Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars

By Jon D. Mikalson

The two great Persian invasions of Greece, in 490 and 480-79 B.C., both repulsed by the Greeks, provide our best opportunity for understanding the interplay of religion and history in ancient Greece. Using the Histories of Herodotus as well as other historical and archaeological sources, Jon Mikalson shows how the Greeks practiced their religion at this pivotal moment in their history.

In the period of the invasions and the years immediately after, the Greeks--internationally, state by state, and sometimes individually--turned to their deities, using religious practices to influence, understand, and commemorate events that were threatening their very existence. Greeks prayed and sacrificed; made and fulfilled vows to the gods; consulted oracles; interpreted omens and dreams; created cults, sanctuaries, and festivals; and offered dozens of dedications to their gods and heroes--all in relation to known historical events.

By portraying the human situations and historical circumstances in which Greeks practiced their religion, Mikalson advances our knowledge of the role of religion in fifth-century Greece and reveals a religious dimension of the Persian Wars that has been previously overlooked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9780807862018

Jon D. Mikalson

Jon D. Mikalson is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year (1975), Athenian Popular Religion (1983), and Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (1991).

Book preview

Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars

Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars

Jon D. Mikalson

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2003 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Heidi Perov Set in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mikalson, Jon D., 1943–

Herodotus and religion in the Persian Wars / by Jon D. Mikalson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and indexes.

ISBN 0-8078-2798-3

1. Greece—History—Persian Wars, 500–449 B.C.—Religious aspects. 2. Herodotus. History. 3. Greece—Religion. I. Title.

BL795.W28 M55 2003

292.08—dc21

2002154453

07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλήνων, ἴτε

ἐλευθεροῦτε πατρίδ᾽, ἐλευθεροῦτε δὲ

παῖδας γυναῖκας θεῶν τε πατρῴων ἕδη

θῆκας τε προγόνων· νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών.

—AESCHYLUS, Persae 402–405

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE

A Religious Account of the Persian Invasions

TWO

Greek Gods, Heroes, and the Divine in the Persian Invasions

THREE

Some Religious Beliefs and Attitudes of Herodotus

APPENDIX

Herodotus on the Origins of Greek Religion

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Passages Cited

General Index

Maps

Mainland Greece 2

Asia Minor 3

Attica and Environs 17

Egypt 169

The Persian Empire 170

Acknowledgments

This project was begun during a most pleasant year as Whitehead Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 1995–1996. Revisiting many of the Persian and Persian War sites under the guidance of John Camp and William Coulson gave considerable inspiration. The staff of the American School did everything to make the year productive and enjoyable. I am grateful for the helpful suggestions of John Dillery, Kevin Clinton, and Robert Garland, who read the manuscript at various stages. As always I owe most to my wife Mary, for expert editorial assistance and especially for her constant support and patience.

Abbreviations

ABSA Annual of the British School at Athens AC Antiquité classique AJA American Journal of Archaeology AJP American Journal of Philology BCH Bulletin de correspondance hellénique BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Burkert, GR W. Burkert. Greek Religion. Cambridge, Mass., 1985. CA Classical Antiquity CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly Farnell, Cults L. R. Farnell. The Cults of the Greek States. 5 vols. Oxford, 1921; reprint, 1977. FGrHist F. Jacoby. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. 3 vols. Berlin and Leiden, 1923–1958. Fontenrose J. Fontenrose. The Delphic Oracle. Berkeley, 1978. G&R Greece and Rome GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies HTR Harvard Theological Review HW W. W. How and J. Wells. A Commentary on Herodotus. 2 vols. Oxford, 1912. IG Inscriptiones Graecae JDAI Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies MH Museum Helveticum ML R. Meiggs and D. M. Lewis. Greek Historical Inscriptions. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1988. Nilsson, GGR I³ M. P. Nilsson. Geschichte der griechischen Religion. Vol. I³. Munich, 1967. Page, FGE D. L. Page. Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge, 1981. PCG R. Kassel and C. Austin. Poetae Comici Graeci. 8 vols. Berlin, 1983–1995. RE A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll. Realencyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1893–1963. REG Revue des études grecques RhM Rheinisches Museum TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association WS Wiener Studien ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars

Mainland Greece

Asia Minor

Introduction

The two great Persian invasions of Greece, the one ordered by King Darius and turned back by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 B.C. and the other led by King Xerxes himself and repulsed in 480–479 by victories of the allied Greeks at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, offer us our very best opportunity from the whole of Greek antiquity to see the interplay of Greek religion and history on a large scale. For a period of ten years, and for somewhat longer if we include the preliminaries to the 490 invasion, we can see how the Greeks internationally, state by state, and sometimes even individually turned to their deities and their religious practices to influence, understand, and commemorate events that threatened their very existence. For this period we have accounts of Greeks praying and sacrificing, making and fulfilling vows to the gods, consulting oracles, interpreting omens and dreams, believing in miracles, pondering pieties and impieties, creating new cults, sanctuaries, and festivals, and making dozens of dedications to their gods and heroes—all in direct relation to known historical events. The purpose of this book is to collect and present the abundantly preserved religious aspects of these critical times and thereby set Greek religion into a historical context so as to understand better the role of Greek religion in the Persian invasions and in Greek life in general.

Modern scholarly surveys of Greek religion, such as Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion and Martin Nilsson’s Geschichte der griechischen Religion, collect, abstract from their immediate contexts, and summarize much of the evidence for Greek religion. They have, of course, immeasurable value and have been the primary vehicle for organizing and analyzing this Protean subject. But there is a need also to see the human situations and historical circumstances in which Greeks practiced their religion if we are to understand the place religion had in their lives. The ancient sources, written and archaeological, allow us to do this best for the period of the Persian Wars in early fifth-century Greece. Much that we describe will be familiar to students of Greek religion, but for scholars and for nonspecialists alike it may prove helpful to see these basics of Greek religion placed into social, cultural, historical, and personal contexts.

Our primary source for this study is, of course, Herodotus. His Histories, completed by 430 B.C. or a few years later, may reasonably be claimed to be the best and richest single source for Greek religion as it was practiced in the classical period. All who study Greek religion mine the Histories for discrete details about individual gods and about religious practices, cults, and institutions and for parallels to religious concepts found in other authors. Oddly, though, until very recently little attention has been paid to the whole—to the picture of Greek religion that emerges from the writings of this observer and practitioner of Greek religion in the classical period.¹ Herodotus describes Greeks practicing their religion—praying, sacrificing, making dedications, employing various methods of divination, and expressing their thoughts—on so many occasions and in such a variety of situations that one can, as I do here, weave his accounts into a general picture of religion of the time. There are, of course, significant limitations in focusing on one author, but these limitations may be counterbalanced by the opportunity to see Greek religion in human, local, and historical contexts as described by one Greek. There is even an advantage that this rich store of religious material is all the product of one man. Herodotus was certainly no ordinary Greek. He was better traveled, more cosmopolitan, more curious, more innovative, and more learned than most Greeks, and it is to these qualities that we owe the Histories. But when we analyze his accounts and views of Greek religion, we find that they are largely in accord with those of other contemporary and later sources for practiced religion. In our concluding chapter we attempt to discover from his writings some of his own religious beliefs and views, but with the knowledge that these were not, or most were not, peculiar to him.

Herodotus as an author is difficult to categorize. He writes an epic narrative of war, but is not a Homer. He uses some techniques and concepts of tragedy, but he is not an Aeschylus or Sophocles. Cicero terms him the father of history, but he is no Thucydides. He is not simply a geographer, ethnographer, or historian, but he exhibits characteristics and methodologies of each.² He is, essentially, a category unto himself, or, put another way, he cannot be categorized. For us that is a virtue because, just as he does not fit squarely into a single genre, so he is not bound by the conventions of one genre. He does not, as Thucydides and most later historians were to do, largely exclude religious considerations from the flow of historical events.³ Nor does he introduce the divine machinery inherent in epic or the (quite different) divine world that the conventions of tragedy dictated. So much of what we think we know of Greek religion is affected by the conventions of the genres of our sources. Very different ideas of Greek gods and religious beliefs emerge from, for example, epic, tragedy, comedy, history, or oratory, in large part because each of these genres had conventions that shaped or limited its presentation of religious material. Herodotus, it seems, stood largely outside of these conventions. We can and will find traces of some of them, but Herodotus’ approach to Greek religion strikes me as less artificial, more direct, less convention-bound, and more eclectic. It may well be more the way an ordinary Greek thought about his religious world. Given the state of our sources, this is, of course, impossible to prove, but it is, I think, a hypothesis worth following to its conclusions. But even if one is reluctant to extrapolate from the Histories what most Greeks believed, we can at least claim to have illustrated some of what Herodotus himself apparently believed, a point to which we return in the concluding chapter.

