.87.

5.90–3 The Athenians are distracted from their desire to punish Aegina by a Lacedaemonian attempt to restore Hippias the son of Pisistratus to power in Athens, c.504 BCE. The Lacedaemonians are foiled by their allies the Corinthians because Corinth wants an independent Athens as a counterweight to Aegina and also to the power of Sparta. Ch. 92 tells as a cautionary tale the story of the growth of Corinthian tyranny; cf. the story of Periander, his wife Melissa, and his children in 3.48–53, also attached as a pendant to the main narrative.

The lion was a symbol of royal power but not, in ancient Greece, of the restrained majesty that we associate with it; a lion was a ravening, bloodthirsty beast (cf. Iliad 5.782). In H the lion is also connected in dreams with the Athenians Hipparchus (5.56) and Pericles (6.131). A ‘cypselus’ was a chest; Pausanias in the second century CE claimed to have seen at Olympia the cedar-wood ‘chest of Cypselus’ (5.17.5). Cypselus reigned c.657–627 BCE and his son, Periander, c.627–587.

For Greek tyrants, cf. n. 1.20 and CAH iii/3. 341–51. Trade and commerce led from the seventh century onwards to changes in the balance of power within and among Greek cities. The infusion of new and somewhat redistributed wealth, plus the invention of hoplite warfare (requiring a committed phalanx of trained soldiers), weakened traditional structures of aristocratic authority. Often tyrants came to power with the support of the ordinary citizenry and new money behind them. By the late sixth century, however, they were seen as a reactionary, oppressive force; cf. the dissatisfaction of the Ionians with their tyrants (n. 5.37–8) and H’s comment on Athens’ growth of power after getting rid of her tyrants (5.78).

The long speech of Socleas in ch. 92 is especially ironic for H’s audience, since in the second half of the fifth century Athens and Corinth were enemies (Thucydides 1.31–55). The narrative here implies that Hippias from his study of the oracles has some idea of what will come some sixty or seventy years later (93).

5.94–5 Sigeum, in the Troad, probably became Athenian in about 600 BCE, too early for the bastard son of Pisistratus to be its first ruler. He may, however, have had to win it back when he came to Sigeum sometime before Pisistratus’ death in 527. The Athenians and Mytileneans had a long-standing rivalry in the Troad. The area was vital to maintaining the Athenian grain route from the Euxine (Black) Sea, although control could not be exercised from Sigeum, CAH iii/3. 374.

Alcaeus’ fr. 401B West celebrates the loss of the poet’s shield at Sigeum: ‘Alcaeus is safe, but his fine armour and shield the Athenians have hung up in the shrine of the pale-eyed goddess.’ Much of the poetry of Alcaeus (b. c.620 BCE) has to do with contemporary aristocratic politics and his hatred of the Lesbian tyrant Pittacus (alongside whom, however, he fought the Athenians at Sigeum). Alcaeus was a contemporary of Sappho, another famous lyric poet of Lesbos (n. 2.124–35).

5.96–7 Here H tacitly shows why he has taken us through this long (55–96) excursus on late sixth-century Athenian politics: we now understand why the Athenians are so willing to embark on the foolhardy project proposed by Aristagoras the Milesian in 498 BCE. They need friends; they fear the return of their tyrants, who are sitting up in the Troad and conspiring with Persia, and they also have the Lacedaemonians, the Aeginetans, and the Thebans to worry about. Twenty ships was almost half the Athenian fleet, before Themistocles built it up in the late 490s and the 480s; cf. 7.144 and CAH iv. 343, 367.

For these ships as ‘the beginning of misfortune’, cf. 3.30, 5.28 and 30, and 6.67, as well as 1.5, 5.82 and 89. (Cf. Iliad 1.6, 5.62, and esp. 11.604, and Thucydides 2.12. Cf. n. 5.4.)

5.98 H returns to the unfortunate Paeonians of 5.15.

5.99 H refers here to the so-called Lelantine War fought by Chalcis and Eretria, the two major cities in Euboea, in about 700 BCE; cf. Fornara, 7, CAH iii/i. 760–3 and iii/3. 308–9. Eretria may also be helping Athens in the Ionian revolt because Athens has recently defeated Chalcis (5.77).

5.100–2 CAH iv. 466 comments: ‘The burning of Sardis and its temple was a symbolic act which justified the Persian burning of Ionian temples after the revolt and of the Athenian Acropolis in the Great War (5.102): this led in turn to the demand for vengeance and reparations incorporated in the Delian League, and to the use of League funds for the Periclean building programme; the hereditary curse was only finally laid to rest with the burning of Persepolis by Alexander the Great. Seldom has such a symbol reverberated though history with such consequences.’ The Athenians lose their enthusiasm for the revolt; they pull out and go home immediately, and two years later (496/5 BCE) they elect as archon Hipparchus son of Charmus, almost certainly the brother-in-law of Hippias, their exiled tyrant. For Cybebe cf. the end of n. 1.32.

For Simonides the poet, see the end of n. 7.201–33.

5.104 Cyprus is crucial to the control of the Levant and has been under Persian control since the 520s (3.19). The story of the revolt of the Greek cities of Cyprus continues in 5.108–16. Salamis is the major city on Cyprus, not here the island off Attica where the naval battle of 480 was fought.

