4. The Meaning of Language Difference

In relation to the standards against which he measures himself, the histōr of the Histories possesses a multi-lingual competence that contrasts with the sense of strangeness most Greek-speakers experience when confronted with any barbarian speech. In his narrative of the common origins of the oracles of Zeus-Ammon in Libya and of Zeus at Dodona, [1] Herodotus communicates his own understanding of the linguistic aspect of the psychology of otherness. According to the Egyptian priests of Zeus at Thebes, Phoenicians once abducted two priestesses from their temple and separately sold them into slavery, one in Libya and the other in northern Greece, where they each founded a sanctuary (2.54). The priestesses at Dodona, however, told the histōr a different story, also supported by “the other Dodonians from around the sanctuary.” According to this version, two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes, one to Libya and the other to Greece. The dove that arrived in Greece, the Dodonians say, perched on top of an oak tree at Dodona, and spoke out “with human voice” (φωνῇ ἀνθρωπείῃ). It declared that a sanctuary of Zeus must rise on that spot. The local people assumed that this was an announcement from god (θεῖον) and obeyed. Meanwhile, the other dove established the sanctuary of Ammon in Libya (2.55).

Confronted with these two traditions, Herodotus offers his own interpretation (γνώμη), which is far more than an attempt to reconcile them and establish what really happened. In speculating on how the more fantastic Dodonian legend may have originated, the narrator reflects on the process of naming and the transmission of names. Since the Egyptian version seems at least plausible from a rationalist viewpoint, Herodotus starts by assuming as true (εἰ ἀληθέως) the story of the Phoenician abduction that caused the arrival of two priestesses (not doves), one to Libya and the other to Greece, or—as it was then called—Pelasgia. [2] The woman who came to Dodona, he says, must have built a shrine of Zeus under the oak tree in remembrance of the sanctuary she used to tend at home. After learning Greek (συνέλαβε τὴν Ἑλλάδα γλῶσσαν), she founded an oracle and told the local people about how her sister was sold in Libya by the same men who sold her in Thesprotia. Where, then, did the Greek tradition about doves come from? This is how Herodotus explains it: Black, foreign, and a slave, the woman has been confined to the animal world, yet at the same time regarded as the bearer of a divine message. To the ancient Pelasgians of Dodona, “human voice” is the Greek language and barbarian speech is abnormal in either direction. [3] But how could anyone fathom a speaking dove? To the Pelasgians, no doubt, the Egyptian priestess is a “dove” in somewhat the same way as to the Scythians snow is “feathers” or to the narrator himself certain Ethiopians sound like bats. The process of transmission, however, has turned the woman into a literal dove just as—less innocently—Cyrus’ nurse Spako became a dog in the discourse of political propaganda. In the case of the Dog-woman the motivation of the initial name-givers is unimportant and unclear, but for the Dove-woman it is crucial and solves the riddle. When the present-day Dodonians say “black dove,” they unwittingly give a sign (sēmainousi) of the truth to Herodotus, who speaks their same “language,” but is also aware of many different languages and knows that common to all of them is the mythopoetic power of names. [4]

Linguistic ethnocentrism entails a claim to the privileged and absolute status of utterances: for the Greeks, only Greek has meaning and what has meaning is Greek. This attitude is mortified in the episode of the defeat of the Greeks from Perinthus at the hands of a barbarian tribe, the Thracian Paeonians (5.1.2–3). One would like to call this little story an ainos, a coded narrative designed to teach a general point. [5] Here Paeonians and Perinthians, to paraphrase one of Plutarch’s complaints about Herodotus, seem to play the role of crows and monkeys in the fables of Aesop. [6]

We have seen cases in the Histories when Herodotus discovers word-transparency as a sort of secret weapon for decoding barbarian speech. Other times, however, he does just the opposite, and criticizes those who understand foreign words in terms of Greek. [7] The Paeonian-Perinthian narrative belongs to this second category of passages, since it features a single sound, Paion, which means different things to different peoples. For the Greeks this is a name of Apollo the Savior and of a song in which Apollo is invoked in this way. [8] For the Paeonians, on the other hand, Paion means ‘Paeonian’, and is the name by which they call themselves. Both ethnea in the story appear oblivious to this distinction or, for that matter, to the existence of any language beside their own.