The primary purpose of this book is to present the religious context of the Persian Wars. Herodotus explicitly and implicitly offers religious explanations of the causes and outcomes of the Persian invasions, and he gives a religious background to the major and many of the minor events of those times. These are regularly ignored, dismissed, or disparaged by both ancient and modern historians, but they are there.⁴ Herodotus thought them important, included them, and integrated them into his account. They may not suit modern ideas of what is historically important, but to assume that the Greeks would in a religious vacuum face, prepare for, fight, win, and remember a war that threatened their very existence may be to misunderstand and oversimplify classical Greek society. I do not think it solely the prejudice of a religious historian to claim that the report of a miraculous event at Delphi or unfavorable battle omens at Plataea could affect the course of events every bit as much as a general’s strategy or the different styles of armor. And how the war was remembered—what Herodotus is attempting to determine and does determine in the Histories—is as much a matter of belief as fact, and the religious components of that memory of the war themselves then become elements of religious belief for Greeks in the future.

In tracing causation there is a natural inclination to put into separate, even opposed categories the human and the divine, the literally mundane and the metaphysical, and then to follow one of them or, at best, to follow both of them in separate if parallel lines. The former are the historians’ turf; the latter are best left to the poets. In real life, however, the human and divine do often meet, and the point of contact is religious cult and religious belief. The dedications by the Greeks at Delphi after their final victory over the Persians are historical facts, no less so than the victory itself, and there were discoverable human, historical reasons for these dedications. Religious beliefs were among these reasons, and the dedications themselves, once erected, could in the future affect religious beliefs, and these beliefs would in turn become one determinant of future actions. Much, in fact most, of what we find religious in Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars is at this point of contact—that is, it is centered in practiced cult, and the religious beliefs underlying the cultic are as human and historical as any individual’s aspirations for empire, political power, or glory. They need to be brought into the discussion of the social and cultural milieu and the causes and outcomes of these great wars.

Although I think the religious component of Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars important, I do not claim that it is Herodotus’ sole or even most important explanation of the events of these years. It is one explanation among several. The interpretation of Herodotus is not a zero-sum game in which the introduction of a new set of explanations needs diminish the value of other explanations. When modern historians wish to promote the value of their own explanations, whether they be the growth of imperialism or the east-west dimensions of the conflict or some other such overarching theme, they tend to demean the importance of other factors, and religion and religious motivation are chief among these other factors.⁵ But among all Greek prose authors Herodotus is perhaps least suited to such a zero-sum game. He presents a wide range of perspectives and methodologies. He offers numerous motivations—each to us sufficient in itself—for single major events and characters and, unlike modern scholars, rarely sees the need to choose among them.⁶ We want one answer; Herodotus provides several. The different motivations sometimes appear to us to conflict or to be otherwise inconsistent, at the very least to overdetermine an event, but this usually does not trouble Herodotus. The battle and Greek victory at Salamis in reality were no doubt the result of a large variety of causes, a variety that Herodotus in his wide-ranging account suggests but which we attempt to reduce to a favored few.⁷ Among these causes, I would claim, were events of a religious nature and the religious beliefs of the participants. I do not claim that religious causes were the only or most important ones and that we should downplay military, political, cultural, strategic, and even geographical factors. Rather I would like to restore the religious elements to the importance that Herodotus gives them in his account of the Persian Wars, as one element among several.