5.105–7 For H’s critical view of Ionians, cf. n. 1.143. Darius here asks who the Athenians are; in 5.13 he has asked who the Paeonians are, and has shipped them en masse to Phrygia (cf. 1.155, where Cyrus asks who the Spartans are). In ch. 106 Histiaeus makes the same argument as Creon in line 590 of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, but here it is intended to fool Darius and does so; cf. n. 5.23–4. In H’s view, of course, Histiaeus is lying; cf. 5.35. The largest Mediterranean island is Sicily, not Sardinia.

5.108–17 The revolt of Cyprus, resumed from 5.104. To koinon tōn lonōn, ‘the Ionian authorities’ (109), implies a common Ionian decision-making body, probably based at the Panionium (1.141, 148, 170, 6.7), CAH iv. 481, 488, 543. The paired land and sea battles in Cyprus (112–13) probably occur in the summer of 497 BCE. See CAH iv. 484 for a description of the archaeological excavations of the Persian siege of Paphos in this campaign. Salamis and Soli are the two biggest and most hellenized cities on Cyprus. In Cyprus, as later at Lade, treachery on the Greek side wins the campaign for Persia, despite Greek victory at sea (113).

Onesilus is made a hero by his former enemies (114); cf. 1.168, 5.47, 7.117. The Greeks (unlike Persians or Egyptians, 2.50, 143) honoured dead heroes and believed that they wielded powers that would continue to protect a community and its territory—a belief that becomes very important as the Persians invade Greek territory (8.39, 109, 143). Cf. also the implications of this belief in 1.67–8, 168, 5.66–7, 6.69.

5.117–21 The revolt of Caria. Halicarnassus lies on the Carian coastline, and H’s own family, like that of many Dorian Halicarnassians, may contain a Carian element (cf. the names of his father and probable uncle, Lyxes and Panyassis). H notes activities of Carians (1.171, 2.152), emphasizes their valour (1.175, 5.118–19, 121, 8.105), and suggests the possibility of Carian local information and informants (e.g. 1.175, 2.61, 4.44, 8.104–5). The Hecatomnidae, the rulers of Caria in the fourth century (they include the famous Carian king Mausolus (377–353 BCE), whose elaborate tomb was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and gives us the word mausoleum), were probably descendants of the Carian royal family of the 490s; Artemisia, the queen regent of Halicarnassus (7.99, 8.68–9, 87, 103) during the Persian Wars, may be related to them also; her name reappears in the dynasty.

The shrine of Labraunda (119), half-way between Miletus and Halicarnassus and a little inland, was supported by the Hecatomnidae and remained active into the third century BCE and beyond, as a spectacular discovery of inscriptions attests; cf. Strabo 14.2.23 for the Roman period.

Myrsus son of Gyges, whose death is briefly noted (121), is the messenger Oroetes employed to trick Polycrates into coming to Magnesia, where Polycrates met his gruesome and treacherous death (3.122). H does not here note the connection; it suggests to us how many other stories and connections between stories he knows but does not tell us in the Histories.

Two of Darius’ sons-in-law, Daurises and Hymaees, die on this campaign (116, 121, 122). The third, Otanes, survives. This is not the Otanes who was one of the seven conspirators (3.68, 80, 88, 144) but is the Otanes whose chair as a royal judge was strung with his own father’s skin (5.25). We do not know if he is the Otanes (7.61) active later in the Persian Wars and the father of Xerxes’ ferocious queen, Amestris (7.114, 9.109). One wishes that the Persian nobility had been more inventive in their names and less inclined to marry their close relatives.

Sisimaces (121) is one of the many Persian names from the Ionian campaign and the Persian Wars later who has now shown up on the Persepolis tablets, as Zissamakka, for December of 500 BCE, a fact that suggests the general reliability of H’s sources for the Persian prosopography of this period, CAH iv. 469–70.

5.124–6 Myrcinus lay at the root of the Ionian revolt, since it was Histiaeus’ ambition there that originally led Darius to remove him to Susa (5.11, 24). It is an area of interest to H’s contemporary public, since in 437/6 BCE the Attic colony of Amphipolis was founded near by, after earlier failed attempts; cf. Thucydides 4.102–8. (Thucydides himself was banished from Athens after he failed as a naval commander to prevent Athens’ loss of Amphipolis to the Spartan Brasidas in 424/3 BCE, Thucydides 5.26.) Leros is a small island 30 miles (48 km.) south-west of Miletus; as in 5.36, here again Hecataeus the logopoios gives advice that is ignored.

The town in which Aristagoras dies may well be ‘Nine Ways’, Enneaodoi (7.114), close to the later site of Amphipolis. H has some sympathy for Histiaeus as a competent and inventive tyrant (4.137–9, 5.23, 6.26–30), but the only good thing he has to say about Aristagoras is his refusal to accept the Persian mistreatment of his friend in 5.33—and even that Aristagoras mishandles. Cf. 5.30, 35, and 124 for his personal ambition, lack of judgement, and cowardice.

6.1–5 The story of Histiaeus, continued from 5.35 and 106. It is unlikely that we, or even H himself, can discern Histiaeus’ true motives. At this point they probably have to do with survival, since he is in a tight place. Persia has become uncomfortable for him, with Artaphrenes hostile (6.1, 30) and awaiting an increasingly improbable satisfactory resolution to troubles in the west; to cap it off, the Milesians do not want Histiaeus back, and he is betrayed by his agent, Hermippus of Atarneus. (Atarneus, on the Aeolian coast, is connected with two other tales of perfidy, in 1.160 and 8.106; it is also where Histiaeus is finally captured, 6.28.)

