Book 8 begins abruptly with an account of the confrontations and accidents at sea that actually took place in late summer of 480 BCE, at about the same time as the land battles at Thermopylae narrated already at the end of Book 7. Strategically, the initial positions of the Greek land and sea forces at Thermopylae and Artemisium have been closely connected: Leonidas needs Eurybiades and the fleet to stop the Persians from landing and surrounding him at the pass; the fleet needs Leonidas to hold the pass, to block Xerxes’ land forces from proceeding southwards. If the way had lain open for the Persian land army at Thermopylae, the Persian fleet could have simply sailed south around Euboea and rejoined the land army in Boeotia or Attica. As it is, the Greek decision to block the Persians at Thermopylae forces the Persian fleet to spend time off the dangerous coast south of Magnesia and leaves them exposed to violent late summer storms, difficult moorage, and confrontations with the Greek fleet off Artemisium. When the Persians move south after their land victory at Thermopylae, it is with a substantially diminished and probably demoralized fleet.
After winning through at Thermopylae, Xerxes and his land forces proceed south, and the Persian fleet moves south also to Phalerum on the coast of Attica. At Salamis, the large island in the Saronic Gulf between Athens and Megara, the Greek commanders debate what to do. Attica is evacuated, Xerxes captures the city and fires the Acropolis, and the Peloponnesian Greeks counsel retreat for the entire Greek force to the Isthmus and the abandonment of central Greece altogether to Xerxes. At this point Themistocles the Athenian provides crucial if unconventional leadership for the Greeks. He cajoles and then threatens Eurybiades, the Spartan naval commander-in-chief; further, he secretly sends a message to the Persians which traps both the Greek and Persian fleets into fighting in the straits off Salamis. The narrow space between Salamis and the mainland gives the smaller, disciplined fleet of the Greeks a tactical advantage, and their heavier and slower ships, built for ramming, have a definite advantage over the faster ships of the invader.
After Salamis, still in the early autumn of 480 BCE, Xerxes is disheartened and flees northwards home with the larger part of his land army, while his fleet retreats to Samos. Mardonius is left to spend the winter in Thessaly with a picked force (said to comprise 300,000 men) and to fight the Greeks on land during the following spring.
8.1–18 Artemisium. H begins with a summary of the Greek fleet that parallels the list of the land forces before Thermopylae (7.202), reinforcing the link between the land and sea battles. Triremes (17) are the largest fighting ships, and come with a complement of two hundred men (one hundred and seventy oars); penteconters are smaller ships of war supplied with fifty oars. Here H lists the states in the order of the number of ships supplied, tacitly demonstrating the force of Athens’ claim to command of the sea (2–3). In 8.3 H seems to minimize Pausanias’ later errors; cf. Thucydides 1.128–34 and CAH v. 100–1.
The story of Themistocles’ use of bribery (4) and H’s general depiction of him as a master of deceit may well have grown up after his later complicated career and departure to Persia (cf. 8.110, 124, the end of n. 7.138–44, and CAH v. 62–7). In any case, the main reason the fleet now stays at Artemisium is surely strategic; Eurybiades has to protect Leonidas’ position at Thermopylae from the Persian fleet. The Corinthian Adeimantus mentioned in ch. 5 will be Themistocles’ main opponent in the councils at Salamis (8.59, 61). The ‘fire-bearer’ in a Greek army (6) was in charge of keeping alight the fire taken from the city centre for sacrifice and his person was inviolable; it is not clear that a Persian would have used the expression found here. At Artemisium, as its name implies, is a temple of Artemis.
