believe the Trojan account, and dismissing the implausibility of the Homeric version
in which the Trojans refuse to surrender Helen, he adds his own view:
No, the fact is, they did not have Helen to give back; they were telling the truth,
but the Greeks did not believe them. In my opinion, this was because the gods
were arranging things so that in their annihilation the Trojans might make it
completely clear to others that the severity of a crime is matched by the severity
of the ensuing punishment at the gods’ hands. That is my view, at any rate.
(2, 120)Similarly, he accepts the validity of oracles: ‘I hesitate to challenge the validity of oracles
myself, and I do not accept such challenges from others either’ (8, 77). In the case of
the famous oracle given to the Athenians at Delphi that in the face of the Persians they
should trust to ‘their wooden walls’, while the narrative is designed to show the political
wisdom of the Athenian leader Themistocles in his interpretation that the Athenians
should trust to their ships, there is no hint of incredulity or cynicism about the institution
ofthe Delphic oracle itself (which continued to be a potent force in the Greek world
down to Hellenistic times). Omens and prophetic dreams (notably in the case of Xerxes
(7, 13)) also play a part in his history. Nevertheless, Herodotus never takes upon himself
the role of prophet, nor do the gods intervene crudely in his history of the Persian Wars
in such a way as to compromise the exercise of human free will.
What Herodotus believed about the intervention of the gods in history may be
discerned in the tale in which the wise Greek Solon advises the rich Lydian ruler
Croesus who supposed himself the happiest of men: ‘But until he is dead, you had
better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate’ (1, 32). Croesus
thinks Solon a fool. ‘After Solon’s departure, the weight of divine anger descended on
Croesus, in all likelihood for thinking he was the happiest man in the world’ (1, 33–34).
The fate of Croesus is an object lesson in the folly of over-confidence and pride, as
the advice of Solon, very much in the spirit of Herodotus, expresses the Greek fear
of excess. Here we have one of the leading ideas that shaped Herodotus’ inter-
pretation of events, that of hybris inevitably begetting a corresponding nemesis in
individuals and states. While he gives us finely individualized portraits of the four great
Persian kings, who all have some qualities he admires, the Persian invasion is a
manifestation of hybris, particularly on the part of Xerxes, leader of the second Persian
expedition against Greece, whose character expresses the arrogance of power.
Similarly, the tragic dramatist Aeschylus in his play the Persians has the ghost of his
father Darius say that Xerxes’ hybris was punished by the gods ‘who used the rashness
ofhis nature against him’ (ll. 742–744). When the king orders his men to lash the
Hellespont, throw fetters into it, brand it with irons and utter curses over it after a
storm has destroyed a recently constructed bridge, Herodotus remarks on the
HISTORY 37