Given Darius’ record of transporting populations, Histiaeus’ lie is not altogether unbelievable; cf. 3.93 and n. 3.149.

6.6–18 The battle of Lade, 494 BCE. The Persians now mount a massive response that is aimed at Miletus, the heart of the rebellion, CAH iv. 487–90. For the catalogue of combatants, cf. 7.61 ff., 89 ff., 8.1 ff., 43 ff., 9.28 ff. Such lists are traditional; cf. Iliad 2.484 ff. The ‘diecplous’ (12) was a manoeuvre of sailing through the enemy’s line and then turning and ramming from the rear. For a judgement on the larger Ionian strategy, see CAH iv. 488: ‘(T)he power and the unity of the Ionians were triumphantly demonstrated; but so was their lack of organization. The appointment of a commander had not been made by the koinon [cf. n. 5.108–17], but was left to a council of war on the actual campaign: it was perhaps a basic weakness of the Ionians that their cities were too equal in power to make questions of leadership easy to settle, whereas for the mainland Greeks there was an obvious choice. On this occasion the solution was ingenious … rivalries between the great states were avoided.’ The strength of the contingents from Samos, Chios, and Miletus testifies to the power and wealth of Ionia in the late archaic period. CAH iv. 490 points out that the two great naval powers of mainland Greece in the archaic age, Corinth and Aegina, only provided forty and thirty triremes respectively at the battle of Salamis fourteen years later.

The problem of the bias of H’s informants, noticeable throughout the story of the Ionian revolt (e.g. in the consistently unfavourable picture of Aristagoras, n. 5.124–6), becomes critical here. Some elements in the account (e.g. the story of Ionian laziness and failure of discipline (12); H’s inability correctly to assign blame and praise for performance in the battle itself (14)) suggest that some of H’s sources may have been interested in mitigating the picture of Samian treachery (13–14) as the cause of defeat. (Other factors that might influence the account: the long-standing rivalry between Samos and Miletus, principally over control of Aegean trade routes (cf. 3.39); the desire in contemporary Athens to justify Athenian control over an Ionia defined by them as undisciplined and uncourageous (Thucydides 1.99).) See CAH iv. 466–73 for an assessment of sources, and, more generally, the lack of Ionian aristocratic family traditions, and the kinds of oral account preserved by a defeated people.

6.16 For the Thesmophoria, cf. 2.171. This festival dates the battle to the autumn of 494.

6.19–20 The other part of the oracle is given in 6.77 and seems to refer to the battle of Sepeia fought between Lacedaemon and Argos. The temple of Apollo at Didyma to which the oracle refers is the famous shrine of the priests called the Branchidae (1.46, 92, 157, 2.159, 5.36), one of the three great sanctuaries of Ionia along with the Heraeum at Samos and the Artemisium at Ephesus. Here Darius makes good his threat of 6.9. The Red Sea here is the Persian Gulf, cf. n. 1.1.

6.21 Sybaris was captured c.510 BCE (cf. 5.44 and n. 5.39–48). Phrynichus was an older contemporary of Aeschylus’ in Athens; he also wrote a Phoenissae, or Phoenician Women (performed in 476 BCE with Themistocles as producer or choregus), on the theme of the battle of Salamis, and a number of plays with mythological themes. In the fifth century a drachma was a skilled labourer’s daily wage, and a slave could be bought for less than 100 drachmas, so this fine represented a very substantial sum. In the same spring, 493/2 BCE, Miltiades probably arrived back in Athens with his four surviving ships, only to face prosecution at the hands of his political enemies for having established a tyranny in the Chersonese (6.104; CAH iv. 339); cf. n. 6.132.

6.22–4 Zancle, later called Messana (modern Messina), is in the northeast corner of Sicily. Rhegium is across the straits on the western coast of the toe of Italy; Locri, its rival, is on the eastern coast of the toe. Anaxilaus of Rhegium will support the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily timed to take place as Xerxes launches his attack on Greece (7.165–6). For the various political machinations of the tyrants Hippocrates and Anaxilaus, see 7.154–5, 164–5; CAH iv. 760–4, 771, 775.

6.25 Aeaces has been rewarded for his services before the battle of Lade (6.13). His father, Syloson, brother of Polycrates, had given Darius his red cloak and received in return the tyranny of Samos (3.139–40, 144). Aeaces had presumably been deposed with the other tyrants at the beginning of the Ionian revolt (5.37, 6.9).

6.26–30 For Histiaeus’ career, see 4.137 (an unlikely scene, at least for Miltiades’ role in it) and nn. 5.23–4, 5.105–7, 5.124–6. His calculations and his fate remind us of the relatively even-handed judgements that H believes the Persian king makes (1.137, 7.194; see also n. 1.156), but also of the ability to subvert royal plans exercised by the king’s ambitious and powerful underlings (cf. n. 3.129–38).

6.27 Altogether the Chians have had an exceptionally difficult time of it; cf. 6.15–16. The accident to the Chian schoolhouse is one of the earliest mentions of formal education in Greece. Here H makes one of his rare personal comments on the pattern formed by human events; cf. n. 3.38.

6.32 Cf. nn. 1.92 and 5.75–8 for enumeration as a marker of the importance of an event. CAH iv. 490: ‘The ruin of Chios and the sack of Miletus mark the end of the archaic period more definitely than any other political event: the two greatest cities of the Greek world, with populations perhaps double that of Athens, never recovered.’

