PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY. VOL. I. DECEMBER 22, 1843. Professor T. H. KEY in the Chair. No. 15. Professor Im. Bekker was elected an honorary member of the Society. The following communication was then read :— 66 Herodotus and the Athenians." By the Rev. J. W. Donaldson. Among the meagre and scanty notices of the literary history of Herodotus which have come down to our times, it is refreshing to meet with an anecdote of unquestionable authenticity which connects him with the great name of Sophocles. This anecdote has not been neglected by the philologers who have written about either Sophocles or Herodotus, but no one seems to have appreciated its full value as a contribution to literary history; for if we combine it with other testimonies which refer to the frequent intercourse of Herodotus with the Athenians in general, we may perhaps draw some important inferences as to the manner in which Herodotus composed his history, and the sources from which it was derived. On the present occasion it is not intended to follow out this investigation to its fullest extent; but it may do some good to indicate a few steps of the process. It appears that Sophocles, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, composed a lyric poem for Herodotus, the Eévior of which began as follows (Plutarch, an seni, &c., c. 3. iv. 153, Wyttenb.) : : Ὠιδὴν Ηροδότῳ τευξεν Σοφοκλῆς ἐτέων ὢν πέντ ̓ ἐπὶ πεντήκοντα. Now Sophocles was born B.c. 495; consequently he wrote this ode in B.C. 440. This year marks an important epoch in the life of Sophocles at the Dionysia of this winter he brought out the most beautiful of his plays, the Antigone; and in consequence, as we are told, of the sound political sentiments developed in some of the speeches, the poet was immediately afterwards elected one of the Strategi, or prætors, in which capacity he sailed to Samos as the colleague of Pericles, and assisted in carrying on the war against the aristocrats, who had returned from Anæa, in B.C. 440, 439. Accordingly, if Sophocles wrote an ode for Herodotus in в.c. 440, he must have done so either before or during the Samian war in that year; for the siege of Samos lasted nine months, and it is more than probable that Sophocles did not return to Athens till B.c. 439. The fact that he wrote such a poem, proves that he had some intercourse or intimacy with Herodotus at that particular time. Herodotus, S therefore, was either at Athens or in Samos in B.C. 440, for Sophocles could not have met with him elsewhere. From the year в.c. 452 till about the commencement of the Peloponnesian war, we must consider Samos as the home or head-quarters of the great traveller of Halicarnassus. Lygdamis, the grandson of Artemisia, and tyrant of Halicarnassus, had put to death Panyasis the epic poet, who was the maternal uncle of Herodotus, and had compelled the historian to fly from his native city. Herodotus took refuge in Samos, and though he afterwards succeeded in putting down the tyranny of Lygdamis, he was not able to re-establish himself at Halicarnassus, but settled in the home of his adoption, and in consequence of this became first an Ionian and afterwards an Athenian. The frequent communication between Athens and Samos might lead us to expect that Herodotus, who was so fond of travelling, would occasionally put himself on board a merchant-ship and visit the city of Pericles. We are told that he was there at the great Panathenæa in B.C. 446, when he recited a portion of his history, which was so flattering or agreeable to the Athenians, that ten talents from the public treasury were voted to him on the motion of Anytus (Plutarch de malignit. Herod. c. 26). Another of the panegyrists of Athens, Pindar, was similarly rewarded; and we may well imagine, that as his works were well known to Herodotus, there may have been some passages between them of which history is silent. Sophocles, at any rate, who was then at the height of his reputation, could not have failed to make the acquaintance of a man to whose literary merits his countrymen had awarded so high a recompense. 1 Honoured and rewarded by the people of Athens, Herodotus, it might be supposed, would take up his residence there but there is no evidence for this supposition, and it seems much more probable that he continued to reside at Samos; so that Sophocles, when he went to that island in B.C. 440, would find his friend there, and as he seems to have preserved his constitutional tranquillity and cheerfulness in the midst of his official and military occupations, he may have amused himself in some leisure moment with writing the fugitive poem which has furnished us with this important date. It is well known that Herodotus was ultimately one of those who joined the great Grecian settlement at Thurii. Now this colony was conducted by Lampon, в.c. 443, and it is clear that Herodotus must have