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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Classica Monacensia
- Sprache: Englisch
This volume is dedicated to the logos of Cambyses at the beginning of Book 3 in Herodotus' Histories, one of the few sources on the Persian conquest of Egypt that has not yet been exhaustively explored in its complexity. The contributions of this volume deal with the motivations and narrative strategies behind Herodotus' characterization of the Persian king but also with the geopolitical background of Cambyses' conquest of Egypt as well as the reception of the Cambyses logos by later ancient authors. "Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos" exemplifies how a multidisciplinary approach can contribute significantly to a better understanding of a complex work such as Herodotus' Histories.
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Andreas Schwab / Alexander Schütze (eds.)
Herodotean Soundings
The Cambyses Logos
Umschlagabbildung: Marmorsphinx als Basis. Neapel, Museo Nazionale, Inv. 6882. Guida Ruesch 1789. H: 91 cm INR 67. 23. 57. Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.
Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften in Ingelheim am Rhein.
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.24053/9783823393290
© 2023 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 0941-4274
ISBN 978-3-8233-8329-1 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0391-6 (ePub)
Contents
Herodotean Soundings
The Cambyses Logos
In the present volume, researchers from different disciplines of Ancient Studies examine Herodotus’ famous narrative about the Persian king Cambyses and his conquest of Egypt. The papers here represent new and original research by an international group of both renowned scholars and young academics presented and discussed in an interdisciplinary circle in Heidelberg in June 2017.1
An important incentive for choosing the theme of the conference was the effort of one of the editors to understand the Cambyses logos in the context of his habilitation thesis focusing on encounters with foreign religions in the Histories of Herodotus.2 However, the Cambyses logos is not only of special interest for Herodotus’ account of foreign religion. Herodotus’ work offers the only comprehensive narrative of the conquest of Egypt under the Great King. At the same time, Cambyses and his misdeeds represent the first pinnacle of Herodotus’ characterization of a whole series of despots, beginning with the Lydian and Persian kings Croesus and Cyrus. In the logos on Cambyses, Herodotus demonstrates his understanding of the relativistic, and culturally relativistic, nature of history in a particularly condensed form as he contrasts Persian, Egyptian, and Greek views of the events he narrates. Last but not least, beginning with the opening of Book 2, the Cambyses logos in fact also frames the extensive Egyptian logos of Book two which in turn can be understood as a prelude to the narrative on Cambyses at the beginning of Book three.
This central narrative from Herodotus’ Histories has been studied from the perspectives of Ancient Greek language and literature, Egyptology, and ancient history. However, these perspectives and also the experts in each of the fields are rarely brought together. The idea of the conference goes back to the desire to create an opportunity for scholars from these disciplines to meet and focus intensely on a discrete and seminal section of Herodotus’ work. The present volume attests to the benefit of such a multi-disciplinary approach to Herodotus that arises from intense focus on a small, but important section of his work. Its contributors not only arrive at new conclusions to challenging aspects of Herodotus’ account, but at the same time have opened up further perspectives for future research.
In the last twenty years, a number of collected volumes dealing with different aspects of Herodotus’ Histories have been published which illustrate the complexity of this multifaceted text. One may roughly discern two tendencies: on the one hand, studies that deal with the text of the Histories itself through various modes of literary analysis, and on the other hand, works that juxtapose the narratives handed down in the Histories with indigenous sources belonging to the cultures his work describes. A number of volumes deal with Herodotus’ worldview and his portrayal of the other.3 Other works focus on the narrative strategies of the ancient author, illuminate the Histories in the context of contemporary historiography, or relate them to myth.4 In addition, there are volumes that juxtapose the Histories with contemporary sources of the cultures described by Herodotus or deal with how Herodotus portrays the Persians and incorporates ancient Near Eastern motifs into his narrative.5
Of some relevance for this volume is the conference volume Hérodote et l’Égypte. Regards croisés sur le livre II de l’Enquête d’Hérodote edited by Laurent Coulon in 2013, in which the second book of Herodotus’ Histories was subjected to a revision building on the current state of Egyptological research on Egypt in the 1st millennium BC.6 Thanks to the numerous religious texts and archaeological findings from Late Period Egypt that have been published in recent decades, the facts that Herodotus knows to report about the Egypt of his time can be evaluated much better than Alan B. Lloyd was able to do in his commentary on Book two.7 In fact, it is possible to identify a real historical background for many of Herodotus’ descriptions, some of which seem strange to the modern reader. A whole series of contributions in the present volume continue these in-depth soundings against the background of the current state of research.
With regard to method and approach, two volumes in particular influenced our perspective. While in the above-mentioned volumes a variety of text passages is discussed, the following collected volume takes a different approach: In Reading Herodotus. A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus, the contributing authors discuss the logoi of an entire book in terms of structure, language, and place in the overall structure of the Histories as well as the significance for the overall interpretation of Herodotus’ monumental work.8 This approach of a discussion of a coherent, continuous section from the Histories is followed here on a small scale using the example of the Cambyses logos, because only in this way do repeating motifs, figures or rhetorical strategies become visible for a discussion from different angles.
A multidisciplinary approach with a focus on the text of a particular episode from Herodotus seems suitable and promising for examining the ‘multivocality of his text’ in a multidisciplinary environment.9 In the volume Interpreting Herodotus, the editors examine anew Charles W. Fornara’s thesis that Herodotus’ Histories are to be read against the background of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War and that Herodotus’ criticism of Athenian expansionist policies, which ultimately led to Athens’ downfall, is inherent in the work.10 This question can also be applied to Herodotus’ Cambyses logos (and the preceding Saite History), as the contributions by Elizabeth Irwin and Alexander Schütze in this volume show.11 Seen in this light, the volume also represents a continuation of this important contribution to the understanding of the Histories.
