Better Fled than Dead: Power and Land in Herodotus 4.11

Herodotus 4.11 relates a brief story of the Cimmerians: in the face of an impending Scythian invasion, two political parties argue over the course of action. The opinion of the elites (τῶν βασιλέων) is that they should remain and fight for their land (πeρὶ τῆς χώρης); the common people (τοῦ δήμου), on the other hand, prefer flight rather than death fighting “against so many” (πρὸς πολλούς) or, in Stein’s reading, “on account of dust” (πρὸ σπoδοῦ). Reaching no consensus, the people decide to leave and thus survive, while the nobles stay and are slaughtered on their land. In reading this logos I propose that it is an instructive morality tale, an “ethnologic satire” (Romm, 48-49), using a foreign canvas to treat a fundamentally Greek situation. The pragmatic view espoused by the Cimmerian demos has an immediate analog in the Athenian evacuation to Salamis, but it also echoes a common trope in the Peloponnesian War, when upper-class farmers are incensed by Spartan depredations of their land (e.g., the views of the chorus, Acharnians 225-230), the traditional basis of their material wealth. These find fault with the Periclean strategy of waiting within the walls, and “letting our land and houses go” (τὴν μὲν γῆν καὶ οἰκίας ἀφeῖναι, Thuc. 1.143.4), relying instead upon the empire of the islands and the navy, a philosophy which empowered the lower classes that made up the bulk of the fleet (Ath. Pol. 23.1-2; Politics 1304a22-4). For the Greek elites, just as for the Cimmerian kings, land was essential to their power and they were reluctant to abandon it, while the lower-classes, with no property, had no stake in defending it. Herodotus’ version of events preceding the Battle of Salamis provides another telling moment: the Corinthian Adimantus scoffs at Themistocles as “a man without a city (ἀπόλι ἀνδρί, 8.61.1), but Themistocles replies that “so long as they had two hundred manned ships, the Athenians had both a city and a land greater than theirs.” Territory does not define a polis: it is the people who make up Athens. Herodotus at 4.46.2 praises the Scythian rejection of agrarianism (ζῶντeς μἠ ἀπ’ ἀρότου) and their mobility as the “cleverest” (σοφώτατα) and “greatest of human affairs” (μέγιστον τῶν ἀνθρωπηίων πραγμάτων). The Scythians, like the Cimmerians and, later, Athenians (cf. Hartog) are successful because they have rejected landholding and an agrarian economy. On a broader level, the logos fits into an overall scheme of what has been seen as an anti-imperialistic theme in the work (e.g., by Munson, Immerwahr, Raaflaub, and Lateiner), especially in the foreign logoi. Without land, therefore, there can be no empire; with the acquisition of and reliance upon land, a state acquires weakness. At Salamis the only “land” the Athenians possess is their own vessels, the equivalent of the Scythian wagons; their city is themselves, not the territory they control. The Scythians have no attachment to the land, nor does the Cimmerian demos. The logos becomes emblematic of a rejection of the Persian (and later, Athenian) ideal of acquisition and possession, and especially the refusal to give up territory. Herodotus’ story thus provides a model in foreign dress for Greek emulation.