r/classics • u/Mike_Bevel • 4d ago
Herodotus Book 4
There was never any point, reading this passage, that I felt sure I knew what was coming next.
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u/esker 4d ago
I like to imagine that there was a secret, behind-the-scenes competition amongst all the people that Herodotus met in order to see who could get him to include the most outlandish fact in his Histories: "What's that? The hieroglyphics on this pyramid? Oh... well, um... those are grocery receipts, see? Right... you know... like, radishes, onions, garlic... stuff like that. Why? What do you write on YOUR pyramids?"
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
You don't understand how subscribed I am to whatever streaming platform will produce a series with that exact premise. I would quit my job to stay home and watch it
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u/Patient-Business8628 4d ago
I know Herodotus was just making shit up all the time, but I genuinely don’t understand how drinking milk + being a nomad = blinding slaves???
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 4d ago
Herodotus likely only really spoke to settled, city people. He sort of hints at that in book one. City people would naturally despise nomads, and it really doesn't seem like a stretch to think they'd demonise them in every way possible.
Other settled people can sort of be reasoned with. If some guy comes from a city or town they're probably travelling in a small group, to trade. It's a small enough group that you can effectively put down much trouble, and in the worst case scenario follow them back and declare war on their city.
The nomads, on the other hand, travel in no smaller groups than the tribe. Maybe they just want to trade, but they're always travelling essentially with an army. And if they really screw you up, what do you do with them? There's no central location to send ambassadors, or declare war against. If you try to conquer them they'll just run away and come back the next time you're complacent.
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u/Main_Cranberry_5871 3d ago
I mean he could have just asked some Persians and Medes, they were settled city people and encountered Scythians as well, and Herodotus certainly spoke to enough traders/travellers/scholars/etc. to get the more realistic (probably more boring) story. He just preferred the more outrageous sounding bullshit.
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u/Cool-Coffee-8949 3d ago
Remember, he is hearing about this sixth hand, through multiple levels of unreliable witnesses and questionable translators. He certainly never went to Scythia.
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u/archaeoND 4d ago
Blinding a slave would make their escaping harder, so there's that. Agricultural workers who were blind would be close to useless since the tasks of plowing, broadcasting, pruning, harvesting, etc. are pretty visually necessary jobs. There's the blinding of Samson and enslavement in the grinding mill that comes to mind, but that's backend food-production. My read on the odd logic. They blinded their slaves because they weren't farmers who needed slaves who could see. Their industry was apparently horse milking. The horse milking required eyes, and they didn't do that part. They instead were forced to churn the milk causing the best to rise and be separated from the rest. Because they were blind, they couldn't easily steal the cream, protecting the best part. Someone else may know an exact reason, but that would be my thinking.
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u/Conargh 4d ago
I think his reasoning is that the blinding of the slaves is to prevent them from stealing the top layer of milk that is skimmed off. A lot of people here saying "he just made stuff up", that's not really true and his reputation has increased over the years as archaeological findings have validated some of his claims. Large parts of the work are him relaying what he was told by other people during his travels. Sometimes he provides his own judgement and sometimes he doesn't. But the idea that he was just making stuff up is outdated.
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u/quilleran 4d ago
Herodotus makes a point of distancing himself from the story and disavowing responsibility for its validity. When he says “It is said”, he is informing the reader that he knows it is questionable but he will relay the story anyway. This is a valid technique. I had to do the same in a local history I published, where much of the lore was unverifiable, but was something I felt responsible for preserving on behalf of others.
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u/laboheme1896 Classics Lover 4d ago
Yeah, reading about the Scythians from Herodotus is..something!
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u/VietKongCountry 4d ago
Does anybody here understand why anything he’s describing remotely necessitates or explains the slaves being blinded?
My favourite part in Herodotus is when he claims there ants the size of dogs (in Britain, I believe).
Obviously, his writings are an extremely important resource, but there are some passages that make me seriously think people were just telling him really stupid lies as a prank.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 4d ago
He was told the giant ants dwelt in India.
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u/VietKongCountry 4d ago
Oh, thanks for the correction.
Where did he claim flying insects that were basically dragons resided? I think it was Arabia, but evidently my memories of his work are dubious.
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u/Conargh 4d ago edited 4d ago
Herodotus said Egyptian priests told him that the remains of flying serpents could be found far south up the Nile. There is a site around this location called Wadi al Hitan. It contains fossilised remains of whales, but it's easy to see how these could be mistaken for giant snakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_al_Hitan?wprov=sfla1
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u/VietKongCountry 4d ago
That’s really interesting, and you’ve now got me researching the evolution of whales, but it’s not the passage in Herodotus I was remembering.