A narrative such as the Cambyses logos provides numerous challenges and welcomes, if not also demands, a discussion from multiple disciplinary angles. It deals with a concrete historical event, the conquest of Egypt by the Persian Great King, but is composed of a whole series of peculiar shorter narratives inviting critical examination of Herodotus’ account, whether the presumed reasons for Egypt’s conquest, descriptions of his failed campaigns, or the characterization of Cambyses as a mad king. At the same time, the logos alludes to and exploits in its telling a variety of Egyptian realia, such as the famous Apis bull, the oracle of Buto or the tomb of Amasis, that can be correlated with sources in the Egyptian tradition. We therefore see this logos as a perfect opportunity to conduct an interdisciplinary experiment that examined how all these aspects of the text might be dealt with together on one occasion and in one volume.
With its multidisciplinary structure, this volume addresses two research desiderata. On the one hand, for Egyptology and Ancient History, Herodotus’ narrative about the Persian king in Egypt is, along with the Egyptian inscription of Udjahorresnet, the only narrative source on a seminal event in Egyptian history: the conquest of Egypt by the Persians brought the Saite period to an abrupt end, a period that had brought Egypt a late-flourishing cultural ‘renaissance’.12 And yet despite this extraordinarily central importance of Herodotus’ Histories for the Egyptological study of this historical and political caesura, it must be noted that Egyptologists have often engaged with the Histories with a particular interest in Book two mostly concentrating on what discrete facts might yield without a view of the overall work and composition of the Histories.13 But such focus on the historicity of Herodotus’ account in Egyptology and ancient history—which is often difficult to verify due to the lack of relevant sources—can sometimes cause one to lose sight of the fact that Herodotus’ multi-layered text is more than a mere ‘factual account’. Rather it is a highly complex and well-composed narrative of an author who pursued an agenda with regard to his Greek readership in a highly sophisticated age.14 On the other hand, Classicists find themselves all too often in want of the expertise of Egyptologists if they are to understand what might be distinctive about Herodotus’ handling of this material.15 Recent research in Demotic studies and discoveries in Egyptian archaeology (especially in the oases of the Western Desert, e.g. in the oases of Dakhla or Kharga), illuminates Herodotus’ text and often vindicates him. In doing so, such research can open up hitherto unimagined perspectives on the Greek text as well as on its meaning and interpretation16, whether, for instance, by placing Herodotus’ disparate narratives about the failed campaigns of Cambyses in relation to the geopolitical conditions in the areas bordering Egypt in the late 6th century BC or by making rather peculiar descriptions of Egyptian cult images plausible on the basis of archaeological findings.
The contributions in this volume are not intended to offer a “commentary” on the Cambyses logos. Instead, they both suggest to readers the kind of direction a commentary needs to take if it is to embrace the many facets of this complex and monumental work and constitute an important contribution to such a project in the future. Achaemenid and Ancient Near Eastern perspectives such as the source situation for the reign of Cambyses in the Persian heartland or Babylonia are not treated exhaustively, nor are text passages such as the excursus on Ethiopia.17 One aim of the individual contributions is rather to offer selected and targeted ‘soundings’ that deal with specific passages of the Herodotus text. On the one hand, these are ‘soundings’ taken directly from Herodotus’ text; on the other hand, they are ‘soundings’ of Herodotus’s legacy, impact on multiple fields of research, such as Egyptology, philology, ancient history, archaeology, ethnography, philosophy, and history of religion, which examine the logos of Cambyses and in doing so also pose the difficult question of what we can know about the ‘historical’ Cambyses. Following previous studies on the Cambyses logos, the contributions of this volume are organized in four parts reflecting the complexity of this particular passage in Herodotus’ Histories.18
Part 1: Linguistic, narratological and philosophical perspectives
The first part of the volume contains three contributions that deal with the text of the Cambyses logos in particular, while all the other contributions relate it more or less to other sources. They offer a first close reading of the Cambyses logos from linguistic, narratological, historical and philosophical perspectives, looking at and analysing the logos as a whole.
In the first contribution Elizabeth Irwin (“Just Who is Cambyses? Imperial Identities and Egyptian Campaigns”) explores the method of reading required to get at what the complex and idiosyncratic account of Herodotus’ Cambyses in Egypt attempts to communicate about historiography, culture relativity, and morality. Building on her seminal article (“Just Why did Cambyses Conquer Egypt?”) from 2017, Irwin investigates the content and mode of narration of Herodotus’ extended Cambyses logos in order to demonstrate the degree to which the text challenges readers not to become implicated in the madness of its character. She reveals that challenge which involves their having to account not only for the cause of Cambyses’ madness, but also for the cause of Herodotus’ characterization of him as such. Through a close reading of the episodes of Cambyses’ story Irwin illustrates how Herodotus’ text holds up a mirror to those readers who fail to recognize the aims and complexity of his account, and the reflection found there is a startling, and not attractive, one.
In “Herodotus’ verbal strategies to depict Cambyses’ abnormality” Anna Bonifazi delves into the linguistic choices Herodotus makes in his characterization of Cambyses. Bonifazi draws close attention to the language Herodotus uses in depicting the king’s abnormal behaviour, behaviour that is largely nonverbal. Her argument draws on the general assumption that the historical, religious, and cultural significance of any Herodotean logos cannot be considered independently of the actual words it uses. At first, she illustrates how Herodotus shapes this logos by interweaving the accounts he attributes to others with his own narrative perspective to form his own inquiries into a literary work of art. Her second point is to reinforce Munson’s idea of an implicit comparison between Cambyses and Herodotus—words and non-words being the pivotal elements. Thirdly, she relates his linguistic choices to the cognitive and semiotic phenomenon of iconicity. In doing so, she illuminates individual recurring patterns that represent strategies with iconic meanings to convey Cambyses’ abnormality.