been at Athens after B.c. 437 (see Herod. v. 77). It appears the most reasonable inference that Herodotus, after the taking of Samos in B.C. 439, became a μéтOikos at Athens, and, like other μÉTOLKOL (Lysias, Polemarchus, &c.), joined the Thurian colony about the commencement of the Peloponnesian war. This view of the successive settlements of Herodotus appears to contribute materially towards a simplification of his biography. For the first thirty-two years of his life (B.c. 484-452) he was a subject of the king of Persia, and as such possessed the greatest advantages for travelling in every satrapy of the Persian empire. If Halicarnassus had been a free state, it would never have been immortalized by the name of its only great historian. For the next twenty years (from B.C. 452 to the beginning of the Peloponnesian war) we must consider Herodotus as a distinguished foreigner settled at Samos,-an honoured friend of the Athenians. For the rest of his life he was an Athenian μérouros, living chiefly as an Athenian colonist at Thurii, and engaged in systematizing and harmonizing into one great whole the historical narratives and traveller's tales by which he had gained his great reputation. Plutarch charges Herodotus with partiality to Athens. We, who live at this distance of time and place, are all partial to Athens: we would conceal all her faults and exaggerate all her virtues: how then can we blame the true-hearted Halicarnassean if he was dazzled by the brilliancy which sometimes imposes even on our northern vision? But Herodotus was an admirer, not only of Athens in general, but of Sophocles in particular. Herodotus was, perhaps, of all the Greeks the most cosmopolitan,-the most free from Hellenistic prejudices: still he could not have failed to appreciate the most Greek of all the Greeks. The more we read Herodotus, the more we must be convinced that the writings of Sophocles were well known to him. He was a great traveller and observer, but he was, for those days, a great reader also. He frequently refers to the writings of other poets, Pindar, Alcæus, &c.; but the chief subject of his meditations must have been the profound and difficult poetry of that great Athenian. This may be inferred from the circumstance, that while he quotes other writers by name, he introduces his imitations of whole passages of Sophocles without so much as alluding to the author. Some of these quotations are so minute and circumstantial, that the hypothesis of accidental coincidence is altogether inadmissible. To begin with the least doubtful of these citations, we find that, in the third book of his history, which contains more references to Samos than any other, Herodotus introduces the story of Intaphernes, whose wife gives the following reason for preferring her brother to the other prisoners (iii. 119): "O king, I might get another husband if I had good luck, and other children if I were to lose these; but, as I have no longer any father or mother, I know no means of getting another brother. Now in the Antigone of Sophocles, which was acted just before the tragedian went to Samos, where he probably met Herodotus, we find Antigone arguing in precisely the same manner. Since the whole argument is a conceit, it is much more reasonable to suppose that Herodotus introduced it into the speech which he made for the wife of Intaphernes, than that Sophocles borrowed it from a history, which, for all that we know, was not published till many years after. Even supposing that Herodotus wrote his third book before the performance of the Antigone, and supposing that Sophocles was well acquainted with that portion of his history, how unlikely is it that he would recollect the terms and phrases of a prose narrative, and preserve in his iambic dialogue the sentences of a λéžis eipoμévn! If, on the other hand, we adopt the more reasonable supposition, that the third book of Herodotus was written subsequently to the performance of the Antigone, and that Herodotus was acquainted with that play, we shall at once understand how Herodotus converted into Ionic prose the lines which had made an indelible impression upon his memory, and how he was led by the parallelism of circumstances to commit one of the most excusable of plagiarisms. Scholars in general think that Sophocles borrowed from Herodotus; but one cannot understand how this could be, and Valckenaer, who first remarked the resemblance between the two passages, seems to have made it clear, by the comparison which he instituted, that Sophocles was the original author of the sentiment. If any competent scholar will place each line in the passage from the Antigone (v. 924) by the side of the corresponding clause in the narrative of Herodotus, he will find that the latter is a prosaic paraphrase of the former, and nothing more :πόσις μὲν ἄν μοι, κατθανόντος, ἄλλος ἦν. Soph. Herod. ἀνὴρ μέν μοι ἂν ἄλλος