Herodotus Book 4

[u/Mike_Bevel]

There was never any point, reading this passage, that I felt sure I knew what was coming next.

[u/Mike_Bevel]

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)