Anthony Ellis examines the phenomenon of cultural relativism at play in the Cambyses logos in order to understand the text’s relationship to the kind of relativity practiced and advocated both by his contemporaries and by later moral philosophers. Ellis argues that Herodotus’ relativist perspective on the validity of diverse cultural practices is closely linked with the differences in how various peoples conceive of what is divine and holy. He draws attention to and examines the tension displayed in the work between the relativist-sounding comments in the Egyptian logos and other apparently non-relativist statements contains both in the logos and the rest of his work.
Part 2: The Cambyses logos and other sources on the conquest of Egypt
The second part deals with the relation of the Cambyses logos to contemporary Egyptian sources and its reception by later classical authors. While the first contribution provides a typology of sources on the conquest of Egypt under Cambyses, classifying them according to temporal and spatial proximity to the event, the second contribution deals with the image of Cambyses in Egyptian sources. The third contribution in turn traces the reception of the Cambyses logos by later authors who adapted the narrative material to suit their needs. Taken together, these contributions offer a comprehensive overview of the sources available to us.
In her contribution on “Perception and Reception of Cambyses as Conqueror and King of Egypt: Some Fundamentals”, Melanie Wasmuth draws attention to several studies evaluating the primary sources from the later 6th century BCE in Egypt and Persia that draw a very different picture of Achaemenid royal display and reception. She notes that scholarly discussion of the extent to which these primary sources are representative for the reception of Achaemenid rule is largely missing. Thus, her contribution seeks to address this gap in the scholarship by focussing on four questions: which sources are available to reveal ancient contemporary perceptions on Cambyses as king of Egypt? Could a different image of Cambyses be displayed in the contemporary sources from Egypt? To which extent can the primary and secondary sources on Cambyses’ reign help to re-evaluate Herodotus’ history construction? And finally, how might the Cambyses logos be turned into a case study for discussing history constructions from an inside/outside angle? Her answers are illuminating and help to define the direction future research might take.
In the chapter “Cambyses the Egyptian?”, Alexander Schütze deals with the question of how Cambyses and the penultimate ruler of the Egyptian 26th dynasty, Amasis, were remembered in Egypt in the 5th century BC. In the absence of relevant sources that would provide information on this, the focus of the investigation is on how the names of said kings are handled: during the short reign of Cambyses over Egypt, the name of Amasis was apparently written without a royal title in documentary texts, and his name, as well as those of members of the royal family, were physically removed from both royal monuments and those of high officials. By contrast, the evidence suggests that Darius treated his predecessor with the same disrespect, depriving his name of a royal title. Schütze interprets these observations against the backdrop of the two Persian Great Kings’ efforts to legitimize their rule and discusses the role of Amasis in the Histories with regard to Herodotus’ portrayal of Cambyses.
Finally, Reinhold Bichler deals with a special aspect of reception: the image of Cambyses in Greco-Roman texts written after Herodotus. He begins by concentrating on literary “echoes” of Herodotus’ “mad king”. Most of the author’s well-known stories, such as Cambyses’ worst acts of violence directed against the corpse of Amasis and the killing of the Apis, were extracted from the wider complex narrative of the Histories and transformed through reworking to fit new narrative contexts. In the second part he asks whether there is “a post-Herodotean Cambyses apart from Herodotus?”, and shows that within the widespread stories of Cambyses’ alleged destruction and plundering of the Egyptian sanctuaries and his misguided campaigns against the Ammonians and the Ethiopians, we find numerous elements that derive from other sources or are greatly extended variants of Herodotus’ narrative or even free inventions. Bichler makes available an appendix that outlines in detail the variety of facts and names that occur in the stories of Cambyses pertaining to his family, his conquest of Egypt and his fate.
Part 3: Geopolitical dimensions of the Cambyses logos
The third part deals with the geopolitical dimensions of Herodotus’ account of Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt. While one contribution deals with the Arabian island and its possible role in the conquest of Egypt, three contributions study Cambyses’ campaign against the Ammonians in the Egyptian Western Desert. This narrative of Herodotus is examined from a historiographical, archaeological and philological perspective, which together provide a dense description of this peculiar passage.
Gunnar Sperveslage investigates the striking parallels between the annals of Esarhaddon and Herodotus’ account of Cambyses’ rule. As there are no other sources that prove an alliance between Cambyses and Arab tribes, Sperveslage argues that Herodotus might have placed a historical event from the time of Esarhaddon in the context of the Persian conquest of Egypt. Seen this way the tribe of Qedar, which had a renewed and powerful position after the end of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, would be the likely candidate for an alliance in connection with the conquest of Egypt. Herodotus’s report fits with the historical and archaeological situation in Northwest Arabia.
The following three contributions deal with one topic from different perspectives: the march of the Persian army against the Ammonians into the desert. Damien Agut engages in fundamental source criticism devoted particularly to Herodotus’ narrative at 3.26. Agut argues that Herodotus combined two strands of memory in narrating the fate of Cambyses’ army in the Western Desert. While he attributes the first part of the narrative (3.26.1–2) to common memories of the Greeks living in Egypt, he attributes the second part (3.26.2–3) of the narrative, that which is explicitly not shared by the Egyptians and others, to the Ammonians (i.e. the inhabitants of the oases) who have good reason to narrate the destruction and almost numinous downfall of the Persian army in a sandstorm. The “fairy tale” of the Ammonians would then have reached Herodotus through the mediation of the Cyreneans. In addition to this source-critical distinction, Agut argues that the Persian king was interested in the oases of the western desert for strategic geopolitical and economic reasons: the Persian king sought to control a ‘rebellion zone’ and was interested in gaining control of valuable trade routes.
