Caesar\'s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

Of the expeditions which we know of, this was much the greatest, so that nei-

ther Darius’ against the Scythians seems an expedition by comparison with this

one... nor the Scythian one... nor the one (according to what is said) of the

Atreidae against Troy... All these campaigns and others which happened like

them are not worthy of this single one.^16

Finally, in book 3, Herodotus uses a very similar turn of phrase to introduce a dis-
tinction between the thalassocrats Minos and Polycrates — Minos from sometime
before the Trojan War, and Polycrates from the generation of Herodotus’s grand-
father (3.122.2):

Polukravth" gavr ejsti prw'to" tw'n hJmei'" i[dmen ïEllhvnwn o}"

qalassokratevein ejpenohvqh, pavrex Mivnw te tou' Knwssivou kai;

eij dhv ti" a[llo" provtero" touvtou h\rxe th'" qalavssh": th'" de; ajnqrwphivh"

legomevnh" geneh'" Polukravth" prw'to".

For Polycrates is the first of the Greeks of whom we know who had the plan of

ruling the sea, apart from Minos the Cretan and any other person before him

who ruled the sea — of the so-called human race Polycrates was first.

Now, it is tolerably clear that when Herodotus points to Croesus and Polycrates as
the first of whom he knows in their various contexts, he is not saying that there is
some ineradicable line positioned about a hundred years in the past that separates
offreal history from myth — whatever “myth” might mean to Herodotus, or “his-
tory” for that matter. Scholars have sometimes taken Herodotus to be drawing
some such line; his pronouncement about Croesus in particular has been taken to
be an opening programmatic statement about a time distinction that is operative
for the whole of the rest of the work.^17 This view cannot be right in its blunt form,
since Herodotus does vouch for a great deal of material that he narrates from
before this period, and he even gives a number of different “firsts of which we
know” from before the time of Croesus and Polycrates, such as the first dithyramb
(1.23 – 24), or the first barbarian dedications at Delphi (1.14.2).^18 Nonetheless, at
the start of his work he definitely is making a distinction between the stories of the
Persians about Io and his own account of Croesus; if you really want to know how
the cycle of aggression and revenge between Europe and Asia began, you look to
Croesus, not to those other stories.^19 Herodotus can certainly go back in time
before Croesus to set the scene for that narrative, but this does not invalidate the
fact that Croesus is a crucial demarcation line.^20 Above all, Herodotus makes a dis-

Stratifying Time: Herodotus. 73