A series of events leaves the Persian fleet weaker. The two hundred Persian ships that have been sent clockwise around Euboea to block the Greek fleet from attempting to escape southwards down the narrow strait separating Euboea from the mainland (7) are caught off Euboea in a storm at night and all perish (13). H doubts (8) that Scyllias of Scione swam the whole way from Aphetae to Artemisium underwater, not surprisingly, since eighty stades is about nine miles (14 km.). In a preliminary skirmish with the rest of the Persian fleet from Aphetae the Greeks acquit themselves well (11) by adopting a circle formation, their prows facing the enemy and their sterns close together, to prevent ramming; in the main battle of Artemisium a couple of days later they prove the match of the much larger Persian fleet (16–18). The single best Greek warrior, Cleinias (17), is the father of the notorious Alcibiades active during the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 5.43, 6.15–18). H thinks the sea battles at Artemisium happened over the same three days as the land battle at Thermopylae (15); unlike some of the other battle synchronisms in H (9.100, perhaps 7.166) this one is not accidental but the result of Greek strategy. H delivers one of his rare judgements on the gods’ role in determining the outcome of events in 8.13; cf. n. 3.38.
8.19–26 Aftermath of Artemisium. Themistocles’ inventive tactic during the Greek withdrawal (19 ff.) serves more to make the Persians nervous than to draw many Ionians away from the Persian cause (cf. 8.85); surely the message actually scratched on the rock face (22) was not as long and eloquent as H reports it to be. Many collections of oracles existed in the fifth century under the name of Bacis (8.20, 77, 96, 9.43); at least three different Bacises were known, Boeotian, Attic, and Arcadian. The figure of twenty thousand Persian dead given for Thermopylae (24) is probably too high and it is not clear how H reached the Greek total of four thousand (25); cf. the beginning of n. 7.201–33. Ch. 26 is a wrap-up anecdote, in which Artabanus’ son keeps up the family tradition of delivering improving sentiments to Xerxes (cf. 4.83, 7.10, 46).
8.27–39 Cf. 7.176 for the enmity between Thessaly and Phocis and more creative stratagems from the Phocians. H is sympathetic to the Phocians’ sufferings (31–3) but not sentimental about their motives (30). For the dedications of Croesus in Delphi (35), cf. 1.50–1 and 92. Not surprisingly, modern scholars doubt the series of miraculous interventions here. Delphi was probably protected from harm because of the oracle’s refusal to take an openly pro-Greek stance; cf. the middle of n. 7.138–44. H does not endorse these stories, but rather claims to report what has been said by the Delphians and the invaders themselves (38).
8.40–125 The battle of Salamis. Nine days pass between the end of the fighting at Artemisium and the arrival of the Persian fleet at the Bay of Phalerum in Attica (8.66). During that time the Persian land army marches to Attica. The Greek command is divided, with the Athenians wanting a sea battle off the coast of Attica, and most of the Peloponnesians wanting to retreat to the Isthmus. Themistocles forces the issue, and the Greeks win the battle.
8.40 According to H here, the decision to evacuate the population of Attica is taken only as an emergency measure after the collapse of the Greek position at Thermopylae. However, an inscription (M-L 23; Fornara, 55), dating from perhaps the late fourth or early third century BCE, was found at Troezen and published in 1960 that suggests a different reconstruction of events from that narrated by H. It purports to be a decree proposed by Themistocles to evacuate the Athenians to Troezen and Salamis. In it the Athenians of military age are instructed to man 200 ships, 100 of which are to go to Artemisium, while the other 100 are to remain at Salamis and Attica. If this ‘Themistocles Decree’ is not a fourth- or early third-century imaginative reconstruction, but the approximate recopying of a genuine decree from before Artemisium, it suggests that the battle of Salamis was not a hurried last-minute improvisation brought on by the collapse of Thermopylae, but part of a long-thought-out plan. H’s narrative (8.40–4), on the other hand, stresses the last-minute haste and fear of the Athenians leaving their city before the arrival of Xerxes.
8.42–8 H lists the Greek contingents here (for the Persian forces see ch. 66). There are fifty-four more Greek ships than at Artemisium and nine new states supplying ships. As in 7.61 and 8.73, H inserts some ethnographic material into his list of contingents. For the Pelasgians of Attica (44), cf. n. 1.56–7; the relationship between the Pelasgians who are the autochthonous Athenians here and those expelled in 6.137 is not explained by H. Of the western Greeks, only the Crotonians (47), from southern Italy, supply aid, one ship. For other figures of Athenian ships supplied to the battle, cf. Thucydides 1.74 (c.265 ships out of 400), and Demosthenes, On the Crown 18.238 (200 ships out of 300). H’s total only comes to 366 triremes (and 7 penteconters), not 378 as stated in ch. 48, unless the text is emended.