In contrast, Olaf Kaper argues that new archaeological excavations and finds in the Dakhla Oasis point to an Egyptian king Petubastis IV, who is said to have successfully rebelled against Persian rule and controlled large parts of Upper Egypt. The new material establishes that Petubastis IV successfully revolted against Persian rule and after which, crowned in Memphis, he went on to control Upper Egypt. Moreover, his reign lasted long enough to undertake building activities in the Dakhla Oasis as an important power base for him. Against this background, Kaper is particularly interested in two questions: when the revolt under Petubastis IV began—in view of Uzume Wijnsma’s argumentation, which refers to the investigation of the rebellions in the Behistun inscription—and why Cambyses moved with his "expedition" into the western desert. He explains the Persian king's expedition as a punitive measure aimed at suppressing a dangerous rebellion. The revolt in the desert was the real reason for the march and especially the large army. According to Kaper the story of the sandstorm was always more fantastic than it could be credible, but a military confrontation is more likely to have dispersed the Persian army and severely reduced its number.
The following contribution by Andreas Schwab examines Herodotus’ account of the disappearance of Cambyses’ army in the desert from a philological perspective. He shows that Herodotus’ narrative of the campaign against the Ammonians contains some linguistic clues that are ambiguous to his Greek readers. These clues reveal hints of earlier Greek literature and elicit literary motifs and mythical references. Based on Herodotus’ multi-layered text, he argues that due to the frequently and significantly used word ψάμμος (sand) and the “Ammonians” (= “those who belong to the sand”), another way of reading and interpreting is possible. In support of and alongside the examinations of Agut and Kaper, Schwab argues, in particular with regard to Thebes, the Ammonians and ‘psammos’, for Herodotus’ literary engagement with Pindar. His investigation illustrates how the text’s literary and poetic design—with special attention to wordplay and references to Pindar—may support Kaper’s and Agut’s theses regarding a possible rebellion and even a rebel enigmatically present in the text of Herodotus.
Part 4: Cambyses and the Egyptian Temples
The last three contributions in this volume deal with a topic that has occupied generations of Egyptologists: Cambyses’ treatment of the temples of Egypt during and after the conquest of the land on the Nile. Herodotus’ account of Cambyses’ atrocities such as the murder of the sacred Apis bull, but especially those of later authors such as Diodorus and Strabo on the destruction of Egyptian temples, have strongly shaped the perception of researchers. While the first contribution offers an overview of the events described by Herodotus, another presents an Egyptian source on the cult politics of Cambyses in Egypt. The last ‘sounding’ places Herodotus’ account of the important sanctuary of Memphis in its historical context.
Dan’el Kahn deals specifically with Cambyses’ attitude towards the temples of Egypt in contemporary and later sources. He first discusses the conquest of Egypt under the Great King and its impact on Egyptian temples, drawing primarily on late sources. He then briefly discusses Cambyses’ campaigns against the Ethiopians and Ammonians and focuses on the atrocities that Cambyses is said to have committed in Egypt according to Herodotus. Finally, he presents Jeremiah 43 as another source not yet discussed in this context.
Fabian Wespi’s contribution takes up the topic of contemporary realia behind the negative image of Cambyses—especially the curtailment of temple revenues. In addition to the often-cited Pap. Bibliothèque Nationale Paris 215, he adduces recent evidence that demonstrates deviations from the known version in the designation of the name of Cambyses. These new findings have consequences for the historical image that Cambyses has among Egyptologists and have a connection to Schütze’s contribution.
In “Cambyses and the sanctuary of Ptah” Joachim Friedrich Quack investigates a short episode, namely Hdt. 3.37. Quack demonstrates that Herodotus’ story about a dwarf-shaped cultic image of Ptah in Memphis as well as about children of Ptah in the same shape, located in an area of restricted access, and the link to Phoenicia and the Pataikoi, agree very well with the available Egyptian and Phoenician evidence. For the way the episode could have been shaped in memory, he draws attention to evidence for existing patterns of Egyptian thought.
The aim of this volume is to prepare and offer a deeper understanding of the Cambyses logos and its role for the historiography of this important epochal change in the history of late modern Egypt through marrying close reading of Herodotus’ logos in its own historical and cultural context with current research on the geopolitical relations of Egypt and its neighbouring countries during the Persian conquest (among other soundings). Moreover, it aims also to show what a reading of this extensive and complex text that considers both the literary character of the Histories and the realia behind the narratives could look like. It illustrates what such a marriage of disciplines might contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the genesis and meaning of the Histories.
This volume may be read in exactly this sense: the contributions are organized in four thematic clusters examining one aspect of Herodotus’ logos of Cambyses from different perspectives. In part, the contributions complement each other, e.g., when Part 1 discusses Herodotus’ narrative style, his choice of words and his handling of the cultural relativism of his time. Part 3 even offers three different readings of the same passage, the Ammonian logos, which vividly illustrate the complexity of possible interpretations. In part, the contributions provide very different assessments of ancient sources, with regard to the image of Cambyses in later sources, or Cambyses’ dealings with Egyptian temples. We hope that these contradictions will lead to a productive discussion of the above-mentioned questions.