6.34–8 The story of Miltiades, the founder tyrant of the Chersonese (c.513 BCE), whose nephew, also named Miltiades, has been active with Darius in Scythia c.513 BCE (n. 4.133–42). For the elder Miltiades’ complex relationship with the Pisistratidae, see CAH iii/3. 404–5. Despite the improving story of the Doloncians, the initiative for Miltiades’ removal northwards may well have come from Pisistratus himself, who would have found a powerful, energetic Athenian aristocrat more useful in the Chersonese, keeping an eye on the grain route and the local grain supplies (n. 7.145–7), than in Athens. Note that the events at Lampsacus (37) must have taken place before Croesus’ removal (c.546 BCE); the old name of Lampsacus, on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont, was Pityusa (pitus is pine).

6.39–41 Miltiades the younger may have come to the Chersonese c.516 BCE; this is the first recorded Athenian trireme. (For the death of his father Cimon see 6.103.) His Thracian wife, Hegesipyle, was the mother of Cimon the later Athenian commander and statesman; her father’s name was the same as that of the Athenian Olorus, father of Thucydides the historian. (She may be the Athenian Olorus’ grandmother; Thucydides’ burial monument was in Cimon’s family graveplot.) The ‘now’ of ch. 41 is 493 BCE, as the Phoenicians approach the Chersonese after the failure of the Ionian revolt. For more on the younger Miltiades and his family, see nn. 4.133–42, 6.103–4, 132–40.

6.42 Artaphrenes sets up the system of taxation that lasted, H says, until his own day; note that Thales had already (1.170) suggested the desirability of political unity for the region more than half a century earlier. In H’s own day, tribute was paid to Athens by the Ionians; the implication here may be that the Athenian tribute was virtually the same as the earlier, Persian assessment.

6.43–5 Mardonius, the nephew, brother-in-law, and son-in-law of Darius, appears on the scene; his father Gobyras was one of the original seven conspirators in 3.70–9, and Mardonius himself will feature largely as the commander-in-chief of his cousin Xerxes in Books 7 to 9. In 6.43, as in 3.80 itself, H assures his reader that, incredible as it may seem, Otanes really did argue for democracy in 521 BCE, and he sees Mardonius’ dismantling of tyrannies in 492 as confirmation of a sort.

Mardonius marches on Athens and Eretria because these two cities had helped in the Ionian revolt (5.99). Xerxes will spend three years digging a canal to avoid having to round Mount Athos in 480 BCE (7.22), because of the disaster Mardonius’ fleet suffers (44). Mardonius’ expedition may have had as its main object not conquering central Greece but solidifying Persian control of the Thraco-Macedonian area (CAH iv. 494–6); if so, it was a larger success than H thinks it was; ‘When he withdrew with part of his forces in 491, he left a well-organized and prosperous satrapy, which was to serve as a base for further operations’ (CAH iv. 496). Macedonia is not a new addition to the Persian empire (5.18), but has just received a new king, Alexander (c.498–454 BCE), and perhaps for the first time substantial numbers of Persian troops.

6.46–9 In 491 BCE Darius demands that the Thasians tear down their walls. CAH iii/3. 6–7 is sceptical of Phoenician activity in archaic Thasos (Thucydides the Athenian historian later possessed rights to work mines in this region of Thrace, presumably in part because of his family connections in the area (cf. n. 6.39–41 and Thucydides 4.105)). Darius then demands earth and water from the Greek cities of islanders and mainlanders alike. We understand more of the significance of Aeginetan compliance here because of the complicated account of Athenian-Aeginetan relations H has already given us in 5.82–9. The Athenians and Cleomenes have cause to be alarmed.

6.50–93 This passage is designed to explain the complicated Greek political background of the events of the late 490s BCE, as mainland Greece sees evidence building of massive Persian military preparations against Greece itself. An account can be constructed of many of Cleomenes’ activities that has as one of his principal aims securing mainland Greece from Persian conquest (61), but his enemies both at home and abroad figure among H’s sources; cf. n. 3.148. His fellow king, Demaratus, is a serious thorn in his side (51; cf. 5.75, 6.61 f).

The story of Crius the Aeginetan (50) can be pieced together from its continuation in 6.73, 8.92. Cleomenes has a reputation for snappy repartee; cf. 5.72, 6.76. Crius’ name means ‘ram’.

6.51–60 A pendant on the history of the Spartan kingship. Sparta is the only Greek state whose customs H extensively describes, as if Spartans were as foreign as Lydians or Persians (1.93–4, 131–40).

6.52–4 The account in ch. 52 is an aetiology, designed to account for the origin of the Spartan dual kingship; cf. n. 4.147–8, for more on the maternal, Cadmean connection. The genealogy in ch. 53 refers to the fact that the Dorians through Hyllus and his father Heracles were descendants of Perseus (ignoring the troublesome mythic complications of 1.7). In 7.61 and 150 Perseus is assumed even by the Persians to be Argive through his mother Danaë, not Assyrian as is claimed here (cf. n. 2.91); in 2.91 he is claimed by the Egyptians. H does not take most pretensions of racial purity very seriously; cf. nn. 1.1, 1.146, 6.125–30.

6.57 For H’s weights, measures, and distances, see App. 2. In the most common Greek system of measurement, one choenix was a modest day’s ration of grain.

