The Beginning of Evils (Herodotus 5.97) from a Persian Perspective

I

Students of the epic have long noted the way a passing comment in the “Iliad” traced the suffering, death, and destruction of the Trojan War to an unexpected starting point. The passage recounts the death of Phereklos, a soldier of no particular importance, who otherwise goes unmentioned.

“Meriones killed Phereklos, son of the craftsman

Harmonides, who knew how to fashion all cunning works

With his hands, for Pallas Athene loved him exceedingly.

He built Paris’s well-balanced ships,

The beginning of evils, which produced evil for all Trojans

And for himself, since he had no knowledge of the gods’ decrees.”^[1]

By designating Paris’s ships “the beginning of evils” (arkhēkakous), the text employs a formulaic phrase and a recurrent narrative construct, whereby something that would normally seem innocent, even trivial, sets in motion a series of events that unfolds over time with consequences that prove momentous.^[2] Thus, were it not for Harmonides’s skill, these ships would have been less swift and seaworthy, such that Paris could not have abducted Helen. Menelaus, in turn, would not have had to seek her recovery or avenge the breach of guest-host relations; Agamemnon would not have assembled a great coalition to help his brother; the war at Troy would not have been fought; and Phereklos – the master shipwright’s son – would not have died in the fighting, along with countless others. The causal chain goes further still, for the text traces Harmonides’s skill to the exceptional (exokha) love Athene bore him, much as the passion between Helen and Paris resulted from Aphrodite’s favor. Here, as elsewhere, the epic shows its sense that human affairs are inextricably entangled with and dependent on what the late Marshall Sahlins termed “metahuman” powers, a category that includes not only gods, but demons, spirits, ancestors, and personified abstractions.^[3]

II

Casting the Persian wars as comparable in scale and significance to those fought at Troy, Herodotus frequently alluded to scenes from the epic and occasionally made use of its formulaic language.^[4] In this spirit, he gestured to the Iliad’s account of Harmonides when identifying the ultimate cause of the later conflict. Toward that end, he called attention to the events of 499 BCE – a decade before Darius’s invasion – when Aristagoras of Miletus won Athenian support for the Ionian revolt he was organizing, after failing to secure such help from the Spartans.

“Coming before the people, Aristagoras said the same things he had said in Sparta about the rich booty to be won in Asia and how the Persians would be easy to conquer, as they customarily used neither shield, nor spear in battle. He also told them that the Milesians were originally colonists from Athens and it would be fitting for their more powerful brethren to rescue them. There was nothing he did not promise, until he swayed (anapeise) them. It seems easier to deceive (diaballein) many people rather than one, since Aristagoras failed to deceive (diaballein) Cleomenes the Spartan King, a lone individual, but he accomplished that feat with thirty thousand Athenians. Having truly been misled (anapeisthentes), the Athenians voted to send twenty ships to aid the Ionians and they appointed Melanthios commander. These ships were the beginning of evils for Greeks and Barbarians.”^[5]

Like Homer, Herodotus identified ships sailing east from Greece to Asia Minor that facilitated a seduction on the one hand, a sneak attack on the other as “the beginning of evils” (arkhē kakōn). In the event, Athenian troops borne by those twenty ships helped the Ionian rebels sack much of Sardis, the Persian satrapal capital, including the temple of its patron deity, a sacrilege that invited retribution. They failed to take the city’s citadel, however, where defenders barricaded themselves until reinforcements arrived, when the tide of battle turned abruptly. As the Ionians suffered heavy losses, the Athenians took to their ships and hurried home, rejecting their erstwhile comrades’ pleas for assistance.^[6]

Homer looked beyond Paris’s ships to their maker and beyond Harmonides to the goddess Athene. In similar fashion, Herodotus identified Aristagoras – whose name literally means “best speaker in council” (aristos + agoreuō) – as the human agent responsible for the Athenian ships’ sailing and all that followed. The verbs used for the address he gave hold particular interest, as they provide critical commentary on the Milesian’s rhetorical skill and style. Thus, as Christopher Pelling observed, Herodotus employed the verb dia-ballein so consistently with reference to Aristagoras (twice in this passage and repeatedly elsewhere) that it becomes his very hallmark.^[7] “What exactly, does diaballein mean?”, Pelling asked, then offered these observations.

