Reginald Walter Macan, Herodotus, The Seventh, Eighth, & Ninth Books with Introduction and Commentary

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τὴν Σαλαμῖνα ... τὴν ἑωυτῶν. Not but what Salamis was also theirs, bnt it was no part of Attica proper, it never was a ‘deme.’ (A kleruchy might be ‘Athenian’ without being ‘Attic’; cp. 6. 139 f.) For the Salaminian settlement cp. my note to 5. 77. 9, and Hicks, Manual2 (1901), p. 6.

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κήρυγμα ἐποιήσαντο. This proclamation will have succeeded the decision of βουλή and δῆμος to abandon Attica, which itself will have followed upon the return of the θεωρία from Delphi (7. 140-144). The story told c. 51 infra makes it probable that the evacuation of Attica neither was nor was intended to be complete in a strategic sense. To have abandoned city and country without such authorization constituted προδοσία, and was a capital crime, as the extant speech of Lykurgos proves—nay, even to convey out of the country into a place of safety τέκνα τε καὶ οἰκέτας (cp. c. Leocrat. 53). Lykurgos' reply on the case before us is rather rhetorical than technical: § 69 οὐ γὰρ τὴν πόλιν ἐξέλιπον ἀλλὰ τὸν τόπον μετήλλαξαν. It is not to be supposed that the Strategoi by themselves either would or could have issued such a proclamation. The terms of the psephism are inaccurately preserved in 7. 144. The psephism there recorded belongs to a much earlier stage; cp. note ad l.

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οἱ μὲν πλεῖστοι ἐς Τροίζηνα: the passage is not free from ambiguity. Are we to understand that an actual majority of Athenian households were sent across to Troizen? Or, merely, that the number at Troizen was larger than either the number in Aigina, or the number in Salamis? That any should have been deposited in Aigina at all is remarkable, in view of the recent war (7. 144) and the present jealousies (c. 92 infra); that any should have remained in Salamis but fighting men would tend to show that the Athenians by no means despaired of victory. The historic connexion between Athens and Troizen went back to the days when both were members of the Kalaurian amphiktyony (Strabo 204), to which Aigina also had belonged; and the mythic associations were no doubt deepened by the Theseuslegend, which was already fully domiciled in Attica. No state in Peloponnese was so closely connected with Athens as Troizen, which even used the Attic standard of weight; there too Athene and Poseidon had contended for possession and divided the spoil; cp. Head, H.N. 371. Yet Troizen, like Aigina, was Dorian; cp. 7. 99 supra, 9. 28 infra. It is curions that the two vessels on the look-out with the Attic cruiser in 7. 179 f. are from Troizen and Aigina.

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τῷ χρηστηρίῳ can only have been the respouse, or responses, recorded above, 7. 140—which (as I suggest) were sought and obtained only after the disaster at Thermopylai This passage, ἔσπευσαν δὲ ταῦτα ... τὴν ἀκρόπολιν, will hardly have been written before Hdt.'s first visit to Athens, and may very well be an insertion in the original draft. It is obviously not calculated primarily for an Athenian public: Athenians would be glad to hear of their fathers' derring deeds, but would not look to Hdt. for information on their own current ritual. This passage, then, probably belongs to the ‘second draft.’ Cp. Introduction, § 9.

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λέγουσι Ἀθηναῖοι: there was no real snake visible; such is the inevitable inference from this passage and the still more explicit phrase below: λέγουσί τε ταῦτα καὶ δὴ ὡς ἐόντι κτλ., a conclusion which only adds point to the Aristophanic gibe: Lysistr. 710 ἐξ οὗ τὸν ὄφιν εἶδον τὸν οἰκουρόν ποτε. The οἰκουρὸς ὄφις was no doubt sacred to Athene, and may have been regarded as a symbol, or a reincarnation, of the earth-born Erechtheus; cp. M. P. Nilsson, J.H S. xxi. (1901) p. 329; but in this case the only proof of the real presence of the serpent was the disappearance of the offering, the divine creature, no doubt, being thought to reside in the crypt of the Erechtheion (ἐνδιαιτᾶσθαι ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ, cp. c. 55 infra). With this story is naturally compared the tale of Bel and the Dragon (Apocryph. Vet. Test. ed. Fritzsche (1871) pp. 86 ff.), in which, as here, the serpent himself took the cake. Blakesley (quoting Valckenaer apparently) adds that at Alexandria any one might eat the cakes of Kronos (Athenaeus 110), while the fish-offerings to Atargatis (at Askalon? Athen. 346) were consumed by the priests as a matter of course, and above board, like the ὄ ρτοι προθέσεως of the Hebrews (cp. προτιθέντες here). The parataxis τε ... καί is observable.

