ABSTRACT

Herodotus is generally acknowledged, even by thoroughgoing sceptics like C. Hignett (1963), as our primary source for Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. It is no less generally recognized, however, that his account of its immediate antecedents – the period from Marathon to the Isthmus Congress of 481, punctuated by the death of Darius in 486 – is wholly unsatisfactory. Herodotus assumes, perhaps rightly, that a full-scale Persian campaign of conquest in Greece was inevitable after 490, but instead of discussing in detail the attitudes and responses of the Greeks to the barbarian menace he indulges his theological and dramatic bent by casting Xerxes’ expedition in the form of a tragedy with full supernatural apparatus. Part of the reason for this one-sided approach was no doubt the kind of Greek sources he had available or chose to use. The treatment of the role of Themistokles is only the most notorious product of biased reporting. However, the history of Sparta is equally personalized and distorted by being presented, fitfully, through the medium of Damaratos, one of Herodotus’ most audaciously exploited dramatis personae (and sufficiently impressive to excite the muse of C.P. Cavafy).