8.49–55 The Greek commanders opt for retreat, and news comes of the arrival of Xerxes in Attica. Only at ch. 51 does H date by Athenian archon years, and it is the first such extant dating by a historian; the annual archonship began in the late 680s BCE. The scene shifts to Xerxes’ attack on the Acropolis, but we see it first through the terrified eyes of the Greeks themselves. For the ‘oracle of the wooden wall’, probably delivered several months before Xerxes’ final descent into Greece, see 7.141. The shrine of Aglaurus (53) was identified in the early 1980s, not where we would expect it from H’s description, at the west end of the north slope of the acropolis, but at the east end instead. The portent of the olive-tree (55) will remind the reader of Xerxes’ dream at the outset of his expedition (7.19); for Erechtheus, cf. 8.44. In the myth, Athena and Poseidon had a contest over who would claim the city; each had to create a useful gift for it and Cecrops chose Athena as the winner.
Artabanus, to whom Xerxes sends the message of success in ch. 54, has been sent back to Persia from Abydus to govern in Xerxes’ absence (7.53).
8.56–64 Greek response to the fall of Athens. Some scholars assume a source hostile to Themistocles behind the detail of the otherwise unknown Mnesiphilus (57–8); the portrait here of Adeimantus the Corinthian may reflect Corinth’s unpopularity in Athens in the late 430s when H would have been finishing his Histories (59; see also the Athenian story of 8.94).
Themistocles’ threat to Eurybiades in ch. 62 is a real one: he has named his daughters Italia and Sybaris, and Athens does in fact found a colony in Thurii in about the same region on the instep of Italy in the 440s (CAH v. 141–3; H himself was apparently one of the colonists). Two Athenian expeditions were moreover sent to Sicily in 427 and 415–413. The adventures of the Samians at Zancle after the collapse of the Ionian revolt suggest the sort of life that the Athenians might have had in mind (6.22–4). For the figures of the Aeacidae, or sons of Aeacus (64), cf. n. 5.80.
8.65–9 Notice how the scene shifts back and forth between Greek preparations and Persian ones. Dicaeus (65) is seeing a vision of the great Iacchus procession sacred to Demeter and Persephone, which customarily took place on the fifth day of the Eleusinian mysteries (the 20th day of the month Boedromion) along the Sacred Way from Athens to the city of Eleusis fourteen miles (22 km.) away on the Thriasian Plain. The figure of 30,000 is the standard number of male Athenian citizens (cf. 5.97). The point of this story is the same as in 8.55: there Athena sends forth the olive shoot on the Acropolis; here Demeter and Persephone celebrate the Iacchus procession in the border sanctuary of Eleusis, both events signifying the gods’ continuing divine protection of Attica even though the Athenians have left the city for Salamis. H rarely gives the name of an individual as the source for a story; probably Dicaeus is named here to lend additional credence (or at least authenticity for it as a story) to the very unusual account. (Cf. n. 3.55 for H’s named interlocutors.) One can well understand Demaratus’ lack of enthusiasm for miraculous happenings at this point in his life (cf. 6.68–70).
In ch. 66 the operations of the Persian fleet are resumed from 8.25. (Phalerum, at the time the main harbour of Athens, lay west of where the modern airport is located.) It seems highly improbable that in a couple of weeks Xerxes has made up the enormous losses suffered at Sepias, in the storm off Euboea, and at Artemisium (7.190, 8.13, 16)—H & W calculate that his fleet of 1,327 (7.89, 184, 185) is now down to about six hundred. Aeschylus’ Persians 341 ff. gives the total at Salamis as 1,207 (the same as H’s original total for the Persian fleet at 7.89), and perhaps that is why H thinks Xerxes has brought his fleet up to its original fighting strength (cf., however, CAH iv. 566 n. 86; Lazenby, 173–4, 187–8).