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ἐπιμήνια ἐπιτελέουσι: sc. ἱερά. The offering was made once a month (perhaps at the new moon; cp. 6 57), and in this case took the form of a sweet cake (μελιτόεσσα, sc. μᾶζα).

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τῆς ἱρείης: sc. of Athene. The word σημηνάσης is consciously used of an official and solemn report; the thing reported is here indeed a ‘sign.’ τῆς θεοῦ, sc. Athene. The untouched cake proved the absence of the snake, the a bsence of the snake that of the goddess. But how long had the cake remained untouched? Did it generally disappear immediately on oblation? The serpent, as a religious symbol or cult-object, is found broad-cast in Hellas and the Mediterranean area; nor is it confined to that region; serpent-myths were “specially a bundant in Egypt and Babylonia” (Encycl. Bibl. iv. 4395), and their area may safely be extended so as to include at least India on the one side and Scandinavia on the other. Whether it have a chthonian or an autochthonous reference, embody an oracular mission, or represent the heroic ancestor, be intended to convey a phallic suggestion, or be connected with the charm and mystery of the lithest and subtlest of animal forms; or whether, on the other hand, it serve, in venomous kind, to typify the powers of evil and destruction: whatever its purpose and significance, the serpent has played a long and curious rôle in religious legend and symbolism. Has it not everywhere gained admission? Remarkably enough, the serpent scarcely figures on the monuments of ‘Mykenaean Tree and Pillar cult’ collected by A. J. Evans (J.H.S. xx. 1900, p. 52), but the missing link has been recently supplied (Annual Br. Sch. Ath. ix. 1902-3). At Knossos snakes are now to be seen brandished aloft by the Minoan goddess in her star-chamber (is she not Aphrodite Urania? cp. Hdt. 1. 105). At Delphi the dragon (there, then, an evil being) was slain, but immortalized, by Apollo. At Athens the goddess received the snake into her service; it curled round the caducens of Heimes and the magie or medicinal waud of Asklepios. The serpent inspired the oracle of Tiophonios at Lebadeia, and dominated the legend of Kadmos at Thebes; appeared in the ritual of Demeter at Eleusis, and contends with the eagle of Zeus on the coins of Elis. The god visited Olympias, the mother of Alexander, in the form of a snake (Plutarch, Alex. 2), and twin-snakes led the son safely through the wilderness to the temple of his divine sire (Arrian, A<*>ab. 3. 3. 5). The snake-symbol, the ἀγαθὸς δαίμων, preserved the walls of Pompeii (and many another city) from impurity; the serpent figures on the monuments of Mithras, with the bull, the hound, and the scorpion, as a sacred mystery. The bronze serpent which, raised upon a mast, had stayed the plague in the wilderness for the Israelites, was worshipped till a reforming king destroyed the idol, and an idealizing legend identified the serpent's image with the Evil One, who had seduced the mother of mankind beside the tree of knowledge. Henceforth, for Hebrew and for orthodox Christian thought the snake-symbol is nehustan; but the earlier associations of tree and serpent were apparently beneficent. As round the world-ash in the Edda twines the great snake, Igdrasil, so the Attic serpent may have coiled round the sacred olive of Athene in the Erechtheion; cp. the remarkable representation, reproduced in Baumeister, Denkmaeler iii. 1394, fig. 1542.

μᾶλλόν τι ... καὶ προθυμότερον. The phrase betrays the reluctance and opposition to the evacuation of the land and the abandonment of the city, which is more clearly indicated above 7. 142, and c. 51 infra.

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ἐς τὸ στρατόπεδον: at Salamis.