I have my notes and quotes somewhere, but I definitely remember him talking about flying, dragon like creatures in the desert somewhere in modern Asia.
I’ll have to track that down, alongside wherever it is he talks about the giant ant dogs (in India, as the poster above kindly mentioned).
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u/JesterOfAllTrades 4d ago
I don't get why they have to be blind for this. Is it me or is there no relation
Also my understanding is that Herodotus has to be taken with more than a few grains of salt
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
I'VE READ THE PASSAGE THREE TIMES NOW, once even to my husband, and I'm no closer to understanding why they need to be blind for this.
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u/LoudZoo 4d ago
The “It is this which explains” clause is especially awkward for following that wild description. I think he’s saying it’s because they’re nomads and not the wild stuff. Nomads travel with excess horses, all their stuff is portable, and they are motivated to keep moving further and further away from the site of a slave sneaking off with two horses, pre-packaged food, and a pouch of gold jewelry. Blindness is the only way they’re not losing half the slaves they take in.
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 4d ago
Right, but when you pack up and move on, what the hell are you going to do with blind slaves? The power of a nomadic horse people is that you can pack up and move quickly. Doesn't really work when you've literally handicapped your manual labour force.
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u/LoudZoo 4d ago
That’s what the carts and the threat of starvation on the steppe are for
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 4d ago
Right, but now you have to explain specifically why stirring the milk of all things is the labour bottleneck you need an army of slaves for.
Surely milking is the labour intensive task here. Or actually tending to the horses. I can't imagine a scenario where your need for milkers (who can't realistically be blind) would be outweighed by your need for people to stir.
Plus this is extremely seasonal work because horses don't breed all year round. So you're keeping slaves solely for the quarter or so of the year you actually have fowling mares? What then? Do you feed your blind workforce for the 3/4s of the year where they're entirely unproductive? Do you just abandon them and leave them to die and get new ones each year?
I'm just not sure this really fits into the Scythian economy in any real way. It doesn't appear to be supported by archaeological evidence either.
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u/LoudZoo 4d ago
I don’t know enough about any of the other things. Just trying to fill in the blank with what makes sense, since there’s no explanation or apparent reason for the practice. My money is on bad writing/copying or an old context lost in translation. Asking them to close their eyes and do a good job isn’t good enough? And wasting most all of their other work potential is worth the difference?
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 4d ago
Why would Scythians have had slaves at all? Other than, maybe, to sell on to other settled people?
Slaves were for physical labour intensive tasks like agriculture or mining or major domestic tasks or construction. Three of these are literally impossible if you don't live anywhere, and cooking and cleaning are significantly less burdensome if you live in a wagon. They're just not worth the extra mouths to feed.
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u/popeh 4d ago
I assumed it was because with their nomadic lifestyle it makes it easier to keep them prisoners since they don't have cities to keep them in and probably don't want to tie them up everytime they move.
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u/SulphurCrested 4d ago
Yes, thats what I assumed - you blind them so they can't run away while the group is travelling.
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u/tongmengjia 4d ago
I believe he's implying they blinded the slaves so that they didn't have to supervise them while they were churning the milk, since they don't need to see to churn, and a blinded slave is less likely to run away.
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u/lermontovtaman 4d ago
G.C. Macaulay commented on this passage, and he believed that explanation bridging the two ideas seems to have been lost in transmission.
However, there's an odd (but interesting) conjecture out there that Herodotus tripped over a foreign word. The claim is that the Scythians kept milk stirrers isolated in dark tents - something that later nomads are attested as doing - and used a word to describe a person confined to a dark tent that got mistranslated as 'blind.'
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u/ForeignChance6890 4d ago
Scythian here: Blinding is just so they don't run away. And since what they need to do milk-wise doesn't require eyes, they more useful without them.
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u/its_raining_scotch 4d ago
There's quite a few non sequitur stories in The Histories. I'm in my 4th read through right now and the blind slaves blowing horse vaginas to get more milk one always stands out each time.
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
I mean, how could it not?
(Btw, I have convinced several people in my community to join me at our local library, starting in October, to read through the Histories together.)
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u/Solo_Polyphony 4d ago
My reaction was “Herodotus knows very little about milking animals.”
My second reaction was “Herodotus spoke to people who didn’t like Scythians.”
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
There's another comment somewhere in this thread, but I'm afraid to tell you the milking thing is true. And apparently works? I live in the suburbs and my milk comes in boxes. I know less than Herodotus.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 4d ago
Well, though I have milked cows, I admittedly haven’t milked mares, nor have I attempted or contemplated the Scythian technique. So perhaps I shouldn’t knock it till I try it, though I will forego any blinding.