Unlike the logos of the doves, this one is sparingly narrated, with no metanarrative interventions. Its mildly anti-Greek bias derives from its being focalized through the Paeonians and from the outcome of the action, which is comically detrimental to the Perinthians. The Paeonians had received an oracle from “the god,” encouraging them to make war on the Perinthians. When the two armies would be ranked opposite to each other, the oracle had said, if the Paeonians should hear the Perinthians call their name, they should immediately attack and victory would be theirs. Subsequently, Perinthians and Paeonians got together for a series of contests. The Perinthians won and began to sing the paean. The Paeonians thought that the Perinthians were calling their name and that their moment had come, just as the oracle had said. They promptly attacked the Perinthians and inflicted on them a severe defeat.

In Aeschylus’ Persians, the paean is followed by a perfectly articulate war-song on freedom; it serves as a glorious affirmation of Greek superiority vis-à-vis the confused “clamor of tongue,” γλώσσης ῥόθος, of the barbarians before the battle. [9] In the Persians by Timotheus, the paean will celebrate the victory (210–214) and contrast with the ungrammatical supplication of a Persian prisoner “entwining Greek with his Asiatic tongue.” [10] The Greeks do not sing the paean in the more complicated Herodotean narrative of Salamis. [11] That song appears in the Paeonian episode instead, where it works as an instrument of defeat for those who sing it and an incitement to victory for those who have misunderstood its intended meaning. “The god,” not identified by name and culturally neutral, has this time for reasons unknown favored the barbarians, denying the privilege of meaning to Greek and presiding over the equal status of languages.

If linguistic relativity is the main point of the Perinthian-Paeonian narrative, the aim of conveying that message helps to explain the uniqueness of the story in other respects. It is somewhat obscure, mock-heroic in tone, and it represent the situation, unusual in the Histories, of an oracle that encourages someone to go to war and practically rewards aggression. [12] This is also the only case in Herodotus when misunderstanding the national verbal code causes trouble or otherwise affects the course of events. [13] Elsewhere in the Histories, only once does someone strategically exploit language difference against an enemy in war: this is Leotychides in his message to the Ionians on the eve of Mycale, a maneuver that however remains without clear results. [14] Conversely, speaking the same national language is not a cure-all. The only Greek in the Histories who knows a foreign language, the Persian-speaking Histiaeus, ends up impaled by his Persian captors anyway. [15] The Greeks are homoglōssoi, yet they do not talk to each other; instead, they solve their differences by war (7.9.β1–2).

In Herodotus, as in Homer and tragedy, speakers of different tongues engage in mutual dialogue without technical difficulties. [16] When an anonymous Persian shares with Greek symposiasts Greek-like sentiments concerning the imminent battle of Plataea, we exceptionally learn that he uses the Greek language (Ἑλλάδα γλῶσσαν ἱέντα). [17] In other narratives the only issue is implicitly whether or not barbarian characters “speak Greek” in a figurative sense, expressing conceptually what a Greek would express, [18] or whether their utterances are distinctly alien. Cultural misunderstandings occur and, like the misinterpretation of oracles, may have a linguistic component. [19] The failure of communication between Croesus and Solon, for example, involves the two speakers’ different notions of who should “be called” olbios and of the meaning of that term. [20] But no consequence ever results in the Histories from Greek-speakers, Lydian-speakers, Persian-speakers, etc., not understanding one another because of their national languages.

The role of language difference in the sphere of communication and mutual acceptance clearly emerges from those narratives that explicitly raise the issue. When a group of reckless young Nasamones from influential families went to explore the deserts of Libya and was captured by pygmies, “neither did the Nasamones know a word of their language, nor did those who took them away know the language of the Nasamones” (2.32.6). This negation signals impending trouble, but the text does not deliver on its apparent promise: the Nasamones returned home safe and sound (2.33.1). Again in Libya, Herodotus describes a system of commercial bargaining between Carthaginians and a local tribe that must rely on dumb show and smoke signals (4.196). These transactions work quite well, and “there is no foul play on either side” (ἀδικεέιν δὲ οὐδετέρους, 4.196.3). The negative evaluation here represents an implicit response to the expectation of the listener. [21]