Thucydides 1.20 is very severe on ‘someone’ who claimed the Lacedaemonian kings, had two votes each, but here H may be merely (somewhat sloppily) implying that each relative cast one vote for the relevant king and one for himself.

6.58–60 Solon had forbidden extravagant displays of emotion as signs of mourning at Athens, and supposedly Lycurgus had done the same for the funerals of private people at Sparta (Plutarch, Life of Solon 12; Life of Lycurgus 27); cf. 1.198, 2.79, 85, 4.71. In Sparta the perioeci (perioikoi), or inhabitants of the surrounding region, were considered Lacedaemonian citizens, though with lesser rights than the Spartiates; the helots were slaves attached to the land, descended from the Laconian and Messenian populations enslaved by Sparta and now farming for the Lacedaemonians the land their ancestors had owned. The existence of helot labour made the Spartiate way of life possible, but also created real anxieties about potential revolt (cf. Thucydides 1.101–3). Both perioeci and helots will figure among the forces Sparta brings to the war with Persia (8.25, 9.10, 11, 28, 80, 85).

In Sparta (unlike Athens) daughters with no brothers could inherit. In the fourth century, according to Aristotle (Politics 1270^a), two-fifths of Spartan land was in the hands of women; Lacedaemonian women were famous among other Greeks for their oddly independent ways. For H’s comparison of Spartans with Persians and Egyptians, cf. n. 6.51–60 (and 3.67 for an instance of release from debt at a royal accession, 2.164 for Egyptian castes).

6.61–72 Demaratus, son of Ariston, was king at Sparta c.515–491 BCE. His opposition to Cleomenes in 506 (5.75, 6.65), and again here in the later 490s, no doubt persuades Cleomenes to remove him.

As H indicates (61), Helen of Troy was worshipped at Sparta; she may have originally been a faded pre-Indo-European tree-goddess. The Gymnopaedia or Festival of Unarmed Dancing (67; literally ‘Festival of Naked Youths’), took place just after midsummer; it was one of the three major Spartan festivals, along with the Hyacinthia in late spring (9.7, 11) and the Carnea in August or September (7.206, 8.72).

On Demaratus’ mother’s reply (68): Astrabacus was in Spartan myth a hero and the great-grandson of Agis, founder of the senior, Agiad royal house at Sparta; Demaratus is a descendant of the other, Eurypontid, house. An astrabē is a mule’s saddle, hence the insult about the muleteer (68). Demaratus leaves post-haste for Persia, so perhaps he did not find his mother’s answer an entirely satisfactory one. It is not easy to judge whether Demaratus as king initially had a more friendly attitude towards Persians than did Cleomenes (cf. Demaratus’ friendship with the Aeginetans) or whether he was driven into their arms by his intense dislike of Cleomenes (61) and, like Hippias of Athens, by the economic necessities of his expulsion from power. Later he is one of Xerxes’ major advisers on things Greek (cf. n. 5.75–8).

On Leotychidas, Demaratus’ successor as Eurypontid king: H skips ahead to the late 470s to describe his disreputable end (71–2). Leotychidas’ initial hostility to Demaratus is entirely understandable (65); he will, moreover, play a vigorous role in the Greek offensive against Persia at the battle of Mycale (9.90–2, 98; CAH iv. 611–16). None the less, H implies that his later career emphasizes the same lack of character as does his initial accession to the kingship; perhaps (though he does not say so here (cf. n. 5.1)) he believes Leotychidas’ later fate to be a punishment for going along with Cleomenes’ scheme.

Leotychidas’ grandson, Archidamus, is the Spartan king who plays a role in the first years of the Peloponnesian War in H’s own day (Thucydides 1.79–85, 2.19–20); the first ten years of it are called ‘the Archidamian War’ after him although he dies in 427 BCE. Some have read H’s unflattering portrait of Leotychidas as evidence for contemporary bias on H’s part.

6.73–84 For Cleomenes’ career, see n. 3.148. H disrupts the chronological order, perhaps to highlight underlying moral connections. We see first Cleomenes’ prosecution of his quarrel with Aegina and Crius the Aeginetan in 491 BCE (H describes the consequence, open hostility between Athens and Aegina in the 480s, in 6.85–93; cf. 8.92 for the long memory of Crius’ son). H implies that the events leading to Cleomenes’ death happen shortly thereafter; he may well have died in 490, the year of the battle of Marathon. In chs. 75–84 the narrative is organized around the various things Cleomenes did in his earlier career that might have brought upon him his horrible end. (Some scholars find the Lacedaemonian account of that end very suspicious; others find it plausible, given the degree to which Cleomenes’ character and actions did not fit the usual Spartan mould, and the sense of strain and even madness that might have ensued, CAH iv. 366–7.) For the helot (75), see nn. 1.65–8, 6.58–60.

6.76–80 H backtracks to Cleomenes’ most notorious act, after the corruption of the Pythia: his sacrilegious murder of the Argives in c.494 BCE after the battle of Sepeia, near Tiryns. The Argives themselves later cite their huge losses (6,000 men, 7.148) as a principal reason for withholding their aid to the Greek side in the forthcoming Persian invasion of Greece. For the prehistory of the Spartan-Argive struggle for dominance in the Peloponnese, see CAH iv. 353–6 and n. 1.82.

In the oracle’s opening line (77) the female is Sparta and the male is Argos. A seps is a dangerous snake; the presence of snakes probably gave the mountain, and hence the battle near by, the name Sepeia. The serpent is a national symbol of Argos (Sophocles, Antigone 125). For the confusion of Argus the hero and Argos the city in ch. 80, cf. Cambyses’ oracle about his death at Ecbatana (3.64).