The volume’s central premise, and that of the conference upon which it was based, is that such interdisciplinary discussions are absolutely required if we are to understand adequately the contribution a work of such complexity as the Histories can make to understanding not only the various histories of the ancient world, but also the histories of the disciplines that study them. One may say that hardly any ancient research discipline does not refer to Herodotus’ Histories in one way or another, and therefore the editors are convinced that the contributions are particularly well chosen to demonstrate the benefit from joint research by different disciplines of ancient studies on a concrete subject within them such as Cambyses’ logos. In this sense, they hope that further, equally fruitful in-depth studies may follow.
A Mobility Grant from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg supported the conference at the International Academic Forum Heidelberg. For their grants for the printing costs and their support we like to express our thanks to the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften and the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU).
For their support in the preparation, we express our sincere thanks to our student helpers Patrick König and Caroline Stadlmann (LMU Munich) as well as Judith Adam, Samantha Philips, Christine Zaun and Jannik Sommer (CAU Kiel). Cordial thanks are due to Dr. Elizabeth Irwin (Columbia University) for stimulating and rich discussions of Herodotus’s narrative art and for linguistic improvements in the preparation of the volume.
Special thanks are due to the two editors of Classica Monacensia, Prof. Dr. Claudia Wiener and Prof. Dr. Martin Hose (LMU Munich), who both welcomed with pleasure the inclusion of our volume in this series. For their generosity and support, we thank them both most sincerely.
Munich and Kiel, January 2023 A. Schütze and A. Schwab
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Schwab (2020): Andreas Schwab, Fremde Religion in Herodots Historien: Mehrdimensionale Religion bei Persern und Ägyptern, Hermes-Einzelschrift 118, Stuttgart.
Török (2014): László Török, Herodotus in Nubia, Mnemosyne Suppl. Vol. 368, Leiden and Boston.
Wasmuth and Creasman (2020): Melanie Wasmuth and Pearce Paul Creasman (eds.), Udjahorresnet and His World, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 26, Tucson.
Map of the Eastern Mediterranean with selected place names mentioned in the Cambyses Logos or discussed in this volume (© A. Schütze)
Close readings: Linguistic, narratological and philosophical perspectives
Just Who is Cambyses?
Imperial Identities and Egyptian Campaigns
It was with enthusiasm that I accepted the invitation to participate in ‘Religion, Violence, and Interaction? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Herodotus’ Narrative on Cambyses’, the workshop that gave rise to this volume. The event offered a unique opportunity to meet with scholars from other disciplines and methodological perspectives in order both to share and to have challenged the understandings I had come to have about Herodotus’ treatment of Cambyses, and to explore further the method of reading required to get at what his complex and idiosyncratic account attempts to communicate about historiography, culture relativity, and morality. Those understandings were largely published in 2017 in an article on the first chapters of Herodotus’ account of Cambyses’ rule, his conquest of Egypt.20 In ‘Just why did Cambyses conquer Egypt? Herodotus’ logos of Cambyses’ Egyptian Campaign: his story as history’, the logoi pertaining to Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt were closely analyzed as an introduction to themes crucial to both Persian history of this period and to Herodotus’ account of it to follow in Book 3, and also as an oblique, yet sustained allusion to Athens’own military operations in Egypt and its citizenship law passed at the end of that period in 451/0 BC. Here in the present article I want to apply the approach of that article and its conclusions to the content and mode of narration of Herodotus’ extended Cambyses logos in order to demonstrate the degree to which the text challenges readers not to become implicated in the madness of its character, a challenge which involves their having to account not only for the cause of Cambyses’ madness, but also for the cause of Herodotus’ characterization of him as such. Herodotus’ text will be shown to hold up a mirror to those readers who fail to recognize the aims and complexity of his account, and the reflection found there will prove not a flattering one. As background to the present discussion, I will provide a brief recap of the conclusions of that earlier article.
The logos of Cambyses’ presence in Egypt sets out, as is fitting at its beginning, with an account of the aitie of his campaign, an account ostensibly explaining why Cambyses went to Egypt, but one whose real importance lies in its introduction of two themes central to this chapter in Persian history and to Herodotus’ handling of it. The ‘account’ is actually three different accounts dealing with the Egyptian concubine Nitetis and the role that her relationship to Cambyses had in inciting the campaign. This composite account serves two functions: first, it provides an implicit exploration of the difficulties of accounting for the cause of an event lying at some distance in the past, and, second, it foregrounds the question of Cambyses’ identity, who this Egyptian pallake Nitetis was, and—more importantly—who she was to him, and therefore what his motives would have been in bringing an army to Egypt.21 This second point is not unrelated to the first: the narrator comments in the second logos that in making Cambyses son of Nitetis, the Egyptians pervert the logos in order to be related to the house of Cyrus, and in doing so he conveys a crucial point about the role of human agency in altering accounts of the past, not least when constructing (often self-serving) narratives of causation.
This seemingly offhand dismissal of the Egyptian version disguises its overall importance, introducing as it does three central themes in Herodotus’ depiction of both Cambyses and Persian monarchy at this juncture in Persian history. First, in its portrayal of the flagrantly mad Cambyses, the narrative implicitly explores madness as a deviation from and disrespect of norms, nomoi, and further raises questions about the criteria or standard against which one is able to declare someone mad, particularly on a figure occupying the exceptional position of king, which as the royal judges point out is a kind of law unto itself.22 Readers are invited to view Cambyses’ various acts from differing perspectives involving the question of who he is as agent, Persian or half-Egyptian. The text at once raises the question, against whose nomos, Persian, Egyptian, (implicitly) Greek, Cambyses should be judged, while also rendering it otiose: for out of this display of multiple cultural perspectives, Herodotus’ logoi ultimately make an implicit argument for certain acts and attitudes being worthy of censure from all points of view. An argument for universal nomoi is paradoxically made through a display of cultural relativity.23 This is Herodotus the sophist at his finest, making the weaker argument the stronger, but doing so for the uncustomary purpose of upholding traditional morality.24 At the same time, his account subtly raises the question of how anyone can be in any position to judge Cambyses when it is impossible to be sure about even the cause of something on the scale of his expedition to Egypt or something as basic as the background of his mother, Egyptian or Achaemenid. The question of Cambyses’ identity will, in fact, prove central to understanding the history recounted in Book 3.