The topic of speech forms a counterpoint to the main plot of an ethnographic-historical narrative—another ainos—designed to undermine conventional notions of alterity: [22] the story of the gradual coming together and ultimate fusion of a band of Scythian young men and a parallel contingent of stranded Amazons or, as the Scythians call them, “Mankillers.” [23] The two groups are in principle as mutually incompatible as Amazons and Greeks—or as Greeks and barbarians, the antithesis they symbolize. In practice, however they turn out to be equal and remarkably similar, except in gender and language. As one of the Amazons and the young Scythian who approaches her start dealing with one another in their primitive setting, the narrative again specifies that the two were not able to communicate through speech, but that it was not a problem: Just as sex replaces war, here the universal language of gestures overcomes the language barrier. [24] This first encounter leads to others, and at the end of the story they all get married, Scythians and Amazons, and the Sauromatian nation is born. The text brings up again the issue of language as part of the well-balanced distribution of powers and privileges between the two equal groups in the new society. The Amazons adopt the language of their Scythian husbands. This corresponds to their subordinate position in the sexual sphere but it is also, in Herodotus’ formulation, an index of superior intelligence: “the men were not able to learn (οὐκ ἐδυνέατο μαθεῖν) the language of the women, but the women picked up the language of the men” (4.114.1). Nevertheless, “the Amazons did not learn it perfectly”; as a result the Sauromatae basically speak Scythian, but they distort it (σολοικίζοντες, 4.117). While Herodotus employs the verb soloikizein ‘distort’ in this remark on a dialect which is not, alas, pure Scythian, in other texts the word is applied to bad Greek as a virtual synonym of barbarizein. [25] But by cheerfully assuming the Scythian viewpoint, the ethnographer once again scores a point for relativity on the language front.

The narrative of the Histories occasionally indicates the existence of a linguistic discrepancy between speakers simply by recording that someone was in charge of mediating a verbal exchange. Interpreters must have been a regular feature of international transactions in the ancient world. Xenophon mentions them rather frequently, sometimes by name, and occasionally gives them a minor character role. [26] In Herodotus’ narrative, which follows tragic and poetic conventions, interpreters are an optional feature and appear only four times, always as part of the apparatus of the Persian court. [27] Their role, however, is different from that of guards, gatekeepers, and other enforcers of the king’s power. [28] Just as in glosses of historiē interpreters occasionally facilitate the work of Herodotus, so in the historical narrative they are a resource for royal inquiry. [29]

As he prepares an expedition to conquer Ethiopia, Cambyses sends from Elephantine some Icthyophagi “who knew the Ethiopian language” to bring gifts to the Ethiopian king and investigate various matters, including the Table of the Sun (3.17, 18.1). These messengers answer the Ethiopian king’s question about Persian culture, hear information about the Ethiopians, and inspect sites and burials. Their ethnic name “Fish-Eaters,” which is the only thing we learn about them, positions them as intermediaries between the Persians and the other mainstream “bread-eating” societies on the one hand, and the meat-eating Ethiopians on the other. [30] Though they serve as instruments of Cambyses’ aggressive designs, the innocent and respectful Icthyophagi are also, vis-à-vis the recipient of the Histories, surrogate-ethnographers for Herodotus himself.

The other linguistic interpreters in the Histories, called by their professional name, hermēnees, are colorless figures, but their rare appearances are signals that cultural issues are at stake. In one narrative the Samian Syloson once happened to make a gift to Darius of the bright red cloak he was wearing, which Darius had admired and asked to purchase. Somewhat unexpectedly, Darius rose to the throne and Syloson’s trivial gesture turned out to have disproportionate consequences. [31] When the Samian presented himself to Darius and declared that he was the king’s “benefactor” (euergetēs), his claim, translated into Persian, would have had greater import than the speaker perhaps intended or than the narrative conveys in Greek. The mention of interpreters (3.140.3) alludes to the official Persian title of orosanga of the king. In exchange for his early favor Syloson becomes tyrant of Samos, obtaining the same reward that in the next generation the Persian king will confer on another Samian, who fought with valor against the Greeks at Salamis. [32]

