HERODOTUS AND RELIGION IN THE PERSIAN WARS 1ST

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 j maps j

Mainland Greece 2

Asia Minor 3

Attica and Environs 17

Egypt 169

The Persian Empire 170

 j acknowledgments j

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

ABSA Annual of the British School at Athens

AC Antiquité classique
AJA American Journal of Archaeology
AJP American Journal of Philology
BCH Bulletin de correspondance hellénique
BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
Burkert, GR W. Burkert. Greek Religion. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
CA Classical Antiquity
CJ Classical Journal
CP Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
Farnell, Cults L. R. Farnell. The Cults of the Greek States. 5 vols. Oxford,
1921; reprint, 1977.
FGrHist F. Jacoby. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. 3 vols.
Berlin and Leiden, 1923–1958.
Fontenrose J. Fontenrose. The Delphic Oracle. Berkeley, 1978.
G&R Greece and Rome
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HW W. W. How and J. Wells. A Commentary on Herodotus.
2 vols. Oxford, 1912.
IG Inscriptiones Graecae
JDAI Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
MH Museum Helveticum
ML R. Meiggs and D. M. Lewis. Greek Historical Inscriptions.
Rev. ed. Oxford, 1988.
Nilsson, GGR I 3 M. P. Nilsson. Geschichte der griechischen Religion. Vol. I 3.
Munich, 1967.
 j introduction j

The two great Persian invasions of Greece, the one ordered by King Da-
rius and turned back by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 b.c. and the
other led by King Xerxes himself and repulsed in 480–479 by victories
of the allied Greeks at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, offer us our very
best opportunity from the whole of Greek antiquity to see the interplay
of Greek religion and history on a large scale. For a period of ten years,
and for somewhat longer if we include the preliminaries to the 490 in-
vasion, we can see how the Greeks internationally, state by state, and
sometimes even individually turned to their deities and their religious
practices to influence, understand, and commemorate events that threat-
ened their very existence. For this period we have accounts of Greeks
praying and sacrificing, making and fulfilling vows to the gods, consult-
ing oracles, interpreting omens and dreams, believing in miracles, pon-
dering pieties and impieties, creating new cults, sanctuaries, and festivals,
and making dozens of dedications to their gods and heroes—all in di-
rect relation to known historical events. The purpose of this book is to
collect and present the abundantly preserved religious aspects of these
critical times and thereby set Greek religion into a historical context so
as to understand better the role of Greek religion in the Persian invasions
and in Greek life in general.
Modern scholarly surveys of Greek religion, such as Walter Burkert’s
Greek Religion and Martin Nilsson’s Geschichte der griechischen Religion,
collect, abstract from their immediate contexts, and summarize much of
the evidence for Greek religion. They have, of course, immeasurable value
and have been the primary vehicle for organizing and analyzing this Pro-
tean subject. But there is a need also to see the human situations and
historical circumstances in which Greeks practiced their religion if we are
to understand the place religion had in their lives. The ancient sources,
written and archaeological, allow us to do this best for the period of the

5
Persian Wars in early fifth-century Greece. Much that we describe will
be familiar to students of Greek religion, but for scholars and for non-
specialists alike it may prove helpful to see these basics of Greek religion
placed into social, cultural, historical, and personal contexts.