6.83 Tiryns sent a force to the Greek cause at Plataea (9.28, along with Mycenae) and so was clearly independent from Argos in 479 BCE. The ensuing wars that H mentions here (c.470 BCE) were an attempt by Argos to establish control over its neighbours and ended in the destruction of Tiryns and the weakening of Argos, CAH v. 106–7, 500(3).

6.86 Macan’s comment, ad loc.: ‘One hardly knows which more to admire in the speech of Leotychides at Athens, the perfection of the narrative or the inconsequence of the logic. The Athenians doubtless were charmed by the one, but easily evaded the other.’ Leotychidas is in Athens in the first place because of a Lacedaemonian vote of no-confidence; the oracle delivered at Delphi in his speech points a larger moral than he intends, and H does not expect the irony to be lost on the reader. (Note that the fact of a Milesian in the time of Croesus coming to Sparta for his banking needs tacitly points up the far greater power of Sparta than of Athens, even for Ionians, in the mid-sixth century.)

6.87–93 The narrative of enmity between Athens and Aegina, resumed from 5.81. H does not make clear whether all the events recounted here happen before Marathon or whether he includes hostilities of the 480s as well. In c.483 BCE Themistocles tells the Athenians that the navy to be built will be used against Aegina (7.144); here (89) the Athenians are hampered by their lack of ships. H comments that the greatest cause of disunity on the Greek side at the time of the first meeting of the Greek league against Persia (481) is the war between Athens and Aegina (7.145).

On the irony for H’s contemporaries of the friendship between Corinth and Athens, united in hostility to Aegina, cf. the end of n. 5.90–3. The mention of Aeginetans being driven off their island (91) may refer to the Athenian expulsion of the population of Aegina in 431 BCE (Thucydides 2.27). If so, it is one of the latest events cited by H in the Histories; he does not refer to their subsequent destruction at Thyreae in 424 (Thucydides 4.57).

Sophanes (92) from the Athenian deme of Decelea will reappear in 9.73–5, winning a reputation for wonderfully improbable feats at the battle of Plataea. Pausanias 1.29.5 sees Sophanes’ grave in the great Athenian cemetery, the Ceramicus, and also comments on his slaying of Eurybates. H may have seen the same monument.

6.94–120 The Marathon campaign, 490 BCE. After the burning of Sardis in 498, Darius had shot his arrow and appointed the slave to remind him of Athens every time he sat down to dinner (5.105). After the defeat of the Ionians, he had begun building warships and horse transports to punish the Athenians and Eretrians in 491 (6.48). The disaster suffered by Mardonius’ forces at Athos (95) had happened in 492 (6.44–5);the consequent decision of the Persian fleet in 490 to go straight across the Aegean from Samos probably took the Greeks by surprise. The number of six hundred Persian ships is a conventional one; cf. 4.87, 6.9.

6.96 The Persians remember the events of 499 BCE (5.30–4). Cf. Aristagoras’ arguments about the stategic value of Naxos, 5.31.

6.97 Delos is the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Despite their reputation for autocratic cruelty, the Persians also have a reputation for fairness (cf. n. 6.26–30), even-handedness to subject peoples, and respect for their gods (nn. 1.135, 1.156; CAH iv. 103–5, 111, 475–6). Apollo may get special consideration; cf. the letter of Darius to Gadatas, perhaps satrap of Ionia (M-L 12; Fornara, 35), threatening to punish him for taxing the gardeners sacred to Apollo and forcing them to work non-sacred land. See also 6.118.

6.98–9 Artaxerxes reigned after Xerxes, 465–424 BCE. H refers to the Peloponnesian War of his own day, fought between Athens and the Peloponnesians but eventually involving the whole of the Greek world (Thucydides 1.1). Thucydides 2.8 mentions an earthquake on Delos shortly before 431, also called unique. Carystus is on the southern tip of Euboea, and later sends ships with Xerxes and runs foul of Themistocles (8.66, 112, 121). Modern students of Old Persian interpret the three Persian names somewhat differently: The stem of Darius is Dārayavahu-, and means ‘holding firm the good’, from dar- (‘to hold’) and vau- (‘the good’); that of Xerxes is in OP Xshayārshan-, ‘a real man among kings,’ from xshaya- (‘king’) and arshan- (‘man, hero, bull’). Artaxerxes is Artaxshaça, ‘having a kingdom of justice,’ from arta- (‘justice’) and xshaça- (‘kingdom’).

6.100–1 This report looks as if it may come from Athens. For the cleruchs, or Athenian settlers, see n. 5.75–8. The Eretrians themselves will later be transported en masse to Asia, 6.119. For the Persian numbers, and the tactics of the first part of this campaign, see CAH iv. 502–6; Burn, 236–41; Lazenby, 45–50.

6.102–17 The battle of Marathon, 490 BCE. H begins with the story of Cimon, half-brother of Miltiades the elder and father of Miltiades the younger. H has promised in 6.39 to treat of Cimon’s death, and does so in ch. 103. Cimon was killed, according to rumour, by the Pisistratidae; his three Olympic victories were in the 530s and 520s BCE. After the Ionian revolt, his son Miltiades the younger flees the Chersonese just in time to come home to Athens c.493, to stand trial and be acquitted, and to muster the Athenian resistance to Persia (cf. 6.41, 104). He is elected to the Athenian board of ten generals, to serve for a year (103; cf. 109–10). For Miltiades’ later career and his earlier capture of Lemnos for Athens, see 6.132–40. Cf. nn. 4.133–42, 6.39–41 for his well-known family, the Philaïdae (6.35 for their claimed descent from Ajax of Salamis).