The last two sets of interpreters we must consider more deeply relate to the narrator’s overall ideology in the sphere of language difference because they help to stage verbal exchanges where other discrepancies come into play that are more problematic than linguistic difference. [33] As the pyre is already blazing, Croesus remembers his past conversation with Solon and invokes Solon’s name three times:

The reason why Croesus’ words are unintelligible (asēma) to Cyrus at first is evidently not that they are spoken in Lydian. Interpreters are at hand, and that is all one needs for language. [34] The mention of interpreters at the beginning and at the end of this passage signals the overcoming of a more serious problem of communication between the two barbarian kings. [35] From a Greek viewpoint, Croesus is the philhellenic barbaros while Cyrus is the remote barbaros, who does not know Solon or anything else about Greece (see 1.153.1, cf. 5.73.2). Only after Croesus relates, and the interpreters translate, the whole story of Solon’s visit to Croesus, Cyrus understands—as Croesus himself had not at the time—the “human” (anthrōpinon), that is to say, the cross-cultural, meaning of Solon’s words. Solon is the real interpreter, who translates from the particular to the general, and his words are for the whole human race. [36]

The meaning of anthrōpinos as ‘cross-cultural’ in Herodotus is confirmed by the narrative of a verbal exchange inserted in the important series of generalizations at 3.38. This dialogue includes three sets of participants, each using three different types of cultural codes: a linguistic code, a code of communication (how things are said, including expressions and gestures), and a code of customs, the last representing the substance of the discourse. I quote the narrative partially in the context of the interpretive passage where it appears: [37]

In this narrative, the cultural codes of communication stand out. The Persian Darius expresses himself in monetary terms, similar to those of his Lydian predecessor Croesus in the scene already considered (“for how much money”; cf. 1.86.4, “I think it would be worth a lot of money”). [38] The Greeks respond, as we would say, in a “normal” way, and answer the question courtroom-style in the same terms in which it is asked. The Indians (and this is an orientalistic detail) display emotion. As for the code of customs, what the three parties are talking about is funeral rites, in which again each differs from the other two. Finally, the reference to interpreters draws attention to the languages—Persian, Greek and Callatian—specifying that the Greeks had the means to understand these codes, and that this item of difference is the least problematic of all. [39] At the level of the nomoi, sacred to the ones and repulsive to the others, the exchange reaches a dead end. Cultural “translation” is difficult when people find difference from themselves disturbing.

As Cyrus’ understanding of Croesus can finally be achieved through one who speaks “for the whole human race,” so here the understanding of the audience is made possible by the histōr. Darius’ experiment with Greeks and Callatians provides the tekmērion (proof/sign) for the theoretical argument at 3.38. [40] Here Herodotus takes stock of his Greek contemporaries’ belief that their own culture is superior and attributes a similar or even greater feeling to all other men (πάντες ἄνθρωποι). Cultural subjectivity is a sure thing, and it is both subjective and universal. As such, it indicates the objective validity and worth of all nomoi. Consequently, a higher principle of Nomos must exist from which these different but equally compelling nomoi all derive. And Nomos, unlike the different nomoi, unifies rather than separates men. Whether or not Herodotus is thinking in terms of the etymological correctness of names, he corroborates as correct (orthōs), the onomastic equivalence testified to by Pindar: “Nomos king of all.” [41]

If the issue of language makes its fleeting appearance in the small narrative of Darius’ inquiry only to advertise its own lack of importance, a certain correspondence is nevertheless established between the three types of codes simply because they are all culturally determined spheres of disagreement among the three speakers—different languages, different forms of expression, different customs. Language represents to Herodotus a particularly unprob-lematic area of difference; it therefore offers a paradigm of relativity to be extended as much as he possibly can to other spheres of culture in which difference is harder to accept as legitimate. The latter include, as here, funeral customs, but also diverging standards of justice and culture-specific knowledge about the gods. There even the narrator has to come to terms with his distaste for cannibalism, ritual prostitution, human sacrifice, and seemingly inadequate representations of the divine. I say “as much as he possibly can” because every observer is bound to be culturally subjective, as Herodotus himself theorizes (3.38.1), and several passages in the Histories show a not entirely resolved tension between relativism and evaluation. Herodotus is not, at any rate, the last ethnographer to be torn between the two. [42]