Our primary source for this study is, of course, Herodotus. His Histories,
completed by 430 b.c. or a few years later, may reasonably be claimed to
be the best and richest single source for Greek religion as it was practiced
in the classical period. All who study Greek religion mine the Histories
for discrete details about individual gods and about religious practices,
cults, and institutions and for parallels to religious concepts found in
other authors. Oddly, though, until very recently little attention has been
paid to the whole—to the picture of Greek religion that emerges from
the writings of this observer and practitioner of Greek religion in the
classical period.1 Herodotus describes Greeks practicing their religion—
praying, sacrificing, making dedications, employing various methods of
divination, and expressing their thoughts—on so many occasions and in
such a variety of situations that one can, as I do here, weave his accounts
into a general picture of religion of the time. There are, of course, sig-
nificant limitations in focusing on one author, but these limitations may
be counterbalanced by the opportunity to see Greek religion in human,
local, and historical contexts as described by one Greek. There is even
an advantage that this rich store of religious material is all the product
of one man. Herodotus was certainly no ordinary Greek. He was better
traveled, more cosmopolitan, more curious, more innovative, and more
learned than most Greeks, and it is to these qualities that we owe the His-
tories. But when we analyze his accounts and views of Greek religion, we
find that they are largely in accord with those of other contemporary and
later sources for practiced religion. In our concluding chapter we attempt
to discover from his writings some of his own religious beliefs and views,
but with the knowledge that these were not, or most were not, peculiar
to him.
Herodotus as an author is difficult to categorize. He writes an epic nar-
rative of war, but is not a Homer. He uses some techniques and concepts
of tragedy, but he is not an Aeschylus or Sophocles. Cicero terms him
the ‘‘father of history,’’ but he is no Thucydides. He is not simply a ge-
ographer, ethnographer, or historian, but he exhibits characteristics and
methodologies of each.2 He is, essentially, a category unto himself, or, put

6 j introduction
another way, he cannot be categorized. For us that is a virtue because,
just as he does not fit squarely into a single genre, so he is not bound by
the conventions of one genre. He does not, as Thucydides and most later
historians were to do, largely exclude religious considerations from the
flow of historical events.3 Nor does he introduce the divine machinery
inherent in epic or the (quite different) divine world that the conven-
tions of tragedy dictated. So much of what we think we know of Greek
religion is affected by the conventions of the genres of our sources. Very
different ideas of Greek gods and religious beliefs emerge from, for ex-
ample, epic, tragedy, comedy, history, or oratory, in large part because
each of these genres had conventions that shaped or limited its presen-
tation of religious material. Herodotus, it seems, stood largely outside
of these conventions. We can and will find traces of some of them, but
Herodotus’ approach to Greek religion strikes me as less artificial, more
direct, less convention-bound, and more eclectic. It may well be more
the way an ordinary Greek thought about his religious world. Given the
state of our sources, this is, of course, impossible to prove, but it is, I
think, a hypothesis worth following to its conclusions. But even if one
is reluctant to extrapolate from the Histories what most Greeks believed,
we can at least claim to have illustrated some of what Herodotus him-
self apparently believed, a point to which we return in the concluding
chapter.

The primary purpose of this book is to present the religious context

of the Persian Wars. Herodotus explicitly and implicitly offers religious
explanations of the causes and outcomes of the Persian invasions, and
he gives a religious background to the major and many of the minor
events of those times. These are regularly ignored, dismissed, or dispar-
aged by both ancient and modern historians, but they are there.4 He-
rodotus thought them important, included them, and integrated them
into his account. They may not suit modern ideas of what is historically
‘‘important,’’ but to assume that the Greeks would in a religious vacuum
face, prepare for, fight, win, and remember a war that threatened their
very existence may be to misunderstand and oversimplify classical Greek
society. I do not think it solely the prejudice of a religious historian to
claim that the report of a miraculous event at Delphi or unfavorable battle
omens at Plataea could affect the course of events every bit as much as a
general’s strategy or the different styles of armor. And how the war was