“It is a difficult word: it receives seven pages in John Chadwick’s Lexicographica Graeca. It is normally translated by something like ‘trick,’ ‘deceive,’ ‘impose upon,’ ‘täuschen,’ “ingannare’ … Sometimes it does involve deceit or at least disingenuousness (Themistocles at 8.110 or Artayctes at 9.116), sometimes a barefaced twisting of an underlying truth (Histiaeus at 5.107), sometimes as when Aristagoras addressed Cleomenes in Sparta (5.50), a rather different type of disquieting persuasiveness … So diaballein in the active or middle voice is more complex than simply ‘trick.’ It basically seems to be to ‘throw words around” (this may even be the force of the dia- prefix added to the verb ballein, ‘to throw’) ‘in such a way as to wrong someone’.”^[8]

In addition to dia-ballein, the verb ana-peithein also occurs twice in the passage above: once in the active voice à propos of Aristagoras’ speech (where I have translated it as “swayed”) and once in the passive to describe its effect on the Athenians (where I translated “misled,” but “seduced,” “swayed,” and “beguiled” would be equally appropriate). While peithein denotes the act of persuading, Herodotus consistently added the preverb ana- to suggest either that persuasion was accomplished by dubious means (bribery, threats, deception), that those persuaded were led to undertake risky, morally questionable action (rebellion, usurpation, dissemblance, betrayal), or both, as in this case.^[9]

Just as the Iliad presented Athene as the ultimate source of Harmonides’ skill and Paris’s ships, one so inclined could trace Aristagoras’s slippery rhetoric to a metahuman power. For any educated Greek would know it was the trickster god Hermes who first created “lies, seductive words, and a wily character,” which he placed in Pandora’s breast as part of Zeus’s plans for humanity.^[10] Thereafter, deceptive speech is among the most effective weapons of the weak, but one that is dangerously effeminate and morally suspect. Whether Herodotus – or his readers – made this connection is far from obvious. At best, one might sense a subtextual allusion, not an explicit reference.

III

It is considerably easier to understand that Persians saw metahuman forces behind Aristagoras’s beguiling of the Athenians, since they theorized Truth and Falsehood as such. Not quite divine or demonic beings (although at times they verge on being so construed), but something on the order of transcendant absolutes that find instantiation in the people and events over and through whom they exercise power. From that perspective, Truth (Old Persian arta, Avestan aša) is not the result of true speech-acts, but their source and cause. The same holds true for the Lie (Old Persian draga, Avestan drug), which prompts – and benefits from – the myriad falsehoods it puts in circulation (and here, it is worth noting that Babylonian versions of the Achaemenid inscriptions always translate draga by pirṣātu, “lies” in the plural, rather than pirṣu in the singular).^[11] In its pristine unity, Truth provided the basis for all moral, sociopolitical, and cosmic order, while the countless and ever-proliferating forms of the Lie were responsible for all divisiveness, confusion, disorder, and conflict.^[12]

Herodotus wrote knowledgeably about Persian reverence for Truth, abhorrence of falsehood, and their view of Greeks as inveterate liars, threats not just to Achaemenid power, but to all that is right and holy.^[13] And as Darius made clear in a text he circulated throughout the empire, it was the King’s divinely-appointed responsibility to preserve Truth, establish order (restoring and maintaining it as necessary), suppress the Lie, and punish liars, especially those who incited rebellion.

“Proclaims Darius the king: These are the lands that became rebellious. The Lie made them rebellious so that these men lied to the people. Then the Wise Lord put them into my hand. As was my desire, so I did unto them. Proclaims Darius the king: You who may be king here later – protect yourself vigorously from the Lie! The man who is a liar, punish him so he is well-punished if you would think thus: ‘Let my land be secure.’ ”^[14]

Such principles informed Darius’s view of Aristagoras and the Ionian rebels, but Herodotus describes the Persian king as having been particularly offended by the Athenians, as he called on “Zeus” for success in taking vengeance and ordered a retainer to admonish him three times each day: “Sire, remember the Athenans!”^[15] To appreciate why his wrath was so focused on Athens, it is useful to consider certain aspects of Persian religious ideology and some events in the years preceding Aristagoras’s visit to Athens.