Herodotus’ attempt, nevertheless, to extend the linguistic paradigm to a non-linguistic translation of culture is pervasive. It includes his application of the names of Greek gods to the gods of foreign peoples and his much discussed translations of the names of the gods, the latter combining in a special way linguistic and conceptual equivalence. [43] It particularly manifests itself at the formal level in certain glosses of ethnographic comparison which suggest an equivalence between an alien and a Greek practice, similar to the equivalences the narrator has no trouble in drawing between foreign and Greek words. [44] Through the narrative of Darius’ experiment the translation of customs is made implicitly, between burning and eating the dead. Both linguistic and non-linguistic translations require considerable adjustment between discrepant phenomena: an Egyptian baris is a boat, but with special characteristics, just as the Callatian Indian version of what to the Greeks is a funeral. But the equivalence guarantees the intelligibility and legitimacy of the foreign phenomenon as another particular manifestation of Nomos, of which its Greek counterpart is also a manifestation.

Nomos, in the Pindaric phrase as Herodotus uses it, transcends its individual embodiments—the nomoi of different peoples. [45] In a parallel way that almost suggests that the two concepts coincide, “the divine” manifests itself through the theoi worshipped by different peoples, but it transcends culture differentiation. [46] It is not surprising to find, therefore, that the divine also transcends the linguistic codes of the world, as those cases demonstrate in which oracles express themselves in different languages.

There are two cases of this phenomenon in the Histories, both accompanied by an extraordinary degree of metanarrative intervention. [47] The narrator advertises as something he regards a great wonder (θῶμά μοι μέγιστον) the experience of a certain Mys, a Carian who had been sent by Mardonius to consult various Greek oracles. When this Mys arrived at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoos in Boeotia, the prophet (πρόμαντις) started to speak in a non-Greek language (βαρβάρῳ γλώσσῃ). Like the histōr who reports this story, so also the Thebans charged with writing down the response “were in wonder hearing a barbarian language instead of Greek.” Mys snatched the tablet away from them and started making the transcription himself, saying that the oracle was speaking in Carian (8.135.1–3). The substance of the oracle is not given in this narrative, and the narrator says he has no knowledge of what precisely the consultation was about (8.133). What is important, and a wonder to him, is the demonstration of the cross-cultural value of divine utterances even when mediated by a cultural institution such as a sanctuary. Barbarophōnoi, in the words of oracles, are the Persian invaders of Greece (8.20.2; 9.43.3); but here their Carian envoy—himself one of the original barbarophōnoi of Homer—obtains direct access to the god. [48]

One episode in the Histories testifies to the internationalism of Delphic Apollo in the context of colonization, where the Greeks’ unilateral ideology vis-à-vis native populations is well known. [49] In his account of the founding of Cyrene in Libya, the most linguistically foreign of lands, [50] Herodotus, like Pindar in his fourth Pythian ode, embraces the tradition that attributes to the oikist Battus the heroic disability of a weak or stuttering voice. [51] Again, like Pindar (Pythian Odes 4 and 5), Herodotus stresses the legitimacy of the position of Battus, whom Apollo’s spontaneous oracle appointed as leader of the Theran expedition and king of the new foundation. [52] The two authors, however, operate in very different contexts. Pindar’s praise of Battus is subordinated to the epinician glorification of his descendant Arcesilaus IV, the king of Cyrene in Pindar’s own time. [53] By contrast, Herodotus recounts the foundation of Cyrene by Battus as a prelude to his history of that city’s devolvement into discord and tyranny in the subsequent generations of Battiad rule. [54]

Other discrepancies between our two earliest sources on Battus are more important for their respective views on Greek and foreign speech. In Pindar, the founder of Cyrene is the civilizer of a barbarian land, who scares off the deep-roaring (βαρυκόμποι) Libyan lions with his “overseas language” (γλῶσσαν … ὑπερποντίαν). Battus’ stuttering speech, in other words, becomes effective in the new setting on account of the divine voice of Delphi, which prescribed the settlement, and thanks to the superior political power of the Greek language in relation to the animal voice of the natives. [55] A version of Apollo’s oracle to Battus that appears in Diodorus translates Pindar’s metaphor into literal terms:

Herodotus gives his colonization narrative a different emphasis. Neither he nor the oracles he reports mention confrontations of the Greek colonists with lions or native peoples. His Battus is a reluctant leader—not a bad thing in Herodotus—whose hesitancy is perhaps symbolized by his stutter. [57] Battus, who doubts his power and strength, finally goes overseas in obedience to the oracle and founds the city in Libya after two false starts and a great deal of trouble (4.155.4; 156–157). He moves his settlement once within Libya, under the sponsorship (and control) of the local Libyans. He reigns for forty years apparently without waging any wars or conquering anyone. [58] In Herodotus’ narrative, trouble with the local Libyans only begins under Battus II (4.159) and intensifies with Arcesilaus II. The analogue of Battus the stutterer is his fourth successor, Battus III the Lame, who is also apparently reluctant to rule: in some sense he re-founds the city by promoting, according to a Delphic prescription, a quasi-democratic form of government in Cyrene. But the next king, the third Arcesilaus, undoes the reform, and the dynasty marches on to its final ruin.

In relation to Pindar and other sources on the colonization of Cyrene—as well as, we might add, Greek colonization in general—Herodotus’ narrative presents a striking peculiarity. On the one hand, it reports no fewer than four Delphic oracles that order the Greeks to colonize Libya. On the other hand it also strives to legitimize the foundation not only from a Greek but also from a barbarian viewpoint. [59] It does so, moreover, in a context that exploits the Pindaric themes of Battus’ disability, the voice of the oracle, and the issue of Greek versus native speech. In Herodotus’ scene of Battus’ consultation of the oracle, Apollo, Battus, and Herodotus’ Greek sources engage in a complicated dialogue that is, at one level, about language. Louder than everyone else’s is the voice of the narrator himself, who interferes at every sentence as the interpreter of the Delphic god: Herodotus’ translation from the Libyan refashions the Therean and Cyrenaic tradition he himself reports. [60] It also reverses the pattern, testified in other sources, of “bilingual” oracles appropriating foreign phenomena to the Greek language. In one of the foundation stories, for example, Delphi prescribes that the Sicilian city be named “Gela” (a local name) after the “laughter” (gelas) of the future oikist. [61] With “Battus,” on the contrary, the histōr insists in his own voice that the name by which the Greek founder of Cyrene is most commonly known is a Libyan word because the god who elected him king in Libya “named” him “King” in the local tongue. [62]

Unlike Herodotus, the Therean and Cyrenaeans who preserve the foundation story derive the name Battus from the Greek word battarizō (βατταρίζω ‘stutter’). They identify the oikist with a linguistic handicap that corresponds to his social and political marginality in a Greek context: [63] he is the natural son of a Theran citizen and his Cretan concubine, and therefore not fully an insider, not endowed with a strong “voice” in the polis and, one can almost say, not fully Greek. To this interpretation, which makes Battos (Battus) onomatopoeically and semantically analogous to barbaros, [64] Herodotus’ Apollo responds with the equivalence of Battos and basileus. The issue of Battus’ voice (phōnē) is really one of language.

The Thereans and Cyrenaeans, who fail to learn from the oracle the real significance of Battus’ ominous name—and perhaps, therefore, misunderstand the task of colonization—resemble the Perinthians, who sing the paion oblivious to the language of the Paeonians. They only hear pure Greek as conveying meaning. [65] They are to this day as presumptuously ignorant of foreign realities as were the Theran colonists, who first settled in the wrong place. When they consulted Delphi again, complaining that they had colonized Libya and were not better off, the oracle chided with Dorian-colored and punning speech: “If you know, not having been there Libya nurturer of flocks better than I who have been there, I indeed admire your wisdom” (4.159.3). The histōr of the Histories has also been there. Because he moves across languages, he is also uniquely qualified to understand the utterances of the divine. His message is about different cultures and concerns “all men.”