introduction j 7
remembered—what Herodotus is attempting to determine and does de-
termine in the Histories—is as much a matter of belief as fact, and the
religious components of that memory of the war themselves then become
elements of religious belief for Greeks in the future.
In tracing causation there is a natural inclination to put into separate,
even opposed categories the human and the divine, the literally mun-
dane and the metaphysical, and then to follow one of them or, at best, to
follow both of them in separate if parallel lines. The former are the his-
torians’ turf; the latter are best left to the poets. In real life, however, the
human and divine do often meet, and the point of contact is religious
cult and religious belief. The dedications by the Greeks at Delphi after
their final victory over the Persians are historical facts, no less so than
the victory itself, and there were discoverable human, historical reasons
for these dedications. Religious beliefs were among these reasons, and
the dedications themselves, once erected, could in the future affect reli-
gious beliefs, and these beliefs would in turn become one determinant
of future actions. Much, in fact most, of what we find ‘‘religious’’ in He-
rodotus’ account of the Persian Wars is at this point of contact—that is,
it is centered in practiced cult, and the religious beliefs underlying the
cultic are as ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘historical’’ as any individual’s aspirations for
empire, political power, or glory. They need to be brought into the dis-
cussion of the social and cultural milieu and the causes and outcomes of
these great wars.
Although I think the religious component of Herodotus’ account of
the Persian Wars important, I do not claim that it is Herodotus’ sole
or even most important explanation of the events of these years. It is
one explanation among several. The interpretation of Herodotus is not
a zero-sum game in which the introduction of a new set of explanations
needs diminish the value of other explanations. When modern historians
wish to promote the value of their own explanations, whether they be
the growth of imperialism or the east-west dimensions of the conflict or
some other such overarching theme, they tend to demean the importance
of other factors, and religion and religious motivation are chief among
these ‘‘other’’ factors.5 But among all Greek prose authors Herodotus is
perhaps least suited to such a zero-sum game. He presents a wide range
of perspectives and methodologies. He offers numerous motivations—
each to us sufficient in itself—for single major events and characters and,
unlike modern scholars, rarely sees the need to choose among them.6

8 j introduction
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We want one answer; Herodotus provides several. The different moti-
vations sometimes appear to us to conflict or to be otherwise inconsis-
tent, at the very least to ‘‘overdetermine’’ an event, but this usually does
not trouble Herodotus. The battle and Greek victory at Salamis in reality
were no doubt the result of a large variety of causes, a variety that He-
rodotus in his wide-ranging account suggests but which we attempt to
reduce to a favored few.7 Among these causes, I would claim, were events
of a religious nature and the religious beliefs of the participants. I do not
claim that religious causes were the only or most important ones and that
we should downplay military, political, cultural, strategic, and even geo-
graphical factors. Rather I would like to restore the religious elements to
the importance that Herodotus gives them in his account of the Persian
Wars, as one element among several.

Herodotus is, of course, our major source, but we can supplement his
account of religious events of these times with those of later, sometimes
considerably later, authors. Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus Siculus
each knew Herodotus’ Histories well and sometimes simply give us ab-
breviated versions of Herodotus. But each also had sources of informa-
tion independent from Herodotus, and they provide valuable additions
to Herodotus’ record. Plutarch of Chaeronea, born before a.d. 50 and
living until at least 120, described in his Lives the activities of some of
the principal figures of the Persian War period (Themistocles, Aristides,
and Cimon), and randomly elsewhere in his voluminous writings he re-
counted a number of events from the time of the Persian Wars. Plutarch
derives some of these from Herodotus, but others, and some especially
valuable for our purposes, he draws from other, often fourth-century b.c.
sources. Plutarch also did not appreciate Herodotus’ portrayal of the role
of his beloved Thebes in the Persian Wars, and wrote a diatribe attack-
ing Herodotus’ credibility, On the Malice of Herodotus (Mor. 854E–874C),
in the course of which he offers some ill-tempered ‘‘corrections’’ to He-
rodotus’ accounts. From this and from Plutarch’s other writings we draw
material to supplement Herodotus’ account of the period.
Pausanias, from Magnesia in Lydia, toured much of mainland Greece
and the Peloponnesus in the early to mid second century a.d. and wrote,
in Greek, a guidebook for the sites he visited. He described Athens, Del-
phi, Marathon, Plataea, and many of the other places at which battles
of the Persian Wars were fought or monuments were erected. Pausanias

