Herodotus and the topography of Xerxes' invasion

Place and memory in Greece and Anatolia

Jan Zacharias Van Rookhuijzen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783110611519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In his Histories, Herodotus of Halicarnassus gave an account of Xerxes' invasion of Greece (480 BCE). Among the information in this work features a rich topography of the places visited by the army, as well as of the battlefields. Apparently there existed a certain demand among the Greeks to behold the exact places where they believed that the Greeks had fallen, gods had appeared, or Xerxes had watched over his men.
This book argues that Herodotus' topography, long taken at face value as if it provided unambiguous access to the historical sites of the war, may partly be a product of Greek imagination in the approximately fifty years between the Xerxes' invasion and its publication, with the landscape functioning as a catalyst. This innovative approach leads to a new understanding of the topography of the invasion, and of the ways in which Greeks in the late fifth century BCE understood the world around them. It also prompts new suggestions about the real-world locations of various places mentioned in Herodotus' text.

1Introduction

1.1Topic

The world is full of places which invite a passer-by to pause his errands for a moment, and to remember that, right where he is standing, once upon a time something very important happened. In Sarajevo, a plaque points out the place where Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot, and the First World War began; the Hougoumont farm in the Belgian town of Braine-l’Alleud marks the epicentre of the battle of Waterloo and the downfall of Napoleon; and the September 11 Memorial in New York marks the place where the two towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

Such contemporary examples are part of an old and widespread phenomenon. The holy sites of many religions mark places where significant religious events were thought to have occurred. Followers of various faiths make their way to the top of the mountain Sri Pada or ‘Holy Foot’ in Sri Lanka, where they revere a footprint, variously said to be of Buddha, Shiva, Adam or Saint Thomas. The Holy Land has for centuries been a destination for Christian pilgrims eager to behold with their own eyes Jesus’ birthplace at Bethlehem and the site of his crucifixion at the Calvary. And in Greece, one could, with the help of Pausanias’ work, gaze at Nestor’s house and Agamemnon’s plane tree.1 We make ordinary places more special and evocative by pointing out their roles in history, religion and fiction, and in the process, our world becomes more meaningful.

The desire of people to imagine the past at significant locations may safely be thought of as universal.2 To the above examples of the ‘tourist gaze’ and the ‘pilgrim gaze’ we can add many other gazes: that of the local, and even that of the archaeologist.3 This book argues for the existence of such gazes in the ‘founding’ work of history itself: as it turns out, the world on which Herodotus of Halicarnassus has given us a window was one in which the question ‘Where did it happen?’ was often asked, and in which answers to that question were easily found.

A clear example appears in the following excerpt from the Histories (7.31), in which Herodotus indicates a very specific place associated with Xerxes’ march from Persia to Greece in the early fifth century BCE. He reports a plane tree on the route of the Persian king, where he performed a kind of ‘tree worship’.4

ὡς δὲ ἐκ τῆς Φρυγίης ἐσέβαλε ἐς τὴν Λυδίην, σχιζομένης τῆς ὁδοῦ καὶ τῆς μὲν ἐς ἀριστερὴν ἐπὶ Καρίης φερούσης τῆς δὲ ἐς δεξιὴν ἐς Σάρδις, τῇ καὶ πορευομένῳ διαβῆναι τὸν Μαίανδρον ποταμὸν πᾶσα ἀνάγκη γίνεται καὶ ἰέναι παρὰ Καλλάτηβον πόλιν, ἐν τῇ ἄνδρες δημιοργοὶ μέλι ἐκ μυρίκης τε καὶ πυροῦ ποιεῦσι, ταύτην ἰὼν ὁ Ξέρξης τὴν ὁδὸν εὗρε πλατάνιστον, τὴν κάλλεος εἵνεκα δωρησάμενος κόσμῳ χρυσέῳ καὶ μελεδωνῷ ἀθανάτῳ ἀνδρὶ ἐπιτρέψας δευτέρῃ ἡμέρῃ ἀπίκετο ἐς τῶν Λυδῶν τὸ ἄστυ.

And when Xerxes entered Lydia from Phrygia, at the point where the road splits with the left one leading to Caria and the right one to Sardis, along which one cannot avoid crossing the Maeander and to go past the city of Kallatebos, in which the craftsmen make a sweet from tamarisk and wheat, while going that way, he found a plane tree. Because of its beauty he decorated it with gold and made one of the Immortals guard it, and he arrived at the city of the Lydians on the second day.