Notice that the weaknesses displayed by the Greek council (8.59–63) are those of a loosely organized confederation of independent states, while the Persian weaknesses (68–9) are those of an autocracy. Xerxes’ courtiers are thinking only about court politics, not the successful prosecution of this war. For Artemisia’s insult (68), cf. 2.102, 8.88, 9.20, 107; for Artemisia herself, cf. n. 7.89–99. In ch. 69 Xerxes again wants to watch something spectacular; cf. 7.31, 43, 44, 100, 128. Here he thinks the fact of his watching the battle will tip the balance in his favour—but H suggests that, though Xerxes’ presence inspires zeal, it also contributes to the confusion into which the Persian fleet falls (8.86, 89, 90).
8.70–83 The Persians have reason to expect the Greeks to behave as they did with their land forces at Thermopylae, sending the bulk of their fleet away and perhaps leaving a small and desperate Athenian contingent to fight at Salamis.
The Peloponnesian fortification of the Isthmus is going on apace (8.40, 71, 74). Next spring, 479 BCE, the Athenians will bitterly reproach the Spartans for the choice they have made, to put all their energies into building their new wall (9.7–8). The date of the eclipse, 2 October 480 BCE(9.10), provides a useful terminus ante quem for the battle of Salamis.
Just as he has done with the cities of central Greece (7.132), H specifies at ch. 73 which of the cities of the Peloponnese medized. It is hard to be confident of the chronology for the Greek councils described in 8.56, 59, 74, but the gist is clear: Themistocles is finding it difficult to persuade the rest of the Greek fleet to stay at Salamis, as the Persians gather at Phalerum and prepare for battle (70). Themistocles’ duplicity and Aristides’ integrity together tip the balance and the Tenian deserters (82) carry the day, so that the Greeks prepare themselves for fighting come the morning. For the tripod at Delphi (82), see. 9.81. Because of Themistocles’ secret warning, many in the Persian fleet have been up all night working very hard (76), while presumably it is only the Greek commanders who have stayed up arguing among themselves (81, 83). Rested Greek troops will be fighting exhausted foreigners in narrow straits that the foreigners do not know well.
For the oracle of Bacis mentioned in 8.77 and 96, cf. n. 8.19–26; for H’s other expressions of personal authorial opinion (77), especially about religion, cf. n. 3.38. We know from other sources that Athens recalled Athenians previously exiled through ostracism, but probably not immediately before the battle, as 8.79 implies.
8.84–96 There is much dispute about the events of the battle of Salamis. For detailed reconstructions of the battle and the differences between Aeschylus’ version of Salamis in the Persians and H’s, see H & W, app. XXI; CAH iv. 573–81; Burn, 450–71; Lazenby, 151–97. The Persians, believing Themistocles’ message, may have sent part of their fleet clockwise around Salamis to try to block the Greeks from escaping around the western end of the island, through the narrows of Megara. The Greeks make use of the circumscribed space of the narrows to prevent the Persians from encircling and boarding them with marines; the heavier build of the Greek ships allows them to ram and disable the already crowded and confused Persian line. Themistocles intends wind, wave, and the treacherous coastline of the narrows to work together in the Greeks’ favour.
Many Persians lose their lives because they cannot swim (89), and many more that have been stationed on the tiny island of Psyttaleia are slain by Aristides’ hoplite troops (95). Artemisia saves herself by attacking and sinking an allied ship, with all hands on board (87), tricking both friends and enemies: Xerxes is impressed with her valour, while the Athenian pursuing her turns away. H enjoys reporting both the insults that the Aeginetan Polycritus, Crius’ son (cf. 6.50, 73) hurls at Themistocles (92), and also Polycritus’ amazing recovery of Pytheas (92), the Aeginetan taken by the Persians before the storm off Cape Sepias and kept alive as a sort of mascot because of his courage (7.181). H’s report is not about Greek or Persian strategy or tactics so much as it is about individual striking episodes. He acknowledges an anti-Corinthian bias in his Athenian informants (94).