Herodotus is, of course, our major source, but we can supplement his account of religious events of these times with those of later, sometimes considerably later, authors. Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus Siculus each knew Herodotus’ Histories well and sometimes simply give us abbreviated versions of Herodotus. But each also had sources of information independent from Herodotus, and they provide valuable additions to Herodotus’ record. Plutarch of Chaeronea, born before A.D. 50 and living until at least 120, described in his Lives the activities of some of the principal figures of the Persian War period (Themistocles, Aristides, and Cimon), and randomly elsewhere in his voluminous writings he recounted a number of events from the time of the Persian Wars. Plutarch derives some of these from Herodotus, but others, and some especially valuable for our purposes, he draws from other, often fourth-century B.C. sources. Plutarch also did not appreciate Herodotus’ portrayal of the role of his beloved Thebes in the Persian Wars, and wrote a diatribe attacking Herodotus’ credibility, On the Malice of Herodotus (Mor. 854E–874C), in the course of which he offers some ill-tempered corrections to Herodotus’ accounts. From this and from Plutarch’s other writings we draw material to supplement Herodotus’ account of the period.

Pausanias, from Magnesia in Lydia, toured much of mainland Greece and the Peloponnesus in the early to mid second century A.D. and wrote, in Greek, a guidebook for the sites he visited. He described Athens, Delphi, Marathon, Plataea, and many of the other places at which battles of the Persian Wars were fought or monuments were erected. Pausanias often draws upon Herodotus in his own accounts, but frequently also records stories still being told in his own time about the battles and miraculous events at these sites. His descriptions of the monuments, some mentioned by Herodotus, some not, are particularly valuable for filling in the picture of religious activities during and immediately after these wars. And, in turn, Pausanias’ record of these monuments is itself often confirmed or supplemented by the discovery of some Persian War monuments in modern archaeological excavations, and these monuments will be described in their proper places.

Diodorus of Sicily, of the first century B.C., is our last major source for religious aspects of the Persian Wars. For much of the early parts of his world history he too drew from Herodotus, but he, like Plutarch, also took from other classical-period sources and preserves some important religious activities and events not to be found in Herodotus.

Plutarch, Pausanias, Diodorus, our other occasional literary sources, and even some of the inscriptions bearing on events concerning the Persian Wars are much later, even hundreds of years later than Herodotus. The accounts of these sources are often questioned by modern scholars, and we will note their objections when we introduce them. We should stress here that even Herodotus’ account was not contemporary or nearly contemporary with the events he describes. The latest surely datable events in his Histories are from 431 and 430 B.C.,⁸ and how long he had been writing by then we do not know. But clearly he did not begin writing, as Thucydides did, in the midst of the wars he was describing. If 484, the traditional date of his birth, is somewhat accurate, he was a young child at the time of the second Persian invasion. Herodotus did interview a few Greek participants in these wars,⁹ but he was writing, at the least, a generation later than the events themselves, and enough time had elapsed for some facts to be lost and for legends to develop. He himself knew of Phrynichus’ tragedy on the capture of Miletus in 494, he may have known of Aeschylus’ production of the Persae in 472, and he had no doubt seen in Athens the famous painting (of the 460s) of the battle of Marathon. Herodotus is thus a late source for the Persian Wars, from a time when the Greeks were constructing their history of these wars in various media.

In this construction of their victory over the Persians, we must consider the possibility that the Greeks and Herodotus himself indulged in some very natural and only human exaggeration. Herodotus could be extremely precise in his use of numbers, as when he described Polycrates’ tunnel on Samos,¹⁰ but virtually no modern scholar accepts Herodotus’ claims that Xerxes’ invasion force included 1,700,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry (not counting camels and chariots), 1,207 triremes, and 3,000 other ships (7.59.3–60, 87, 89.1, 97). He gives the total force, ultimately, as 2,641,610 combatants and an equal number of noncombatants (7.184–185). Herodotus anticipates objections to these numbers by describing in detail how Xerxes counted his troops at Doriscus and by listing each contingent and its commander, but the modern judgment is that these numbers are wildly exaggerated. Similar doubts are raised about Herodotus’ claims that the Thasians spent 400 talents ($240 million) hosting Xerxes’ army for one very sumptuous meal (7.118), that the Greeks at Thermopylae faced 3 million opponents (7.228.1), and that the Greeks at Plataea killed 230,000 of Mardonius’ army of 300,000 (9.70.5). These numbers are questioned by virtually all modern scholars but not, interestingly, by ancient historians, including Thucydides. For Greeks they had clearly become part of the legend of these wars.