IV

Although Persians condemned all forms of falsehood, they considered breach of a contract, compact, or treaty particularly abhorrent. Such agreements, denoted by the common noun miθra-, were regarded as solemn and binding.^[16] These could be concluded between friends, business partners, family members, or groups of any size, including nations, and the larger their scale, the weightier were the consequences for any infringement.^[17] Those who reneged on such commitments – termed “miθra-liars” (Avestan miθrō.druj-) – were among the greatest malefactors, since their mendacity threatened the world’s peace, stability, and order. As the Avestan Hymn to Miθra puts it:^[18]

“The miθra-liar scoundrel

Destroys the whole land.

He strikes truthful people as hard as

A hundred sorcerors.

Do not break a miθra,

Not one you conclude with a liar,

Nor one with a truthful coreligionist.

A miθra is surely binding for you both:

Liar and truthful.”^[19]

Miθra-commitments were enforced by the metahuman who embodied their binding power. Sleepless, he has a thousand ears, ten thousand eyes, and ten thousand omniscient spies, who help him watch for even the slightest infringement of a treaty, contract, or compact.^[20] Beyond such unfailing vigilance, Miθra is described as a warrior with strength in his arms (bāzuš.aojaŋhəm raθaēštąm), a skull-crusher (kamərəδō.janəm), the strongest of deities (aojišto yazatanąm) who is best able to overcome resistance (vərəθrająstəmō yazatanąm), and he wields a hundred-headed mace, the most powerful of martial weapons (amavastəməm zaēnąm).^[21] When anyone proves false to a solemn agreement, the deity’s vengeance falls not just upon the miθra-liar himself, but on the malefactor’s people.

“If someone should betray him –

A house-lord ruling over a household,

Or a village-lord ruling over a village,

Or a district-lord ruling over a district,

Or a nation-lord ruling over a nation –

Miθra, angered at having been treated with enmity,

Comes forth to smash

The house, and the village,

And the district, and the nation.”^[22]

Such ideas informed the way Persians understood Athenian participation in the sack of Sardis. For eight years earlier, at a moment when Athens felt vulnerable to Spartan attack, Cleisthenes, leader of the newly established democracy, sent a delegation to Sardis in quest of Persian support. The response they received was exactly what anyone familiar with Achaemenid practice – and Cleisthenes was surely such – could easily have anticipated.

“When the messengers arrived and conveyed the things they had been authorized to say, Artaphrenes, satrap of Sardis, asked them “What kind of men are you and what land do you inhabit that you should need to become allies of the Persians?” Having heard the messengers’ answer, he summarized things for them. If the Athenians would give earth and water to King Darius, he would conclude an alliance with them, and if they would not give these, he ordered them to depart. The messengers spoke among themselves, deciding on their own to give earth and water, planning for the alliance to be made. Upon returning home, they received heavy blame.”^[23]

This scene has received considerable scholarly attention. Of particular interest is the way Herodotus provided latter-day Athenians multiple ways to deny that their ancestors’ attack on Sardis had violated any alliance or treaty. Thus, one could argue that the envoys exceeded their authority rendering any agreement they reached with Artaphrenes – Darius’s half-brother, whose name means “glory by virtue of Truth” (*Arta-farnah)^[24] – invalid, having never been ratified by the Assembly. More casuistically, one could observe that in principle an agreement might have been reached, but the alliance would have taken effect only when earth and water were actually delivered – not simply promised – and there is no evidence this was done.^[25]

His coyness on these points notwithstanding, Herodotus did detail some important changes that took place between 507, when the emissaries called on Artaphrenes and 499, when Athenian ships helped sack his city. In the intervening years, the Spartan threat had receded; Athens had become more confident and powerful; the tyrant Hippias (r. 527–510), whom they expelled when forming the democracy, had taken refuge in Sardis, where he slandered (dia-ballein) Athens to Artaphrenes; who then pressed for the tyrant’s restoration; an intervention the Athenians found so misguided and threatening that conflict with the Persians seemed inevitable.^[26] Clearly, these developments prompted a dramatic change in Athenian policy, while Persian understanding of their relations remained constant. For as Louis Orlin first recognized, what Herodotus described as an “alliance” (symmakhiē), Persians would have considered a miθra antarə dahyu, i.e. a treaty between two nations and peoples.^[27] As such it was a solemn, sacred commitment, irrevocably binding and enforceable through the metahuman power of Miθra, whose vengeance would fall on the miθra-liars, ensuring victory for the injured treaty-abiding people.