8.97–107 Aftermath of the battle on the Persian side. H seems to compress into a single day Xerxes’ dismay, his attempt to build the causeway, his sending of the news to Persia, his conversations with Mardonius and Artemisia, his entrusting of his children to Artemisia, as well as Mardonius’ selection of the crack 300,000 troops (cf. 9.32) from Xerxes’ army, and the sailing of the Persian fleet from Phalerum north to the Hellespont. Xerxes himself leaves with the bulk of his army after only a few days (8.113). CAH iv. 582–3 comments that this narrative may point back to a different reality, in which Xerxes’ land army probed as far as Pegae in the Megarid and the Isthmus of Corinth, a serious attempt was made at building a causeway to Salamis, and a second sea battle was contemplated, since Xerxes’ navy was still considerably larger than that of the Greeks opposing him. It may have been Xerxes’ fear of the coming of winter (as well as of being cut off himself at the Hellespont) that caused him finally to abandon his plans (8.113).
H gives no details on the losses of ships. Diodorus 11.19, probably following Ephorus, sets the Greek loss at forty and the Persian at more than two hundred, apart from those captured.
The Persian messenger service (98), of interest in itself as the fastest travel of which mortals are capable (cf. n. 1.214), is described in terms that recall the Odyssey (4.566 ff.). H’s text about the Persian royal messengers was in turn adapted and inscribed on the 1914 façade of the General Post Office in New York City by one of its architects: ‘…neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ It has become the unofficial motto of the US Postal System. The relay torch-race was run at the Panathenaea and at the festivals of Prometheus, Hephaestus, Pan, Bendis, and Theseus. Aeschylus’ Persians 532 ff. gives a vivid account of the mourning at Susa on the receipt of the news of the sea battle (99).
The conversations between Xerxes and his two counsellors (8.100 ff.) reveal both Mardonius’ true objectives and Artemisia’s realistic assessment of the risks and opportunities involved. What even Artemisia does not anticipate, however, is the demoralization that apparently will strike Xerxes after his hasty flight back to Asia (9.108–13, described by H without editorializing comment). Xerxes’ behaviour in Book 9 certainly continues the man/woman theme H has played with here in portraying Artemisia and Xerxes (7.99, 8.68, 88, 103).
A surprising addition at this point is the pendant on Hermotimus the eunuch (105 ff.), whose name looks suspiciously as if it means ‘honour of the herm’. A herm is a statue with genitals prominently displayed (ch. 2.51). His story contains both the theme of the remarkable promised in theHistories’ introduction, and that of a tisis, ‘vengeance’, long delayed but finally and satisfyingly achieved; cf. nn. 1.8, 1.91. A report of the priestess of Pedasa (104) and her beard-growing proclivities, also mentioned in 1.175, has come into the text of H’s manuscripts here, but is generally believed more germane to the context of 1.175, where some of the language looks less suspiciously late as well.
8.108–12 Aftermath of Salamis on the Greek side. This narrative must have made for bitter-sweet hearing or reading by H’s audiences in the 440s and 430s BCE, since it looks forward to the behaviour of the Athenians towards islanders and mainland Ionians in the fifty years after the Persian Wars. The opportunism and greed of Themistocles are marked, as well as his readiness to contemplate feathering his own nest later with Persian largess (110; cf. the end of n. 7.138–44). H’s sources here are clearly not fans of Themistocles, but Thucydides, who rates Themistocles’ gifts and achievements much more highly than H does, accepts as historical the story of the message to Xerxes (Thucydides 1.137).
It is peculiar that two of the most moving assessments of Greek values and the meaning of the Greek cause are expressed by Demaratus, the exiled king of Lacedaemon in Xerxes’ camp (7.102), and Themistocles, the master trickster, here (109). Themistocles speaks as he does for the purpose of beguiling his allies and later winning credit with Xerxes. For the thrashing of the sea to which Themistocles refers, see 7.35.
