THE STORY OF THE PERSIAN WAR.*
Jr there be less of original handling in Mr. Church's stories from Herodotus than there necessarily was in the stories from Homer and from the Athenian Dramatists, there is even more draught on his powers as a translator and abridger, for it is by no means easy so to render Herodotus as to give an ade- quate idea at once of his old-world anxiety to tell everything just as it had been told to him, and his new-world doubt as to the accuracy of the creeds of his informants, and also of the curious mixture of simplicity, shrewdness, caution, and research which the whole conveys; moreover, it is still less easy to do this, when the problem is so to select as to compress the story of the Persian war into about half the space of the original. Mr. Church has effected this with great success. His -style is, as usual, archaic enough to carry the old-world air about it, and yet so clear and bright as to give a distinct conception of the pure Ionic atmosphere from which he has derived his tale. The story, as told in English, has much of the charm of Herodotus himself,—conveying his profound sense of the magnitude of the crisis to the Greeks, of the mingled awe and wrath with which they looked back upon the hosts of Barbarians who had pressed down upon them, of the curious difficulty which the Greeks had had in uniting firmly even to prevent a great catastrophe, of the deep-rooted insularity of their various States, and of the great superiority of the Athenians to the rest of the Greek States in their discernment of the danger, and their sense of resource for dealing with it. Mr. Church makes us feel the pride of the old historian in the Greek victory, as he felt it him- self, and yet he makes us feel keenly that there was in Herodotus a considerable capacity of sympathy for the Persian gallantry, and something like pity for their overthrow. There is no vestige of savage vindictiveness in the mode of chronicling Persian disasters. Indeed, if Mr. Church's Story of the PersianWar could be amended at all—which, under the conditions, would be very difficult—it would be by presenting somewhat more carefully than he has done all those traces of respect and sympathy for the Persians which give so delightful a sense of large- ness of heart to the old Halicarnassian's narrative. There are many places in which we should have been glad to see the sympathy of the keen-eyed historian for the Persians more fully represented. For example, the forebodings of Artabanus which prefigure so finely the course of the war of Xerxes are, for our taste, far too much abbreviated by Mr. Church, some of their noblest apophthegms being omitted; and again, some of the finest touches just anticipating the great catastrophe at Plateea are also omitted. If we had had our choice,—and we are speaking, so far as we can, for young people, as well as for ourselves,—we should have preferred an even greater abbrevia- tion of the narrative of the marches and military operations, to abbreviations of the strangely effective drama by which Herodotus shows us the conflict of hope and fear in the Persian, and also at times in the Grecian breast.
Nothing can be better, however, than Mr. Church's ren- dering of this side of the narrative, so far as he renders it at all. But he is too apt, we think, even in his rendering of the dialogue, to retain the recitals of fact, and to curtail the report at the points where it best expresses the dignified eloquence and self-knowledge of the speaker. Thus, in giving the remonstrance of his uncle with Xerxes, Mr. Church retains the recital of Darius's mishaps at greater length than was • The Story of the Persian War. Prom Herodotus. By the Rev. Alfred. J. Church, Professor of Latin in University College, London. With Illustrations from the Antique. London Seeley sad Co.
necessary, but drops some of the finest portions of his protest against the rash counsel of Mardonius :-
" When Mardonius had thus spoken, all the other Persians kept silence; but at the last, Artabanus, the eon of Hystaspes, being uncle to King Xerxes, and so taking courage to speak, put forth a con- trary opinion in these words :—' 0 King, if there be not set forth opinions that are contrary the one to the other, thou canst not choose the better, but must follow the one which thou hearest. For it is with opinions as it is with gold. Pure gold we know not so long as it is left by itself, but when we rub it against that which is not pure, then we know it. I counselled thy father Darius that he should not make war on the Scythians, men that have no city to dwell in; but he, thinking to subdue them, would not hearken to me, but marched against them, and lost many and brave soldiers. And now thou haat it in thy heart to make war against men that are far better than the Scythians, being mighty both by sea and land. Hear, therefore, into what danger thou art moving. Thou wilt bridge over the Hellespont, and march into the land of Greece. Suppose that thou suffer defeat, whether it be by sea or by land, or, haply, by both, for the men are valiant (and, indeed, what they can do we know full well, for Datis and Artaphernes, when they led a mighty host into Attica, the Athenians alone defeated). But suppose they get the mastery by sea only, and so, sailing to the Hellespont, break down the bridge. This surely, 0 King, would be a terrible thing. Nor is this thing that I say of my own devising. For thy father Darius bridged over the Thracian Bosphorus and the Danube, and so marched against the Scytbians. And when the Scythians used all manner of entreaties to the Ionians, to whom, indeed, the King had entrusted the charge of the bridge, if Histiteus of Miletus had followed the judgment of the other lords of the Ionians in this, and had set himself against us, then had the power of the Persians been utterly destroyed. Surely it is a dreadful thing even to speak of, that the fortunes of the King should have rested upon the will of one man. Put away, therefore, O King, I beseech thee, this thy purpose to run without any need into this great danger, and hearken unto me. Break up this council, and think over this matter in thine heart, and afterwards declare unto us thy purpose ; and remember this also, that God smites with his thunder such creatures as are tall and strong, passing by them that are smaller and weaker, and that it is on the tallest houses and trees that his bolts for the most part fall. For he is wont to bring