introduction j 9
often draws upon Herodotus in his own accounts, but frequently also
records stories still being told in his own time about the battles and mi-
raculous events at these sites. His descriptions of the monuments, some
mentioned by Herodotus, some not, are particularly valuable for filling
in the picture of religious activities during and immediately after these
wars. And, in turn, Pausanias’ record of these monuments is itself often
confirmed or supplemented by the discovery of some Persian War monu-
ments in modern archaeological excavations, and these monuments will
be described in their proper places.
Diodorus of Sicily, of the first century b.c., is our last major source for
religious aspects of the Persian Wars. For much of the early parts of his
world history he too drew from Herodotus, but he, like Plutarch, also
took from other classical-period sources and preserves some important
religious activities and events not to be found in Herodotus.
Plutarch, Pausanias, Diodorus, our other occasional literary sources,
and even some of the inscriptions bearing on events concerning the Per-
sian Wars are much later, even hundreds of years later than Herodotus.
The accounts of these sources are often questioned by modern scholars,
and we will note their objections when we introduce them. We should
stress here that even Herodotus’ account was not contemporary or nearly
contemporary with the events he describes. The latest surely datable
events in his Histories are from 431 and 430 b.c.,8 and how long he had
been writing by then we do not know. But clearly he did not begin writ-
ing, as Thucydides did, in the midst of the wars he was describing. If 484,
the traditional date of his birth, is somewhat accurate, he was a young
child at the time of the second Persian invasion. Herodotus did inter-
view a few Greek participants in these wars,9 but he was writing, at the
least, a generation later than the events themselves, and enough time had
elapsed for some facts to be lost and for legends to develop. He himself
knew of Phrynichus’ tragedy on the capture of Miletus in 494, he may
have known of Aeschylus’ production of the Persae in 472, and he had no
doubt seen in Athens the famous painting (of the 460s) of the battle of
Marathon. Herodotus is thus a ‘‘late’’ source for the Persian Wars, from
a time when the Greeks were ‘‘constructing’’ their history of these wars
in various media.

In this ‘‘construction’’ of their victory over the Persians, we must con-

sider the possibility that the Greeks and Herodotus himself indulged in

10 j introduction
some very natural and only human exaggeration. Herodotus could be ex-
tremely precise in his use of numbers, as when he described Polycrates’
tunnel on Samos,10 but virtually no modern scholar accepts Herodotus’
claims that Xerxes’ invasion force included 1,700,000 infantry, 80,000
cavalry (not counting camels and chariots), 1,207 triremes, and 3,000
other ships (7.59.3–60, 87, 89.1, 97). He gives the total force, ultimately,
as 2,641,610 combatants and an equal number of noncombatants (7.184–
185). Herodotus anticipates objections to these numbers by describing in
detail how Xerxes counted his troops at Doriscus and by listing each con-
tingent and its commander, but the modern judgment is that these num-
bers are wildly exaggerated. Similar doubts are raised about Herodotus’
claims that the Thasians spent 400 talents ($240 million) hosting Xerxes’
army for one very sumptuous meal (7.118), that the Greeks at Thermopy-
lae faced 3 million opponents (7.228.1), and that the Greeks at Plataea
killed 230,000 of Mardonius’ army of 300,000 (9.70.5). These numbers
are questioned by virtually all modern scholars but not, interestingly,
by ancient historians, including Thucydides. For Greeks they had clearly
become part of the legend of these wars.
The question arises whether there was a similar exaggeration in reli-
gious matters. This element was, of course, shaped and constructed no
less than others by Herodotus and the Greek tradition. We do not, how-
ever, see the same type of exaggeration in, for example, the number and
size of victory monuments and other dedications to the gods, most of
which are verified by ancient eyewitnesses and archaeological excava-
tions. More important, though, is whether the sources exaggerated the
role of the gods such as Poseidon and Apollo of Delphi in bringing vic-
tory to the Greeks. Here, of course, we are treating religious belief and not
fact, and for us the real question is whether Herodotus and other sources
exaggerated or misrepresented what the Greeks believed happened, and
there is no evidence that they did. If Herodotus does not give with com-
plete accuracy the beliefs of the actual participants in these wars, he at
least represents how Greeks of the following two generations imagined
them, and that has considerable value in itself. And the accounts of Plu-
tarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus have their value in recording how these
events were ‘‘remembered’’ many centuries afterward.