6.105–6 The story of Philippides who ran about 140 miles (225 km.) in two days. He is called Pheidippides in some manuscripts, but the name is very rare, and Pheidippides, the somewhat slippery son in Aristophanes’ Clouds, is unlikely to have been given the same name as the hero of Marathon.

In a later legend, told by Lucian (Pro lapsu inter salutandum 64.3), Philippides/Pheidippides is at the battle itself, runs the 26 miles (40 km.) back to Athens, with his last breath says khairete, nikōmen, ‘hail, we’re the winners’, and dies. Hence the name of the Marathon, the modern 26-mile race. The story was expanded by the nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning (‘Pheidippides’, 1879), into a long and overwrought narrative poem in which Pheidippides runs to Sparta, runs back to fight at Marathon itself; when asked by Miltiades to report the victory at Athens, he runs the 26 miles to Athens from Marathon, reports the victory, and finally expires: ‘Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay I Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!’

Religious law at Sparta forbade the Lacedaemonians to leave Laconia until the moon was full in the month of the Carnea at Sparta. They seem to have started at moonset on the first possible day and to have marched the distance from Sparta to Athens with a vanguard of 2,000 men in two days and a night (6.120; CAH iv. 514).

6.107 For Hippias’ attention to dreams and the like, cf. n. 5.56. He has been making trouble for Athens with the Persians since his banishment in 510 BCE (5.96, 6.94), and he will continue to do so (7.6). He has the Persians land at Marathon, the same site where in his own younger days his father Pisistratus had made his final triumphant return to Athens, 546 BCE, and where he might hope for some local support (n. 1.62).

6.108 From Thucydides 3.68 we can date the Plataean connection with Athens to 519/8 BCE. The Twelve Gods were Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Dionysus; the altar was set up in the Athenian agora by Pisistratus the grandson of the tyrant (Thucydides 6.54), and all Athenian distances were measured from it. The ill will that Cleomenes encourages here between Athens and Thebes bears eventual fruit in the Theban invasion of Plataea in 431 BCE, precipitating the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 2.2).

6.109 The Archon Polemarch or ‘war leader’ was one of the nine archons or annual magistrates of Athens; by H’s day his responsibilities had become largely ceremonial. Callimachus comes from Aphidna, the deme of Harmodius and Aristogiton (cf. 5.55), so Miltiades’ appeal to their example may be particularly effective.

6.111–17 See CAH iv. 506–17; Burn, 242–52; and Lazenby, 54–74 for reconstructions of the strategy and tactics of the battle itself drawn from H, other ancient sources, and archaeological evidence. Cavalry was part of the Persian force but apparently played no part in the battle (cf. Fornara, 48). The key on the Athenian side was an infantry built up heavily in the wings and thin in the centre. When the Persian infantry centre (where the picked Persian and Scythian forces were) broke through the Athenian centre, it was isolated from supporting Persian forces and could be attacked by the victorious Athenian flanks from the rear. The official Cleisthenic battle order for the ten tribes of Athens was: Erechtheis, Aegeis, Pandionis, Leontis, Acamantis, Oeneis, Cecropis, Hippothoontis, Aeantis, Antiochis. The Athenians approached at a run, in part to minimize the lethal effect of Persian arrows.

Cynegeirus (114) was the brother of Aeschylus the Athenian playwright, who also fought in the battle. Aeschylus himself chose for his own epitaph not mention of his dramatic works but the following: ‘The grove at Marathon, and the long-haired Mede of his knowledge may speak of the glorious courage of Aeschylus’ (trans. Hammond, CAH iv. 515).

The 192 Athenian dead (117) were buried in the Great Mound, c.150 feet (45 m.) in diameter at the site of the battle; the Plataeans and slaves were buried in a separate mound. Some of the scenes H describes (of Epizelus, Cynegeirus, Callimachus) were perhaps depicted in the Stoa Poecile or ‘Painted Stoa’ in Athens (c.460), where H would have seen them.

6.119 The Eretrians are settled about 24 miles (38.5km.) from Susa; a primitive oil well is described here.

6.121–4 H’s assessment of the charge of treason against the Alcmaeonidae. Ch. 122 contains a short passage on Callias (omitted in this translation), which is often thought to be an interpolation; like 7.239, it less clearly serves as background for its context than the normal Herodotean pendant. (This Callias was grandfather of the Athenian statesman Callias of the fifth century, who was cousin of Aristides and brother-in-law of Cimon.)

It is not clear that H’s defence of the Alcmaeonidae would have seemed convincing to an early fifth-century Athenian. They were not in exile throughout the period of the tyranny (cf. 1.61, n. 5.62–3), and they seem to have been implicated in an earlier Athenian approach to Persia (n. 5.72–4). Xanthippus, married to the niece of Cleisthenes, prosecuted Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, seeking the death penalty on his return from Paros (6.136; CAH iv. 340–2, 521–2). Xanthippus’ brother-in-law, the Alcmaeonid Megacles, was ostracized (that is, required to leave Athens for a ten-year period) in 487/6 BCE, during a time when Athens was clearing itself of Persian sympathizers (a year after the ostracism of Hipparchus son of Charmus, the leader of the Pisistratidae in Athens). Xanthippus was ostracized in 485/4.