The question arises whether there was a similar exaggeration in religious matters. This element was, of course, shaped and constructed no less than others by Herodotus and the Greek tradition. We do not, however, see the same type of exaggeration in, for example, the number and size of victory monuments and other dedications to the gods, most of which are verified by ancient eyewitnesses and archaeological excavations. More important, though, is whether the sources exaggerated the role of the gods such as Poseidon and Apollo of Delphi in bringing victory to the Greeks. Here, of course, we are treating religious belief and not fact, and for us the real question is whether Herodotus and other sources exaggerated or misrepresented what the Greeks believed happened, and there is no evidence that they did. If Herodotus does not give with complete accuracy the beliefs of the actual participants in these wars, he at least represents how Greeks of the following two generations imagined them, and that has considerable value in itself. And the accounts of Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus have their value in recording how these events were remembered many centuries afterward.

My concern is religious history, the religious events and acts associated with the Persian Wars as reported by Herodotus and other sources and the religious beliefs behind them as expressed, primarily, by Herodotus. Those who work in the political and military history of these times may well find my trust in Herodotus as a source naive, but my purposes are different from theirs. I attempt to discover what the Greeks believed happened and why they believed it happened. The political and military historians are searching for what really happened and for the real motives and causes behind these events. In so doing they often challenge Herodotus’ accounts, sometimes with the help of other ancient sources but most often simply on the basis of their own sense of historical probabilities. And they devote little attention to omens, prayers, and miracles which, since Thucydides, have been largely excluded as determining events and causes in Greek history. But some religious events are, in fact, historical: for example, the taking of omens before the battle of Plataea and the dedications of victory at the major Panhellenic sanctuaries at the end of the wars. Historians are understandably reluctant to accept miracles or accurate oracles as reported by Herodotus. The miracles are often dismissed as tales concocted by religious personnel in the sanctuaries, and the oracles as late ex eventu fabrications by the oracle centers. But, whatever their origins—and at that we can only guess—these omens, miracles, and oracles were believed in by Herodotus and, most probably, by most Greeks of his time, and they became part of the corpus of Greek religious beliefs. That they did in fact become a part of that corpus of religious beliefs is demonstrated by Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus. As such they are critical to understanding Greek religion of the time and are proper subjects for the historian of that religion. For most of these Herodotus is our sole source, and if we reject his accounts and interpretations of them, we are left with nothing but our own speculations about what the Greeks might have believed about the role of the gods and of cultic practices during these wars. And, finally, because so much of what Herodotus claims in religious matters can be documented or paralleled in contemporary and later sources for Greek popular religion, he earns considerable trust in those matters for which we have no other sources. All this does not mean, of course, that we accept, without discrimination, everything Herodotus tells us about Greek religion. In our discussions we will be noting Herodotus’ occasional variant accounts of a religious event, his own doubts, his sometimes cautious statements about religious events, and the different layers of religion he introduces into his Histories. But, by and large, we trust Herodotus far more than do political and military historians because we are concerned primarily with beliefs, not with the facts that lie behind those beliefs. It is these religious beliefs about the Persian Wars that Herodotus represented and no doubt in some cases shaped, and it is these beliefs that were part of or became part of the religion of the generations after him.