8.113–20 Mardonius picks his army, and Xerxes marches homewards. The troops Mardonius chooses have been described in 7.41, 61, 62, 64, 65. The payment rendered by Mardonius (114) will be his own death and loss of the battle of Plataea the following spring, 9.63–4. Of the sufferings H describes on the return march (and the even more dramatic sufferings described in Aeschylus’ Persians 480 ff.), CAH iv. 585 comments, ‘We need to take all this with a cellar of salt.’ See also Burn, 470–1 and Lazenby, 205–6. Xerxes takes forty-five days to march the 550 miles (880km.) or so back to the Hellespont (115), suggesting neither headlong haste nor total breakdown. H does not tell us why he includes the improbable story of the sea captain and the wholesale jettisoning overboard of Xerxes’ court (118–19), but it may be for the sake of his own tongue-in-cheek remark that follows, certainly implying a criticism of the way Xerxes has run his war. He has in effect seated overdressed and out-of-shape courtiers at the oars of his ship of state.
For an assessment of Xerxes’ campaign as a whole, see CAH iv. 587–8. The issue of this war was still very much in doubt at the end of 480 BCE, as the resistance of Andros and Carystus to Themistocles’ harassment shows. ‘What made Salamis decisive at sea was the change in the plans of Xerxes. Whatever his reasons, he did not return …’ (CAH iv. 588).
8.121–5 Greek dedications and the assignment of honours. Croesus’ bowl has been described in 1.51. For Themistocles’ further exploits at Sparta after the end of the war, cf. Thucydides 1.90–2, where Themistocles draws out a visit to the Lacedaemonians long enough for the Athenians to get their walls rebuilt, a move Sparta opposes in 478 BCE. The hostility to Themistocles indicated in the anecdote of ch. 125 seems to have been widespread in Athens, since Themistocles was not offered a sea command after 480 (we find Xanthippus in command in 479 (9.114)). Belbina is a rocky and insignificant island off the coast of Sunium.
8.126–9 Artabazus is the commander of the Parthians and Chorasmians in Xerxes’ army (7.66); he is perhaps a close relative of Xerxes, since his father Pharnaces has at least the same name as a Pharnaces son of Arsames who was in charge of the royal treasury in Fortification Texts from Darius’ reign (CAH iv. 85) and may have been Darius’ uncle (1.209).
As H says (126), Artabazus will become even more important after he manages to lead forty thousand of Xerxes’ troops away from Plataea the following spring (9.66, 77, 89), leaving Mardonius in Greece. Some scholars speculate that H’s knowledge of Mardonius’ thoughts in Books 8 and 9 may ultimately come from Artabazus, if a Tritantaechmes son of Artabazus is the Persian satrap of Babylon in H’s time and possibly one of H’s informants (1.192). Artabazus and his family also remain influential in the region of the Hellespont. Artabazus seems to have been blamed by Xerxes neither for the losses in Chalcidice over the winter of 480–479 nor for abandoning Mardonius, since in Thucydides 1.129 we see him become satrap of Dascylium immediately after the war, assigned by Xerxes to the delicate task of dealing with Pausanias. Artabazus’ grandson is still satrap in Dascylium during the early Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 2.67, 5.1), and his great-grandson is the Pharnabazus of Thucydides Book 8 and Xenophon’s Hellenica.
Here (127) Artabazus makes use of the winter lull in fighting to try to reduce Olynthus and Potidaea, cities at the northern end of Pallene, the westernmost tongue of the Chalcidice peninsula, which have taken the opportunity offered by Xerxes’ retreat to revolt. He takes Olynthus but is undone by a treacherous tide at Potidaea as he tries to get his army past the city walls on to Pallene proper; the tides of the Aegean normally rise and fall by only a few inches, but a strong current comes into the north-east corner of the Mediterranean from the Euxine (Black) Sea (fed by all those rivers H describes in Book 4), and it may here be complicated by the effects of earthquake. (The Potidaeans are sure that Poseidon, god of earthquakes, is involved (129); the town is named after him and the Persians have desecrated one of his temples on the city’s outskirts.) As a Corinthian colony, Potidaea is again of military interest in the initial stages of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 1.56–65; cf. a tactic similar to Artabazus’ by Aristeas the Corinthian in Thucydides 1.63).