Second, with regard to Darius, the text sows seeds of uncertainty about the version of history it seems to go on to endorse. For in dismissing the Egyptians’ claim that Nitetis was Cambyses’ mother as a fabrication designed to connect them to the house of Cyrus (Hdt. 3.2: ἀλλὰ παρατρέπουσι τὸν λόγον προσποιεύμενοι τῇ Κύρου οἰκίῃ συγγενέες εἶναι—‘But they pervert the story in an attempt to pretend they are related to the house of Cyrus’), it draws attention to a distortion that many scholars of Persia impute to Darius in his efforts to legitimize what was actually a usurpation of the Persian throne.25 Although seeming to maintain the main thesis of the official Persian version of Darius’ succession—albeit with significant variation—26 as his having deposed a pretender to the throne, the version he gives is only ‘something like’ that promulgated by Darius: Herodotus’ introduction of a second Magus into the revolt (Hdt. 3.61.2), the brother of the first, one who looked like the brother Cambyses killed, and indeed, didn’t only look like him, but also (remarkably)—the force of καὶ δὴ καὶ had the same name—seems designed to test the credulity of readers,27 whose confidence should be further shaken by encountering a Darius prepared to transgress a fundamental Persian nomos (so Hdt. 1.136.2) in finding lying no different than telling the truth, both having profit as their goal.28
This final point opens the third path to understanding Herodotus’ handling of Cambyses. For this chapter of Persian history itself provided Herodotus with the invitation to take great licence in its recounting: it would have been clear to well-informed people of Herodotus’ day, if clear to us now at this distance, that owing to the efforts of Cambyses’ successor very little, let alone the truth, about Cambyses could be known, or at least known to the majority of his readers.29 This period of Persian history gave Herodotus both the inspiration and the licence to manipulate it—as Darius had, but to a different end—through fabricating stories about Cambyses in such a way as to invoke the ruler of another arche closer to Herodotus’ contemporaries, an arche that waged its own Egyptian campaign: namely, that of Athens. Of this Egyptian ambition, Herodotus reminds readers at salient moments of the campaign (Hdt. 3.12, 3.15) and once again at the very conclusion of Book 3 (Hdt. 3.160.2); moreover, Athens’ own ‘imperial phase’ was characterized by its own nomos restricting legitimacy and inheritance (Plut. Per. 37) in the form of Pericles’ Citizenship Law, passed at the time of their own Egyptian campaign and evocative of that attributed to the Persians in chapter 2.30 Moreover, in the eyes of some contemporaries these Greek possessors of this arche were deemed ‘mad’ by their attitudes towards the nomoi of themselves and others, as well as for denying the universality of certain (moral) nomoi. This essay develops that earlier argument by demonstrating how Herodotus’ narrative collapses the distinctions between Persia and Athens, and in particular between the figure of Cambyses as he pursues his imperial ambitions in scornful and indiscriminate disregard for nomoi—both his own and others’—and his readers who may have been (or be) afflicted with the same kinds of madness (see below).
The larger, more fundamental questions of that article were these: how are we are meant to be reading Herodotus’ text and what exactly is it trying to communicate to its readers through an account such as the one he provides in the case of Cambyses? An essential tenet in my reading of Herodotus is that he is a highly self-conscious, highly rhetorical author, who has composed an account full of pitfalls designed to entrap readers who fail adequately to recognize these qualities at work within his text: quite simply, such readers risk finding that the naivité or gullibility that they have assumed in the narrator to be in reality nothing more than a demonstration of their own. In particular, those who underestimate the sophistication of this text, treating Herodotus as naively misled into accepting the truth or at least the sincerity of his sources, are in most cases the ones naively misled by their source, his text. The implications of this point for the text’s handling of Cambyses would be that for his account to be so at odds with the primary evidence available to us,31 that is, for there to have survived such diverse near contemporary sources allowing even us to realize this, despite the far greater chasm separating us from this period than Herodotus himself, would require either that he created such an account consciously, or—despite his claims—that he has greatly misrepresented, if not entirely fabricated, the firsthand experience of Egypt that he purports to possess.32 This point takes on even greater weight when we realize that Herodotus himself reveals, in the very second chapter of book 3, the possibility of seeing Cambyses otherwise, from an Egyptian perspective that embraced him as their own, and labels, in the third chapter, ‘unpersuasive to me’ an account that imputes to Cambyses the express intention of doing what Herodotus’ account goes on to portray him as doing, namely, turning Egypt upside down.
