Herodotus Histories by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

49–51 Aristagores and Kleomenes

See Solmsen 1943: 196–200 and esp. Pelling 2007.

49.1 Ἀπικνέεται…ἀρχήν : Aristagores is called ‘tyrant’ (he no longer actually is that, having resigned his tyranny, but the designation has stuck to him), but Kleomenes ‘has the arche’. This too is misleading, but in a different way: it ignores the partly collective realities of decision-making at Sparta: see on 49.9 below. Hdt. wants us to think that both are autocrats for the purposes of this head-to-head encounter, but at the same time he drops a hint (again 49.9, but see 50.1n.) that this was not the whole truth, as far as Kleomenes was concerned. Note in particular that Hdt. completely ignores, for the moment, the existence of the other Spartan king. He is saving up Demaretos until the tensions described at 75.1. ἔχων χάλκεον πίνακα ἐν τῶι γῆς ἁπάσης περίοδος ἐνετέτμητο ‘bringing with him a bronze tablet on which was engraved a map of the whole world’. πίνακα: the word πίναξ, which comes to be used for a list (hence ‘pinakographer’, a compiler of lists), means a (painted) panel or (bronze) tablet, perhaps of the kind implied at Ar. Nub. 206. It cannot have been large if Aristagores carried it round with him on his help-raising journey as a visual aid. It must (despite Brodersen in Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 107–8) have done more work than a mere list or itinerary would have done, if only in the sense that its main function was as a spectacular visual adjunct to Aristagores’ more detailed rhetoric. Aristagores points to it at 49.5 (δεικνύς) and uses ‘deictic’ words such as οἵδε or ἥδε (‘here are’, ‘here is’) about the Lydians and Phrygians at 49.5, about Cyprus and the sea round it, the Kilikians, the Armenians, and the land (χώρη) of the Matienoi at 49.6, and the river Choaspes and Sousa at 49.7. [Longinus] Subl. 26.2 commented that Hdt.'s geographical descriptions enable the reader to visualise the places in question; the present passage would have been a very good illustration of this (cf. Nünlist 2009: 155).

The first person to have drawn the inhabited world on a map is said to have been the philosopher Anaximandros from Anaxagores’ city of Miletos: Strabo 1.1.11, citing Eratosthenes; so too Agathemeros (GGM 2.471, date uncertain), who adds ‘after him the much-travelled, πολυπλανής, Hekataios [another Milesian] corrected it’. Agathemeros goes on to say that Hellanikos wrote his history without one, ἀπλάστως, sine tabula, as Müller translates it. See Dilke 1985: 23–4 and OCD4, ‘maps’. Dilke 23 acutely notes that since Kleomenes has to ask how many days the journey would take (50.1), the map presumably had no indication of scale (but the question is necessary preparation for the punch-line at 50.3, and may not have been guileless on the part of Kleomenes, or, if one prefers, of Hdt.). See also Dilke 112: Aristagores’ map may have depended on the Persian courier system, and will probably (Dilke 23) have included the Royal Road, about to be described below. Maps were not everyday items in the ancient world (Shipley 2011: 10), and part of the reason why Hdt.

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