8.130–2 Xerxes’ fleet keeps an eye on Ionia from Cyme and Samos; the Greek fleet gathers at Delos. The Athenians have put Xanthippus the former exile in charge of their fleet (for his connections, cf. the middle of n. 6.121–4) and not Themistocles. Themistocles’ tactics have saved the Peloponnese from invasion but have not saved Athens itself from being burned and sacked (CAH iv. 594).
The Lacedaemonians have now made one of their kings commander-in-chief (signifying the importance they give to the fleet, after Salamis?). H honours Leotychidas with a genealogy, as he has Leonidas (7.204), although Leotychidas’ later career is less glorious; cf. the end of n. 6.61–72. For the energetic prosecution of the war in Ionia under Leotychidas’ command later in the spring of 479 BCE, see 9.90–106. An echo of Ionian irritation at the timidity of the mainlanders can be found in the comment about the Pillars of Heracles in ch. 132. Strattis (132) must be getting on in years, at least if he is the same Strattis of Chios who has been tyrant of Chios since Darius’ Scythian expedition (4.138). The 110 ships the Greeks muster at Aegina in the spring is about one-third of the number gathered at Salamis in the previous autumn; presumably most of the Athenians are now preparing to fight the Persians by land in Boeotia, and they may also be deliberately withholding most of their navy from the allied cause in order to encourage Sparta to fight in central Greece (cf. the threats of 8.62).
8.133–44 Mardonius’ activities in winter and early spring 480–479 BCE. He first consults oracles in central Greece. For the Persian sacking of Abae (134), cf. 8.33; for H’s interest in Caria and Carians, cf. n. 5.117–21. Amphiaraus is an Argive, one of the mythic seven heroes led by Polynices, Oedipus’ son, against Thebes; Croesus had consulted Abae and Amphiaraus also (1.46, 49, 52, 92).
Alexander is introduced in ch. 136 without acknowledgement of our previous acquaintance with him (and Bubares!), although in 5.22 H sends the reader forward to this passage for proof that the Macedonian kings are Greek; cf. n. 5.17–22. Thucydides 2.99 takes the claim of the Temenids, the Macedonian royal family, to Argive ancestry seriously as well; Temenus was one of the Heraclidae, or sons of Heracles, who in myth returned from the north to claim the Peloponnese (cf. the ‘Dorian invasion’, with which the Heraclidae are mythically associated, nn. 1.56–7 and 4.147–8). Temenus took Argos for his portion (cf. CAH iii/3. 282–5 for possible real seventh-century connections between Argos and Macedonia).
The story of the three sons (137; cf. 4.5) may go back to Iranian folk-tale. On the Garden of Midas (138): this part of Macedonia for more than three centuries (c.1150–800 BCE) had been the home of the Brygi, most of whom may well then have set off for Asia and become the Phrygians of north-west Asia Minor (7.73; CAH iii/1. 649, 653–4).
Mardonius’ choice of Alexander as an ambassador is an astute one. Alexander has already successfully warned the Greeks off defending Thessaly (7.173), and he will play a vital role later in the spring at Plataea, telling them of Mardonius’ plans (9.44–6). His arguments are sensible. The two subsequent speeches, those of the Lacedaemonian envoys and of the Athenians themselves, are fascinating, because in them we see articulated the growth of a consciousness that is specifically Hellenic, crystallizing around the issue of the war with Persia. The Spartans represent a paler and more conflicted version of it. They are both sympathetic and irritated; they feel reluctantly implicated in the troubles that, by their way of thinking, the Athenians have brought on themselves (cf. 4.118–19, for the same issues debated by the Scythians and their neighbours). The Athenians in return articulate the principle of a common Hellenism, defined by ties of religion, blood, speech, and custom. It is not clear that before Xerxes’ invasion most Greeks would have thought such connections important or would have thought of themselves principally as Greeks rather than as members of an individual tribe or city (cf. Polycritus’ behaviour in 8.92). Unlike the Scythians in Book 4, for the moment the Athenians do not articulate the practical threat of what will happen to the Peloponnese should the Athenians decide to collaborate (but see 9.7, 11).