I have translated several passages from Herodotus’ Histories, in part because Herodotus’ accounts place religious matters in a larger context, and in part because I, like Pausanias (2.30.4), have no intention of rewriting what Herodotus told well before. The prose style of Herodotus, relaxed, paratactic, and occasionally repetitious and wordy, has great charm in itself, and in my translations I have attempted to allow this style to come through, only rarely abbreviating or smoothing the flow of the original. My handling of two words requires comment. What Herodotus tells are called by him logoi (λόγοι, things told), whether they be short, paragraph-length accounts of brief episodes, a book-length account of Egypt, or the whole narrative of the Persian invasions. These logoi are by modern translators variously termed histories, accounts, stories, and myths, but to Herodotus they are all logoi. In my translations and discussions I avoid for logos history, story, and myth, because each of these imposes on what Herodotus writes an un-Herodotean value judgment of its factual worth. I generally use the term account, but also sometimes employ the transliteration logos.¹¹ Nomos (νόμος) is another special and important term. It and its cognates (νόμιμα, νομίζω) are frequent in the Histories and pose a different problem. Nomoi are customs that may or may not be institutionalized as laws.¹² The phrase customs/laws sometimes used by translators for nomoi is cumbersome and also frequently inaccurate because many of the nomoi Herodotus describes remained only customs. Depending on the context, I sometimes employ custom, sometimes law, and occasionally just give the transliteration nomos. To reduce confusion I have followed throughout the spelling of names to be found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, third edition (1996), with the exception of a few deities and their epithets.

In my teaching I have long urged students—to whom terms like 10 drachmas or 3 minae or 1,000 talents have little meaning—to convert such sums to dollar equivalents at the rate of 1 drachma = $100, 1 mina = $10,000, and 1 talent = $600,000. This rate gives a middle-class Athenian an average daily wage of $100 and an annual income of about $30,000. These dollar equivalents alert students to the vast financial resources of fifth-century Athens and also to the fact that the relative costs of certain items such as cows, clothing, and food differed greatly from what we experience today.¹³ I include similar conversions throughout this study.

D. Müller in his Topographischer Bildkommentar zu den Historien Herodots (1987) offers maps, plans, bibliographies, and photographs of all sites mentioned by Herodotus and now in the territory of modern Greece. The photographs in particular will bring back welcome memories to those who have had the good fortune to tread many of these sites and will help others realize the intimate connections between Herodotus’ accounts and the topography and monuments of the localities. For the first mention of sites important to this study I give reference to Müller’s monumental work.

I give for all Delphic oracles the number assigned to them by Fontenrose (1978) in his catalog. In that catalog one will find discussion, ancient sources, and bibliography for the oracle in question. Many of the epigrams and epitaphs from the period have been attributed by ancient or modern sources to Simonides of Ceos, but few of the attributions are certain. I note the few certain ones but rather than leave the others anonymous I attribute them, as is commonly done, to Simonides. Herodotus’ Histories is, of course, our prime source, and references simply in the form 8.51–55 are to it. Many passages from Herodotus, Plutarch, Diodorus, and Pausanias are translated and discussed in Chapter 1 and then are referred to in later chapters, and to indicate this and to draw the reader to the initial translations and discussions I put citations of these passages in later chapters in italics (8.51–55). The passages in Chapter 1 may be tracked down in the Index of Passages Cited. All dates henceforth are B.C. unless otherwise noted, and, finally, Herodotus dates certain events by the number of years before his own time. For convenience and consistency I posit his time to be 450.

One

A Religious Account of the Persian Invasions

The Prelude

In 510, just twenty years before the Persians landed at the Bay of Marathon, the Athenians ousted Hippias who had succeeded his father Pisistratus as the tyrant over Athens. The elimination of a tyrannical dynasty that had ruled continuously for thirty-six years, off and on over a longer period, and the implementation, within a few years, of the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes changed fundamentally the nature of the Athenians and of their state. According to Herodotus, When the Athenians were governed by tyrants, they were better than none of their neighbors in military affairs; but when they escaped the tyrants, they became the best by far. This shows that when they were held down, they played the cowards, as if they were working for a master (δεσπóτη, but when they became free, each one was eager to work for himself (5.78). These recently energized Athenians, again in Herodotus’ judgment, were to play the key role in the ultimate defeat of the Persians (7.139). After liberation from the tyrants, there followed for the Athenians a quick succession of major battles and conflicts with neighbors, and behind these and the expulsion of the Pisistratid tyranny lies a host of religious causes and concerns, which, together, offer a glimpse into the religious environment on the eve of the Persian invasions.