The Alcmaeonidae may well have engineered the removal of the tyrants from Athens (123) and have created the Athenian democratic constitution (5.66) without being automatically anti-Persian. They were more likely anti-Lacedaemonian (5.70, 72–3)—or simply, in their own eyes, pro-Athenian. For the Athenian politics of the period and the use of ostracism, see CAH iv. 334–46, 521–4. It is impossible to say, however, whether a shield was flashed at Marathon as a signal to the Persians, or, if so, who did it and what they meant by it.

6.125–30 H is irreverent towards the founders of important lineages; cf. the story of Gyges (1.8–12), of the dual Spartan kingship (6.51–2), and of the family of the tyrants at Gela (7.153). Cf n. 1.146 and more generally the end of n. 6.52–4. (That H habitually refuses a reverent or even respectful attitude towards important people, particularly Greek, greatly exasperated the second-century CE essayist Plutarch: see Pearson (ed.), On the Malice of Herodotus = Moralia 854–74.) The chronology of the Alcmaeon story is difficult; as H & W point out, Croesus reigned in Lydiac.560–546 BCE, but by about 550 Alcmaeon’s granddaughter was old enough to be married to Pisistratus (1.61).

For Cleisthenes of Sicyon (126, c.600–570 BCE), see n. 5.67–8; and CAH iii/3. 346–50 for Cleisthenes as one of a number of sixth-century Greek tyrants. For the chronological difficulties created by the list of suitors, see Macan, H & W, and Legrand, ad loc. Missing are suitors from Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, and Ionia; given the story of 5.67 f., it seems improbable that an Argive would think he had a chance. According to Pherecydes (FGH 3, fr. 2), Hippoclides of Athens, the chief rival of the Alcmaeonid Megacles, was a Philaid, an older relative of the family of the two Miltiades, nn. 6.34–8, 6.39–41.

6.130–1 Reference to ‘Athenian custom’ reminds H’s contemporary readers of Pericles’ citizenship law of c.450 BCE, demanding that an Athenian citizen have two Athenian parents. Here Pericles’ own great-grandmother is the foreigner involved. H follows up with the genealogy of Pericles himself and a reference to his mother’s dream of giving birth to a lion (cf. n. 5.90–3).

6.132–6 Having accounted for the Alcmaeonidae, H now switches back to the later doings of Miltiades, victor of Marathon. H’s sources are clearly hostile to Miltiades; CAH iv. 518–19 points out that it was sensible strategy to try to secure the Cyclades for Athens in 489 BCE, given what the Persian fleet had done in the previous year. Miltiades may have secured some other islands before turning to Paros; there-after the campaign clearly misfired. The Hydarnes mentioned in ch. 133 is probably the son of the Hydarnes found among the seven Persian conspirators (3.70); he was commander of the Immortals in Xerxes’ invasion (7.83, 211). On Paros: the tribute lists of the Athenian empire attest its wealth, not least because of its marble (5.62).

For Xanthippus, Miltiades’ attacker, see n. 6.121–4. Although married into the Alcmaeonid family, Xanthippus quite possibly launched this prosecution independently in 489 BCE, to further his own political career. He fathers Pericles (131), is ostracized (a fact not mentioned by H), and comes back to Athens to participate in the Persian Wars as a naval officer and direct the Athenian occupation of the Hellespont thereafter (8.131, 9.114, 120). Fifty talents (136) is three hundred times what Phrynichus had to pay for his play, The Fall of Miletus (6.21; there are 6,000 drachmas in a talent).

6.137–40 For Pelasgians as the pre-Greek indigenous population of Greece, cf. 8.44 and n. 1.56–7 and 8.44. According to Strabo 9.2.3 the Pelasgians mentioned here are not the native Athenian Pelasgians (cf. 8.44 and Macan’s note ad loc.) but Boeotian Pelasgians driven into Attica by the Thessalian immigration into Boeotia, dated by Thucydides 1.12 to two generations after the Trojan War. The descendants of the Argonauts expelled from Lemnos when the Pelasgians came became part of the Lacedaemonian colony in Thera (4.145–6).

The story of chs. 138–9 seems to be an Athenian ‘charter myth’, designed to justify the Athenian control of Lemnos and, more generally, the superiority of Athenian blood or at least the upbringing given by an Athenian mother. (Cf. the story of Cyrus’ boyhood habits, 1.114–15, but also 1.146 for the transmission of culture through the female line.) Aeschylus refers to the traditional ‘Lemnian crime’ in Libation Bearers 633, that is, the murder of the men of Lemnos by its women before the arrival of the Argonauts.

For the curse (139), cf. 1.167, 3.65, 4.151, 5.82, 9.93. The story of the oracle and its consequences certainly look like a convenient support of Athenian claims in the northern Aegean in about 500 BCE. It is difficult to assign a date to Miltiades’ conquest of Lemnos for Athens; it presumably occurred during the time of the Ionian revolt, since it involved Miltiades in an open break with Persia. Lemnos’ importance to Athens initially had to do with its position on the grain route from the Euxine (Black) Sea to mainland Greece (cf. n. 7.145–7); it was a part of the fifth-century Athenian empire and with Imbros and Scyros was allowed to remain in the possession of Athens after the King’s Peace of 386 BCE (Xenophon, Hellenica 5.1.31).