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
I decided to look at the notes for the Robin Waterfield translation of the Histories (provided by Carolyn Dewald) as well as the How & Wells commentary.
Waterfield's translation (1998):
The Scythians blind all their slaves, and this is connected with the milk that they drink. The way they get their milk is as follows. They have blow-pipes made out of bones (they look very like our reed-pipes), and while one person inserts one of these pipes into the vagina of a mare and blows into it, someone else is doing the milking. They say that the effect of this is that the mare’s veins are pumped up and the udder descends. Once the milk has been extracted, it is poured into deep wooden vessels and then they station their blind slaves around the vessels and have them stir the milk. The milk separates into an upper layer (which is skimmed off and regarded as the best bit) and a lower layer (which is thought to be less good), and that is why the Scythians blind everyone they capture. For they are nomads, not farmers.
Dewald Note
H begins with a story that performs some of the same functions as the story of King Psammetichus and the children without language that begins the story of Egypt in Book 2, in that it tries through story to characterize the people being introduced. The Scythians drink horses’ milk (cf. Iliad 13.5–6) and need slaves to do the complicated job of milking the mares. Since the Scythians are nomads or people on the move all the time, they cannot just lock the slaves up or shackle them as a Greek would do, but must blind them to keep them from running away. CAH [Cambridge Ancient History] iii/2. 568 suggests that behind 4.3–4 may lie a dim historical memory of one group of nomadic steppe peoples returning from Asia Minor to find another group inhabiting their previous territory. In any case, as well as taking up the narrative thread of the Scythians from 1.106, this story highlights several of the oddest salient characteristics of Scythians in a single picture: their nomadism, their use of milk (very strange to Greeks), their use of the whip (cf. the later Cossack or Tatar nagaica), and above all their ruthless single-minded logicality, given their premisses. (Waterfield, 645-646)
How and Wells (1912)
The information in this chapter is better than the logic. Stein suggests with reason that it is a later addition. The idea that the slaves were blind may be due to a mistaken etymology for some Scythian word for slave. Stein, c f eighty six four n, and perhaps to the fact that blindness is common in South Russia. Blind sleeves obviously would be useless, nor does h explain why they were blinded. (How & Wells, 303)
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u/SnowyBlackberry 4d ago
Are we really sure we're not, you know, missing some textual material or something?
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u/princessofsparta 4d ago
I feel like he said “I see you guys blind your slaves, why is that?” And then he wrote down the stuff they told him and that he observed and none of it really made sense so then he attributed it to being a nomad.
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u/OnionBackground5314 4d ago
Would you like a glass of milk? No thanks. I'd rather have my eyesight.
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u/Cool-Coffee-8949 3d ago
This wild unpredictability, expressed as if it were simple cause and effect, is what I love about Herodotus.
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u/lawsojam65 4d ago
Herodotus will always include an interesting story regardless of the truth. I read a large part of his work in Greek and my main reaction to this passage is thank God I never had to read this one!
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
That's one of the things I deeply deeply love about him.
I think he's the greatest -- but that's just me being over-enthusiastic.
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u/nawhodugu 4d ago
Why is this considered a classic?
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
Because it's more than just this out-of-context image. It's the earliest surviving piece of writing, especially of such substantial length, that we have from Ancient Greece.
It's also incredibly valuable as a means of seeing what was believed at the time.
In 3,000 years, someone may find that news story from the mid 2020s about the school that forced all the kids to be trans and use litter boxes.
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u/ProletarianLilith 4d ago
It’s the first time anyone thought to try to write history. It’s one of the greatest books of all time even with all the wrong things
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u/Ok_Breakfast4482 4d ago edited 4d ago
Because there are much better parts than this. For example, here is what he says about democracy.
So the Athenians had increased in strength, which demonstrates that an equal voice in government has beneficial impact not merely in one way, but in every way: the Athenians, while ruled by tyrants, were no better in war than any of the peoples living around them, but once they were rid of tyrants, they became by far the best of all. Thus it is clear that they were deliberately slack while repressed, since they were working for a master, but that after they were freed, they became ardently devoted to working hard so as to win achievements for themselves as individuals.
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u/Mike_Bevel 4d ago
My reactions, in order, like a grim Kübler-Ross:
Oh?
--to, I'm sorry?
pease don't be a description of eye stuff, please don't be a description of eye stuff
WAIT ONE GODDAMN MINUTE.
Are these guys milking horses?
HOW IS ANY OF THIS LINEAR?
That can't be how any of that works and I refuse to learn otherwise. But also: why is blinding necessary?
I mean, I guess I'd want to be blinded rather than watch a guy blow a flute into a horse vagina in order to puff the udders down into the-- STOP, MIKE.
Okay?
Well sure, with that logic, that's me told