As will be discussed in §2.1.4, Herodotus probably based this anecdote on Anatolian folklore, in which stories about the visit of the Persian king had become attached to one or more real plane trees. I propose to call this kind of place a mnemotope, or ‘place of memory’ (§1.3). This concept describes how communities come to associate particular historical or mythical narratives with particular places.

Although historical narratives often feature places like the plane tree of Kallatebos, there has been surprisingly little recognition, let alone understanding of the processes by which ancient authors may have come up with them. The perspective has also been lacking in scholarship on Herodotus. Investigating this topography as a collection of mnemotopes therefore offers a new perspective on an important text about an important event.

1.2Hypothesis & scope

This book will apply the concept of mnemotope to the Persian invasion of Greece, which consists of Xerxes’ march from Persia to Greece and the subsequent encounters of the Persian and Greek armies until the siege of Sestos (480–479 BCE). It is my hypothesis that the framework of mnemotopes is a useful heuristic tool to understand the topography of Xerxes’ invasion as recounted in Herodotus’ Histories.

To explore this hypothesis, I will first try to arrive at a general understanding of mnemotopes in §1.3. In §1.4 we will then see that there is much scope for exploring mnemotopes in Herodotus’ work, and that this exploration offers new insights that complement previous research on Herodotus’ work and the Persian Wars.

Part 2 features a full discussion of the individual mnemotopes within the topography of Xerxes’ invasion. These places have been grouped into ten case studies. Within each case study, the relevant sites are addressed, as far as possible, individually. For every mnemotope the following questions, where applicable, will be answered:

–What is being remembered at the mnemotope?

–Where was the mnemotope located?

–What other narratives were localised here?

–Is there reason to doubt the historicity of the narratives or their localisation?5

–Are there any alternative traditions about the localisation of the narrative?

–Does the narrative adhere to a common place?

It could be argued that the physical context of mnemotopes is irrelevant as the concept revolves around the ideas embodied by these places. However, as indicated above, places may become mnemotopes because their form sometimes inspires or influences the story. Furthermore, knowledge about the physical environment of a mnemotope is a requirement to comment on its prominence, visibility and visitability, parameters which are important in the formation of mnemotopes. Moreover, in some cases there are correlations between two or more different places, which are only perceptible when these are properly mapped. In some cases the physical environment gives reason to doubt the historical accuracy of our sources. Finally, the identification of the place is a requirement to unlock access to archaeological sources that may provide a deeper understanding of it.

For reasons of feasibility the research topic is limited along several lines. First, it will only be concerned with Xerxes’ invasion of Greece and it will therefore not include a study of the battle of Marathon, which happened during the reign of Darius. This battle probably was the most ‘remembered’ Persian War battle for the Athenians6; nevertheless, it is justifiable to exclude it from this study, because Xerxes’ campaign is the only real invasion of Greece, and the narrative about it is a self-contained, independent section within the Histories, with only few digressions.7 Second, only those mnemotopes of Xerxes’ invasion that occur in the Histories will be discussed. While other, mainly later, sources will be used where necessary to elucidate the questions presented above,8 they are hardly ever securely independent of Herodotus’ account,9 and usually to be placed in a different memory context.10 At any rate, the number of mnemotopes which do not appear in Herodotus is rather limited, as Herodotus’ work is by far the richest account, the ‘master narrative’, of the Persian Wars. While Pausanias is the most important source for sites associated with this event after Herodotus,11 they are also found in other ancient authors, and the process of identifying such places has been reactivated in modern times.12 Third, there will be no extensive discussion of objects or relics of Xerxes’ invasion. As will be explained (§1.3.2), these are not included in my definition of mnemotope and have already been studied elsewhere.13 Finally, because mnemotopes signify events cast in narratives, only those places where Herodotus localises specific events of the Persian Wars will be studied; places that merely function as geographical markers will not be considered.

1.3Mnemotopes

1.3.1The choice of a term

This book is positioned at the crossroads of the major research themes of ‘space’ and ‘memory’, which have left their mark on the study of the ancient world. The spatial turn has taught us that textual space may have a thematic function, can mirror or contrast themes of the work, expose symbolic functions, characterise characters, and psychologise them.14 The field of memory studies has highlighted that “memory is the present past”,15 and that we must accordingly approach the past from the perspective of the people who engaged with and (sometimes) created that past.16

The approach presented here is more specific and concerns the overlap of these domains: the role of space in ancient memory. In recent years, studies have appeared which demonstrate that this relationship can be successfully explored in the Graeco-Roman world,17 and the ancients themselves had developed a mnemonic system in which memories could be tied to specific ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• List of maps and figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Topographical Case Studies
• 3 A Typology of Mnemotopes
• 4 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index