1Overview: the Cambyses logos—doubles, identity, recognition
The narrative of Book 3 is one of doubles: two Nitetises (Hdt. 3.1), two corpses said to belong to Amasis (Hdt. 3.16.5–7), two stories of Cambyses’ brother’s death (Hdt. 3.30.3), two sister-wives of Cambyses (Hdt. 3.31.6), two stories of one of their deaths (Hdt. 3.32, with two puppies!), two Magi (Hdt. 3.61), two Smerdises (Hdt. 3.61.2), two Agbatanas (Hdt. 3.64.3–4), two stories about how Darius’ horse won the throne for him (Hdt. 3.87) 33 Duplicity in its two-fold meaning as both ‘doubleness’ and ‘deception’ perfectly sums up the dominant thematic of Herodotus’ logos of Persian monarchy in this period.34 Held up next to Egyptian or Persian contemporary sources, Herodotus’ account constitutes what he might himself have called a διξὸς λόγος (‘a second, opposing account’) about Cambyses’ rule or Darius’ accession, and in the context of Book 3 this can hardly be accidental.35
In addition to duplicity, from its very outset identity and recognition are major themes of the Cambyses logos. Again and again, characters are depicted as failing to recognize that names both denote and mask, and that a single name may belong to more than one entity. On the flip side, the text also explores how one entity may occupy two (if not more) identities at once or be one of two mutually exclusive identities: king of Persia and either consort or son of Nitetis, entirely Persian or half-Egyptian, a brother and husband of each of two sisters. Oedipus’ riddle and life come to mind—one creature can at different times walk on four, two, and three legs, one man can at the same time be stranger and native to Thebes, son and husband, father and brother. In the episodes of this logos that follow this comparison with tragedy will be seen to be central to Cambyses’ story owing to the defining features of that genre.
Cambyses’ logos begins and ends with questions about identity, whether of Cambyses—who was it who bore him?—or of the usurper of his throne, his brother or an imposter—seemingly the latter, but the figure who unmasks him openly declares that for profit’s sake he would become an unabashed liar. It begins with two people called Nitetis and ends with two called Smerdis. But might there also be two ‘Cambyses’? On one level, there certainly are in the form of two versions of the same person, the one Herodotus depicted and what seems the alternative figure for whom other sources exist, although there are two of these, Persian and Egyptian. But my concern here is not with the same individual, named Cambyses, for whom there are multiple versions, but rather that the one name, ‘Cambyses’, might be denoting more than one entity, the Cambyses of the narrative and a ‘Cambyses’ to whom his depiction alludes: to paraphrase Nitetis when she points out that she is not the Nitetis Cambyses thinks she is (Hdt. 3.1.4: διαβεβλημένος ὑπὸ Ἀμάσιος οὐ μανθάνεις, ‘You don’t understand that Amasis has put one over on you’), readers do not understand how Herodotus may have put one over on them in outfitting some other figure in the trappings of the Persian king. Perhaps they need to ask, using Cambyses’ phrase with a substitution, who is ‘stepping on the name’ of Cambyses (ἐπιβατεύων [τοῦ Καμβύσεω] οὐνόματος, Hdt. 3.63.3, 3.67.2) and who is ultimately responsible for the version of Cambyses, son of Cyrus, that Herodotus chose to present despite actual Egyptian sources suggesting Herodotus’ Cambyses to be an imposter.
I will argue that the text challenges readers to recognize the ways in which a narrative about Cambyses may also double for a narrative about certain of Herodotus’ readers. This possibility can also be framed using another prominent theme of Book 3: tragedy. One will see tragic allusion writ large in the stories of Psammenitus and in Cambyses’ end. The reason for this, I will argue, has to do with a central ingredient of tragedy, that of anagnorisis, recognition. In ways analogous to Sophocles’ Oedipus, Herodotus depicts his Cambyses as recognizing the error (hamartia) that he has made in misconstruing the future conveyed to him both in a dream and an oracle,36 turning on his family in fear of a conspiracy against his throne and becoming to his blood kin what he should not have been, a ‘brother-killer’ (Hdt. 3.65.4): ‘And missing the mark about everything that going to happen, a brother-killer I have become, when there was no need, and of my kingdom no less have I been deprived’ (παντὸς δὲ τοῦ μέλλοντος ἔσεσθαι ἁμαρτὼν ἀδελφεοκτόνος τε οὐδὲν δέον γέγονα καὶ τῆς βασιληίης οὐδὲν ἧσσον ἐστέρημαι). It is the recognition of who he is and who he has become. Realizing his error in the face of his mortality, he is made sophron (Hdt. 3.64.5), a state equivalent to ‘knowing oneself’, its opposite, according to one contemporary view, being the ‘nearest thing to madness’, the state in which Cambyses had been.37
Recognition is not, however, meant to be confined to the revelation had by the characters within the plot: Herodotus’ mode of narration puts at risk complacent readers who, feeling they occupy a greater position of knowledge and self-knowledge than Herodotus’ protagonists, are comfortable in their assessment of their own ability to recognize and understand who they are, not only in relation to the characters about whom they are reading, but more fundamentally. They are those who feel they have transcended the universal limitations of the human condition, that they are eudaimones (‘happy, blessed’) and that their eudaimonia (‘good fortune’) is permanent.38 For as Herodotus constructs his account, readers are also implicated in the act of recognition, the challenge is there for them to recognize what is being conveyed by the text, and who they are as revealed by how they respond to what they find narrated. Below will be traced those ways in which the narrative engages readers, and its attempts to manipulate, reveal, and ultimately influence their responses. Herodotus’ mode of narration stratifies his audience according to their readerly reactions: those of them most enamoured by an imperial mindset will find themselves manoeuvred into responses identical to those of its mad Persian king, while others may respond to the encouragement, also present in the text, to recognize the nature of the madness from which Cambyses suffers and that, belonging as it does to ‘the many evils that are accustomed to afflict humans’ (οἷα πολλὰ ἔωθε ἀνθρώπους κακὰ καταλαμβάνειν), it is one to which anyone can be, and some of his contemporaries were, vulnerable/susceptible.