down all high things. So otherwise a very great host is often pat to flight by a few men, God sending upon it some storm or panic, for he will not suffer any but himself to have high thoughts. And as to thee, Mardonins, thou doest ill, speaking lightly against the Greeks, and persuading the King to head his army against them ; for this thou manifestly wishest. God grant that thou succeed not in thy purpose ! But if it must needs be that we march against the Greeks, then at the least let the King remain here safe at home. And let us make this wager between ourselves. Choose out for thyself such men as thou wilt have, and take with thee an army so great as thou desirest, and if things go as thou sayest that they will, according to the pleasure of the King, then let my children be slain, and I also with them. But if things go not so, then shall thy children be slain, and thou also with them, if indeed thou shalt ever come back. Bnt if thou wilt not take this wager, and wilt still march against the Greeks, then am I sure that they who are left in this land will hear that Mardonius has perished, having first worked great harm to the Persians, and lies torn by dogs and birds in the land of the Athenians, or, it may be, of the Lacedremonians, having so learned what manner of men they are against whom thou persnadest the King to make
war.' " That is finely given, but the passage is suppressed in which Artabanus declares the light opinion expressed by Mardonius of the Greeks to be a slander, and remarks that such slander, when it takes effect, is the most terrible of evils, since while there is one victim of the injustice, there are two who commit
it,—both he who slanders the absent, and he who allows himself to be persuaded before he has examined accurately the grounds of the slander which he accepts for truth. And again, in the conversa- tion between this same Artabanus and Xerxes at the Hellespont, Mr. Church abbreviates parts of the sayings of Xerxes himself which we should like to have had more fully, especially where Xerxes says, what we in modern times have so often had to rediscover for ourselves, that he who would take everything into consideration for and against any design, would never act at all; and that it is better for a man actually to suffer the half of the evils he might have anticipated, than to go through all possible sufferings in imagination, even though he escape them all in reality. These are the sort of touches which make the history of Herodotus resemble rather an epic than a history, and we would rather have lost a little of the incident, than have lost any of the colouring by which the incident is illuminated. Still more do we regret the loss of the beautiful story, narrated by Thersander after the battle of Plataea, of the Persian who lay with him on the same couch at the Theban banquet before the battle, and who assured him, with floods of tears, that of all the Persian army there would soon he but very few survivors, ending with the declaration that of all the pangs man can undergo, this is the most bitter,—that one who knows much, should be able to control nothing.
Mr. Church has, however, taken care to preserve many of the quaint sayings of the historian himself, as, for instance, this
very characteristically Greek saying, which is quite destitute of Christian humility :—" The truth of these matters cannot cer- tainly be known. Yet so much may be affirmed without doubt, that if all men were to bring their own misdeeds into one place, as wishing to exchange them for the misdeeds of their neigh- bours, when they came to look close into the misdeeds of their neighbours, they would be right glad to carry back their own; " and again, this sceptical remark on the Magian incantations, " For three days the storm endured. But the Afagians offering victims and using incantations and doing sacrifices to Thetis and the nymphs of the sea, laid it on the fourth day, or, may be, it ceased of its own accord." We will give one specimen of Mr. Church's admirable rendering of Herodotus's anecdotic style, for by that, perhaps even more than by his sagacious remarks, the youthful reader will remember his History, and it would be difficult to give a better short specimen than the account of Artemisia's achievements in the battle of Salamis. Artemisia was of the city of Herodotus, and no doubt he takes genuine pleasure in chronicling her unscrupulous adroitness, as well as the credit she gained with Xerxes, in spite of the fact that in the war she had fought on the wrong side :- " How the rest of the Greeks and of the barbarians behaved them- selves cannot be described, but of Artemisia of Halicarnassus this story is told. The fleet of the King being now in great confusion, it so chanced that the ship of Artemisia was pursued by an Athenian ship. And she, not being able to escape, for she was the nearest of all to the ships of the enemy, and had many of her own friends in front of her, devised this means of saving herself, and also accomplished it. She Brave her ship against the ship of the lord of Calyndus, being one of the fleet of the King (whether she had a quarrel against this man, or the ship chanced to be in her way, is not known for certain), and had the good-fortune to sink it. And thus she gained a double gain. For when the captain of the Athenian ship saw what she did, judging that her ship was of the fleet of the Greeks, or that it had deserted from the King, he left pursuing her ; and also, having done this ill-service to the Persians, yet she got the greatest glory from the King. For Xerxes, as he looked upon the battle, saw how her ship smote another. And one said to him, ' 0 King, seest thou how bravely Queen Artemisia bears herself, sinking a ship of the enemies F' Then said the King, Was this verily the doing of Artemisia r And they affirmed that it was, knowing the token of her ship; but the ship that was sunk they judged to be one of the Greeks. It so chanced, also, that her good- fortune might be complete, that not a man of the ship of Calyndus was left to tell the truth. As for Xerxes, ho is reported to have said, My men have become women, and my women have become men.' "
Mr. Church has added another to his great services to Classical literature, in this delightful story of one of the greatest achieve- ments of the Greeks, as it is told by the widest-minded and shrewdest of the old-world travellers and observers.
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