V

From antiquity to the present, all who considered the question have understood that offering earth and water enacted submission to Persian power and incorporation within the Achaemenid empire. Less clear is why this particular practice played that role and what exactly it signified. Several able scholars have attempted to establish its religio-symbolic significance, but in the absence of direct testimony, the suggestions that have been offered tend to be based on comparanda of questionable value. Regrettably, this is true of Louis Orlin’s appeal to theological constructs of the Younger Avesta,^[28] Amélie Kuhrt’s recourse to an episode reported in Faustus of Byzantium’s ‘History of Armenia’ that took place eight centuries after Darius’s reign (if it did so at all),^[29] and Michael Munn’s focus on Anatolian deities and cultic practice.^[30] More secure is our understanding of the gesture’s sociopolitical consequences, as recently summarized by Ela Filippone.

“The ‘earth-and-water’ formula, transmitted by Herodotus, had ‘homeland, country (in a general sense)’ as its referential meaning;

In Herodotus’ storytelling, ‘giving earth-and-water’ should be intended as ‘giving one’s own country’;

By giving earth-and-water to the king, a permanent ‘ruler-subject’ relation was established between the giver and the receiver. Some of the obligations were already implicit in the condition of subject (Old Persian bandaka-, rendered by doûlos ‘slave’ in Greek): lasting loyalty and obligation of military and material support in case of necessity.

Ideally, an earth-and-water giving people was considered as a part of the great Achaemenid oecumene.”^[31]

Particularly admirable in Filippone’s account is the way she distinguishes three types of “earth” that figure in the proceedings: 1) the soil delivered to the Persian king; 2) the land or country this gift represented; and 3) “the great Achaemenid oecumene” into which that land was incorporated. Each of these was denoted by a different lexeme in Old Persian, consideration of which can help clarify the way symbolic and material, human and metahuman concerns intersected in these ritualized prestations.

Following Filippone, let us begin with *zam, which does not appear as an independent term in the limited corpus of Achaemenid inscriptions, but supplies the second element in the toponymic compounds Uvāra-zmiya- (Avestan Xvāiri-zəma, “Chorasmia”) and Uvāra-zmi- (“Chorasmian”).^[32] Derived from Indo-European *dh(e)g̑hom, *zam denotes “earth” in the sense of “ground, dirt, soil,” like its cognates: Avestan ząm, Sanskrit kṣm, Greek χθών, Latin humus, Lithuanian žēmê, Old Church Slavonic zemlja, and others.^[33] It is the most concrete, most humble form of earth at issue, but along with water (Old Persian ap), it provides the basis for the sustenance, growth, and vitality of all life: plant, animal, and human.^[34]

Second is Old Persian dahyu, which the trilingual inscriptions render by Babylonian mātu (regularly written as the Sumerogram KUR), whose primary sense is territorial: “land, country (as political unit).”^[35] In contrast, the Elamite versions make use of a loanword whose plural occurences – da-a-yu-u-iš-pe – bear a determinative element (the final -pe) reserved for animate beings, with the result that this denotes populations, not territories.^[36] The consequent ambiguity, plus the complex relation of the Old Persian term to its Indo-Iranian cognates (Avestan dahiiu-, daŋhu and Sanskrit dásyu-) has sparked a certain amount of controversy.^[37] Most notably, Pierre Lecoq argued that dahyu primarily refers to the people, population, and civil society of a given country,^[38] while Rüdiger Schmitt insisted “daß altpers. /dahyu-/ ‘Land, usw.’ meint, nicht ‘Volk’.”^[39] Both positions strike me as overstated and I would prefer to think the sense of dahyu as “land” extends to a bounded territory, a distinct ethnicity, and a polity whose degree of independence was contingent and renegotiable.^[40]

Beyond *zam (= soil) and dahyu (= land + people), a third term denoted “earth” as the entirety of the known world. This was būmī, which appears frequently in the Old Persian corpus, most often in the cosmogonic accounts that stand at the head of twenty-three inscriptions.