Who are these contemporary readers whose powers of recognition and self-recognition will be challenged? And what about future readers? What is to be the nature of their (self-)recognition? In what follows, this essay most often means by ‘contemporaries’ Athenians, and a fortiori those of an imperialist disposition, because Athenians were not homogeneously disposed towards their city’s internal politics and arche as made obvious by the eventual political coups of the late fifth century. And there are other contemporaries, of course, those outside Athens—subjects and critics—who could justifiably have felt some Schadenfreude at Herodotus’ veiled portrayal of the Athenians.39 And there are also his future readers for whom Herodotus most certainly also wrote.40 I will have more to say about how Herodotus translates this notion of differentiation and stratification based on interpretive capacities and political orientation within his contemporary readership into the reception he orchestrates in future readers. But perhaps here it suffices to say that future readers will occupy a spectrum between the poles of those enamoured by Athens and/or empire, and those more critically disposed towards one or both. Readers of the former group are more likely to fall foul of his ‘Persian’ narrative: their investment (conscious or not) in the cultural superiority of the Greeks with Athens as pinnacle, as well as in their own intellectual and moral superiority over antiquity owing to an erroneous investment in the notion of progress, may cause them not to recognize whose is the madness that Herodotus depicts, and likewise to deny Herodotus (and perhaps any ancient author) the capacity to write a narrative of such sophistication and seeming modernity. For the danger is real: not only have the majority of Herodotus’ readers encountered both the Greeks and their language with an overwhelmingly Athenian focalization, but access to that education is most usually predicated upon belonging to cultures which are or have been imperialist, and by and large to a certain class within those cultures. Both reasons create obstacles for Herodotus’ readers (the polloi among those privileged oligoi) to see—or really see—Athens from a critical perspective (as, for instance, most Ionians or Peloponnesians would), and render it possible to enhance and exploit a stratification within his readership based on an ability and willingness to break free from a cultural focalization belonging to the Athenians which they have come to share.
2Whose Version? Adopting a Persian viewpoint (chs. 1–3)41
The opening of Book 3 attempts to manoeuvre readers into adopting a Persian perspective on the cause of the Egyptian campaign and induces the unwary of them to read in a way that mirrors the viewpoint and attitudes of the conquerors. It does this by the way in which the three accounts of the cause of the Egyptian campaign are given. Audiences are induced to prefer the first account owing to its mode of presentation: it is both the longest of the three and, unlike the others, not explicitly dismissed by the narrator; in fact, as they first embark on their reading of the campaign, they will have been entirely unaware that other versions would follow.42 Moreover, the deployment of the source attribution is significant: readers will have heard the first logos in full before having it qualified by a source attribution (‘so now say the Persians’, οὕτω μέν νυν λέγουσι Πέρσαι) that might alert them to its provisionality, and they are likely to have forgotten by then that what the narrator declares will be presented is merely ‘a cause something like what follows (δι᾽ αἰτίην τοιήνδε)’, and as such something implicitly other than what they really say: like it, but therefore not actually it. Those readers who find themselves induced to accept (however non-commitally) the first logos, the Persian version, or—once removed—to think that Herodotus does (and in doing so collapsing the author’s actual identity into that of the narrator he creates), have failed to recognize the absence of the narrator’s explicit endorsement.
Ultimately non-commital as to the cause, the account he provides is therefore such as to make his readers particularly responsible for what they go away believing about the cause of the Egyptian campaign and/or for what they believe Herodotus’ view on the subject to have been.43 The text has in a sense manufactured in those readers a kind of complicity with the Persians in casually accepting ‘such a cause’ which is only ‘something like’ the real cause,44 and in both cases—the Persians’ and the readers’—doing so owing to a similar eagerness to get on with the conquest, whether as historical ergon or as logos. In a way, those readers themselves are aitioi for the way that Cambyses behaves (or rather the way that Herodotus depicts ‘Cambyses’ as behaving) towards and in Egypt. They have chosen to understand Cambyses’ actions in a particular way, despite no compulsion by the narrator, and that choice then becomes an early indicator of how they might respond to the rest of the narrative.
Furthermore, closer scrutiny reveals both that all three accounts are in fact ‘something like’ each other,45 and that the reasons given to prejudice readers against the second and third accounts are hardly devastating. In the case of the third logos, it should be obvious that just because something is not persuasive to some one individual (whose subjectivity is stressed through the use of the first person: ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐ πιθανός, Hdt. 3.3.1) does not necessitate its being untrue. Ironically, without providing any reasons for this lack of persuasion, this bare statement manages to persuade, and even transfers responsibility for this judgment to those readers who may, induced by the absence of explanation, then supply their own. The second logos requires readers to recognize how dependent they are upon others—i.e. Herodotus’ account—to have the ‘knowledge’ needed to assess its content, in this case knowledge of Persian royal history and customs. Herodotus’ comment about the Egyptians’ knowledge is formulated in such a way as to raise the question of who, if indeed anyone (Hdt. 3.2.2: ‘For if anyone else knows the customs of the Persians, the Egyptians also do’),46 is truly in a position to know whether inheritance laws at the time of Cyrus’ death excluded a half-Egyptian ascending to the throne,47 or even to know who Cambyses’ mother was. The corollary of having accepted the Persian version of the first logos is the necessary denegration of the Egyptian point of view found in chapter 2, and readers are ‘assisted’ in doing this by the narrator’s adoption of the authoritative register of the apodeixis.48 This anti-Egyptian bias will be found again in the coming chapters, and is one that facilitates readers’ taking by default a dismissive view towards the version of history held by an arche’s ‘subjects’.49