γένοιτο, εἰ δαίμων ἐθέλοι. Soph. μητρὸς δ ̓ ἐν "Αιδου καὶ πατρὸς κεκευθότοιν, Surely no one can read this without seeing that Herodotus must have based the passage on a recollection of the lines of his friend Sophocles. But this is by no means the only passage in which Herodotus evinces a recollection of the writings of Sophocles. The celebrated saying of Solon (Herod. i. 32) must surely have been more familiar to his countrymen than to Herodotus. It is absurd to suppose that the dialogues and speeches in Herodotus have a real historical foundation. We can prove that some of the compositions are made up of you borrowed from Greek poets. The speeches of the Persian conspirators in book iii. 80 sqq., in spite of the exéxonoar d'v of the author, must be regarded as pure fabrications; indeed they are absolutely Greek throughout. Similarly with regard to the saying of Solon, it is likely enough that Herodotus borrowed it from Sophocles (see Ed. Tyr. v. 1528 sqq., and Trachin. init., where it is called " an ancient saying"). Again in iii. 52, 53, among many other references to Greek poets who lived long after Periander, there are four distinct imitations of the phraseology of Sophocles:—(a) c. 52: kýρvyμa êñоýσαтo, os ἂν ἢ οἰκίοισι ὑποδέξηταί μιν, κ. τ. λ. Cf. Soph. Ed. T. 235: μýr εἰσδέχεσθαι, κ. τ. λ. (") c. 53 : βούλεαι τήν τε τυραννίδα ἐς ἄλλους πεσέειν, καὶ τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρὸς διαφορηθέντα (cf. i. 88). Soph. Αj. 510: εἰ νέας τροφῆς στερηθεὶς σοῦ διοίσεται μόνος ὑπ ̓ ὀρφανιστῶν μὴ φίλων. φιλοτιμίη κτῆμα σκαιόν. piλwr. (c) ibid, piλoriμin kτñμα σKatóv. Cf. Soph. Antig. 1015: αυθαδία σκαιότητ ̓ ὀφλισκάνει. (*) ibid: μὴ τῷ κακῷ τὸ κακὸν ἰῳ. Soph. Aloade, ap. Stob. iv. 37: errav0a pévro návrа rávОρwπv νοσεῖ, κακοῖς ὅταν θέλωσιν ἰᾶσθαι κακά. Another instance of a similar imitation of Sophocles is found in iv. 129, where the optà iørávтes ra ra is supposed by Valckenaer and others to be a citation of the celebrated passage in Soph. Electra, 27: ἀλλ ̓ ὀρθὸν οὖς ἵστησιν. As in the passage last quoted, so in this the historian seems to have had Pindar in his eye as well as Sophocles. Herodotus, in speaking of the braying of the asses, uses the singular phrase: ὑβρίζοντες ὦν ὄνοι ετάρασσον τὴν ἵππον τῶν Σκυθέων. That by ὑβρίζοντες he means the braying of the asses, is clear from what follows : μεταξὺ ὅκως ἀκούσειαν οἱ ἵπποι τῶν ὄνων τῆς φωνῆς ἐταράσσοντο. Νow Pindar in his tenth Pythian ode, which was written before the birth of Herodotus, speaks thus of the asses led to sacrifice by the Hyperboreans (v. 36): 'Añóλλwv yeλậ ὁρῶν ὕβριν ὀρθίαν κνωδάλων, i. e. “ he laughs when he sees the loudvoiced wantonness of the asses.' If it is objected that opŵr cannot refer to the sense of hearing, some might justify the confusion by quoting κτύπον δέδορκα, &c. But it seems more probable that the poet refers generally to the spectacle of an ass in a state of üßpes, of which the most remarkable feature is its bray, and it must be owned that this is a spectacle ridiculous enough in the eyes of men and gods. Pindar, then, would mean by üßpus that the ass was in a state of clamorous and amorous excitement, implying by the epithet opoíav that he was braying; and Herodotus, copying him, would take the more general word in the particular signification. This appears to be a proof that he was the copyist of Pindar and not the originator of this peculiar use of the verb vẞpicw. Similarly, one might infer that Hesiod's phrase èτéшν voμós (Op. et D. 403) was borrowed from the longer and more elaborate parallel passage in Homer, Il. xx. 244 sqq. But if the style of Herodotus was affected by his acquaintance with the context of older writers, and of Sophocles in particular, there were at least two Athenian writers-if we can call them Athenians whose style received a tinge from the Herodotean λégis εἰρομένη. There can be little doubt that the ἀφελής λόγος of Lysias, no less than the Koin diáλeктos of Xenophon, were based upon Herodotus; for while there is no other style which they so much resemble, the presumption of an intercourse between Lysias and Herodotus, who were fellow-citizens of Thurii, and, with regard to Xenophon, the express testimony of the rhetorician Dionysius (de præcip. Histor. p. 777 Reiske), may induce us to believe that this resemblance was not accidental, but intentional in both cases. Lysias was an Athenian in the same sense as Herodotus:-originally a péroikos, he joined the colony of Thurii, and afterwards returned to Athens, the home of his adoption. That Herodotus became acquainted with Lysias at Thurii and noticed his early promise, as he is said to have done in the case of Thucydides, is not stated, but it is at least possible that such was the case. It is, however, a most probable supposition that Xenophon, a traveller like Herodotus, would endeavour to appropriate the style which had made the Halicar |