My concern is religious history, the religious events and acts associated

with the Persian Wars as reported by Herodotus and other sources and

introduction j 11
the religious beliefs behind them as expressed, primarily, by Herodotus.
Those who work in the political and military history of these times may
well find my trust in Herodotus as a source naive, but my purposes are
different from theirs. I attempt to discover what the Greeks ‘‘believed’’
happened and why they ‘‘believed’’ it happened. The political and mili-
tary historians are searching for what ‘‘really’’ happened and for the ‘‘real’’
motives and causes behind these events. In so doing they often challenge
Herodotus’ accounts, sometimes with the help of other ancient sources
but most often simply on the basis of their own sense of historical proba-
bilities. And they devote little attention to omens, prayers, and miracles
which, since Thucydides, have been largely excluded as determining
events and causes in Greek history. But some religious ‘‘events’’ are, in
fact, historical: for example, the taking of omens before the battle of Pla-
taea and the dedications of victory at the major Panhellenic sanctuaries
at the end of the wars. Historians are understandably reluctant to accept
miracles or accurate oracles as reported by Herodotus. The miracles are
often dismissed as tales concocted by religious personnel in the sanctu-
aries, and the oracles as late ex eventu fabrications by the oracle centers.
But, whatever their origins—and at that we can only guess—these omens,
miracles, and oracles were ‘‘believed in’’ by Herodotus and, most prob-
ably, by most Greeks of his time, and they became part of the corpus of
Greek religious beliefs. That they did in fact become a part of that cor-
pus of religious beliefs is demonstrated by Plutarch, Pausanias, and Dio-
dorus. As such they are critical to understanding Greek religion of the
time and are proper subjects for the historian of that religion. For most
of these Herodotus is our sole source, and if we reject his accounts and
interpretations of them, we are left with nothing but our own specula-
tions about what the Greeks might have ‘‘believed’’ about the role of the
gods and of cultic practices during these wars. And, finally, because so
much of what Herodotus claims in religious matters can be documented
or paralleled in contemporary and later sources for Greek popular reli-
gion, he earns considerable trust in those matters for which we have no
other sources. All this does not mean, of course, that we accept, without
discrimination, everything Herodotus tells us about Greek religion. In
our discussions we will be noting Herodotus’ occasional variant accounts
of a religious event, his own doubts, his sometimes cautious statements
about religious events, and the different ‘‘layers’’ of religion he introduces
into his Histories. But, by and large, we trust Herodotus far more than do

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

In my teaching I have long urged students—to whom terms like 10 drach-

mas or 3 minae or 1,000 talents have little meaning—to convert such
sums to dollar equivalents at the rate of 1 drachma = $100, 1 mina =
$10,000, and 1 talent = $600,000. This rate gives a middle-class Athenian
an average daily wage of $100 and an annual income of about $30,000.

introduction j 13
These dollar equivalents alert students to the vast financial resources of
fifth-century Athens and also to the fact that the relative costs of cer-
tain items such as cows, clothing, and food differed greatly from what we
experience today.13 I include similar conversions throughout this study.
D. Müller in his Topographischer Bildkommentar zu den Historien Hero-
dots (1987) offers maps, plans, bibliographies, and photographs of all sites
mentioned by Herodotus and now in the territory of modern Greece. The
photographs in particular will bring back welcome memories to those
who have had the good fortune to tread many of these sites and will help
others realize the intimate connections between Herodotus’ accounts and
the topography and monuments of the localities. For the first mention
of sites important to this study I give reference to Müller’s monumental
work.
I give for all Delphic oracles the number assigned to them by Fonten-
rose (1978) in his catalog. In that catalog one will find discussion, ancient
sources, and bibliography for the oracle in question. Many of the epi-
grams and epitaphs from the period have been attributed by ancient or
modern sources to Simonides of Ceos, but few of the attributions are cer-
tain. I note the few certain ones but rather than leave the others anony-
mous I attribute them, as is commonly done, to ‘‘Simonides.’’ Herodotus’
Histories is, of course, our prime source, and references simply in the
form 8.51–55 are to it. Many passages from Herodotus, Plutarch, Diodo-
rus, and Pausanias are translated and discussed in Chapter 1 and then are
referred to in later chapters, and to indicate this and to draw the reader
to the initial translations and discussions I put citations of these passages
in later chapters in italics (8.51–55). The passages in Chapter 1 may be
tracked down in the Index of Passages Cited. All dates henceforth are b.c.
unless otherwise noted, and, finally, Herodotus dates certain events by
the number of years before ‘‘his own time.’’ For convenience and consis-
tency I posit ‘‘his time’’ to be 450.