“A great god is the Wise Lord, who created this earth (imam būmīm), who created that sky, who created mankind, who created happiness for mankind, who made Darius king: one king over many, one commander over many.”^[41]

Three points are worth making in the present context. First, it appears that water was implicitly understood as part of the earth at the time of its creation, since a Babylonian variant of this passage has the deity creating earth and water (KI-tì ib-nu-ú u Ameš ib-nu-ú), a move that resolves any possible misunderstanding, since the Sumerogram KI (which stands for Babylonian erṣetu), unlike Old Persian būmī, denotes not just “the earth (in cosmic sense),” but also “dry land.”^[42] The addition of A^meš makes clear that water was also present.^[43]

Second, all the original creations appear in the singular, unity being part of their primordial perfection. Subsequent fragmentation of earth (būmīm) and humanity (martiyam) into different lands-and-peoples (dahyāva, the plural of dahyu) results from the Lie’s corrosive effects, in response to which the Wise Lord took redressive action, charging the Achaemenid ruler with the task of restoring the world’s proper order.

“Proclaims Darius the King: When the Wise Lord saw this earth (imām būmīm) seething in rebellion, then he bestowed it on me. He made me king.”^[44]

“Proclaims Darius the King: When the Wise Lord made me king in this earth (ahyāyā būmiyā), by the Wise Lord’s will, I made all good.”^[45]

Third, the identification of Darius as “one king over many” (ai̯vam parūnām xšāyaθiyam) sets up an extended homology predicated on the contrast of ideal Unity and a deeply flawed, contentious Multiplicity that yearns for restoration of the harmonious primordial ideal.^[46]

One: Many ::

Truth (arta): Lie (draga) ::

Earth (būmī): Lands (dahyāva) ::

One King (aivam… xšāyaθiyam): Many subjects (parūnām)

In his later inscriptions, Darius adopted “King in this earth” (xšāyaθiya ahyāyā būmiyā), then “King in this great, far-reaching earth” (xšāyaθiya ahyāyā būmiyā vazkāyā dūrai̯ api) as the culminating item in his list of royal titles and on one occasion he went so far as to name himself “King in all the earth” (xšāyaθiya haruvahyāya būmiyā).^[47] As Clarisse Herrenschmidt recognized nearly a half century ago, with these titles the Achaemenids settled on būmī as the way to describe the unprecedentedly large, powerful, and ambitious sociopolitical entity they had constructed.^[48] In contrast to our term “empire,” their usage had a distinctly aspirational aspect, signaling a wish to restore the ideal unity of ”this earth” (imam būmīm) as the Wise Lord created it, toward which end it was necessary to champion Truth and overcome the Lie. The list of lands-and-people (dahyāva) that had been incorporated into the empire (būmī with its novel semantics) provided a measure of the progress they had made toward fulfilling that ambition.^[49]

At this point, we can begin to perceive how the three different forms of “earth” related to one another in the request Artaphrenes and other Achaemenid officials made on behalf of the Great King:

• Giving soil (zam) and Water (ap)

• represented the decision of a land-and-people (dahyu)

• to accept incorporation within the Persian empire (būmī)

• helping to restore the unity of this earth (imam būmīm)

• consistent with the original intentions and ongoing desire of the Wise Lord (Auramazdā)

• after which, any attempt to reverse this decision

• would represent the breach of a binding commitment (miθra)

• under influence of the Lie (draga)

Considered from the perspective of this religiously grounded imperial ideology, the ships that helped sack Sardis not only revealed the Athenians to be miθra-liars, it set back the project of world-restoration, producing disorder, conflict, unhappiness, and untruth, provoking Miθra’s wrath, the Wise Lord’s sorrow, and making it necessary for the Achaemenid ruler to set things right. For the beginning of evils was not just those ships, but – as always – the corrosive, metahuman force of the Lie.