In the night before the celebration of the Panathenaea in Athens, in 514, Hipparchus, Pisistratus’ son and Hippias’ younger brother, as reported by Herodotus, received a dream:

A tall and handsome man seemed to stand over Hipparchus and speak in a riddling way these lines:

"Endure, O lion, you who have already suffered unendurable things with an enduring spirit.

No human being who commits injustice will not pay the punishment."

As soon as day came, Hipparchus told his dream to dream interpreters, but he rejected the dream and escorted the procession of the festival. There he died, assassinated by Harmodius and Aristogiton (5.55–56).¹

The words of the dream were for Herodotus riddling to the extent that, contrary to his usual practice, he neither has another interpret them nor attempts to do so himself.² The riddle remains unsolved for us. Was Hipparchus the doer or the receiver of injustice? The first line, Endure, O lion . . ., would suggest the latter, but the second line, No human being . . .,—given the glory that his assassins received for their deed—points to the former.³ This prophetic dream, the first of many, that we shall encounter, is uncharacteristically enigmatic. Most Herodotean dreams are quite explicit, and all prove true. Hipparchus’ rejection of the dream was not a religious crime, but was a mistake, the type of mistake often made by those who were, for other reasons, guilty of impious behavior.

At this very time the Alcmaeonidae, a prominent and rich Athenian family, were enduring the exile imposed upon them by the Pisistratidae. They and their supporters held the fort Leipsydrion in the mountains of northern Attica. They used their considerable influence and wealth to secure from the Amphictyons of Delphi the contract to rebuild, at Delphi, the temple of Apollo that had recently, in 548, burned to the ground. The Alcmaeonidae in their generosity went beyond their contractual obligations, most notably by building the East facade of the temple from marble, not from porous limestone. And then, according to Herodotus, as the Athenians claim, when the Alcmaeonidae were in Delphi they bribed the Pythia to tell the Spartans, whenever they came on a public or private oracular mission, to ‘free’ Athens (5.62–64). This the Pythia did. The oracles were deceitful κιβδήλοισι μαντηίοισι, 5.91.2),⁴ but the Spartans, despite their ties of a guest-host relationship (xenia) with the Pisistratidae, were eventually persuaded and, after an initial failed invasion, in 510 sent their king Cleomenes with a Spartan force to free Athens.⁵ To win the favor of Delphi with dedications or, as here, a generous gift was quite proper, but to bribe (ἀνέπειθον χρήμασι) the Pythia was quite a different matter. The same Cleomenes later corrupted Delphic officials to throw into question by oracular responses the legitimacy of the birth of his fellow king Demaratus, and, according to Herodotus, most Greeks gave this as the cause of Cleomenes’ later madness and grisly suicide (6.66–67.1, 75.3). By contrast Herodotus offers no condemnation or punishment of the Alcmaeonidae’s behavior.⁶ This is our first instance in which Herodotus downplays an impiety committed by a group he admired against a tyrant or despotic power.⁷ For Herodotus, in some cases at least, political objectives apparently override religious scruples.

Attica and Environs

After the Spartan expulsion of the Pisistratidae there emerged at Athens as leaders, and opponents, the Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes (perhaps the very Alcmaeonid who had bribed the Pythia [Hdt. 5.66.1]) and Isagoras. After various disputes, Isagoras, distrusting Cleisthenes’ popularity and democratic reforms, called in his xenos Cleomenes for a second time.⁸ As his reason for intervening again Cleomenes, prompted by Isagoras, charged that Cleisthenes was, as an Alcmaeonid, polluted. Over a century earlier a certain Cylon, an Olympic victor, had attempted to establish a tyranny in Athens. He had failed and found himself with his supporters besieged on the Acropolis. He took refuge as a suppliant at the statue of Athena Polias in the temple of Athena. Cylon and his supporters were eventually removed, with the promise that they would not suffer death, but the charge was that the Alcmaeonidae and their partisans had then killed them. The murder of suppliants was clear impiety, and for it the Alcmaeonidae would be polluted.⁹ Herodotus questions the charge: "Neither Cleisthenes himself nor his friends and relatives (οἱ φίλοι) shared in the murder. These things had