14 j introduction
 j one j

A Religious Account
of the Persian Invasions

j The Prelude j

In 510, just twenty years before the Persians landed at the Bay of Mara-
thon, the Athenians ousted Hippias who had succeeded his father Pisis-
tratus as the tyrant over Athens. The elimination of a tyrannical dynasty
that had ruled continuously for thirty-six years, off and on over a longer
period, and the implementation, within a few years, of the democratic
reforms of Cleisthenes changed fundamentally the nature of the Athe-
nians and of their state. According to Herodotus, ‘‘When the Athenians
were governed by tyrants, they were better than none of their neighbors
in military affairs; but when they escaped the tyrants, they became the
best by far. This shows that when they were held down, they played the
cowards, as if they were working for a master (δεσπότῃ), but when they
became free, each one was eager to work for himself ’’ (5.78). These re-
cently energized Athenians, again in Herodotus’ judgment, were to play
the key role in the ultimate defeat of the Persians (7.139). After liberation
from the tyrants, there followed for the Athenians a quick succession of
major battles and conflicts with neighbors, and behind these and the ex-
pulsion of the Pisistratid tyranny lies a host of religious causes and con-
cerns, which, together, offer a glimpse into the religious environment on
the eve of the Persian invasions.
In the night before the celebration of the Panathenaea in Athens, in 514,
Hipparchus, Pisistratus’ son and Hippias’ younger brother, as reported
by Herodotus, received a dream:
A tall and handsome man seemed to stand over Hipparchus and speak in a rid-
dling way these lines:

15
 ‘‘Endure, O lion, you who have already suffered unendurable things with an
enduring spirit.
No human being who commits injustice will not pay the punishment.’’

As soon as day came, Hipparchus told his dream to dream interpreters,

but he rejected the dream and escorted the procession of the festival.
There he died, assassinated by Harmodius and Aristogiton (5.55–56).1

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

At this very time the Alcmaeonidae, a prominent and rich Athenian fam-
ily, were enduring the exile imposed upon them by the Pisistratidae. They
and their supporters held the fort Leipsydrion in the mountains of north-
ern Attica. They used their considerable influence and wealth to secure
from the Amphictyons of Delphi the contract to rebuild, at Delphi, the
temple of Apollo that had recently, in 548, burned to the ground. The
Alcmaeonidae in their generosity went beyond their contractual obli-
gations, most notably by building the East facade of the temple from
marble, not from porous limestone. ‘‘And then,’’ according to Herodo-
tus, ‘‘as the Athenians claim, when the Alcmaeonidae were in Delphi they
bribed the Pythia to tell the Spartans, whenever they came on a public
or private oracular mission, to ‘free’ Athens’’ (5.62–64). This the Pythia
did. The oracles were ‘‘deceitful’’ (κιβδήλοισι μαντηίοισι, 5.91.2),4 but the
Spartans, despite their ties of a ‘‘guest-host’’ relationship (xenia) with the
Pisistratidae, were eventually persuaded and, after an initial failed in-
vasion, in 510 sent their king Cleomenes with a Spartan force to ‘‘free’’
Athens.5 To win the favor of Delphi with dedications or, as here, a gener-

16 j a religious account
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