Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
Do not fortify or dig up the Isthmus.
Zeus would have made an island if he had wanted to. (Hdt. 1.174)
Like Xerxes, the Cnidians are wrong to undertake this alteration of their world; unlike him, they heed warnings and stop before catastrophe strikes.25 In a similar situation in book 2, the Egyptian king Necos starts digging a canal, which the Persian king Darius will later finish when he has conquered the region. An oracle stops Necos, saying that he is helping his Persian enemy (2.158).26 In Herodotus’s world, the gods are not usually in the business of approving or forbidding earth- and waterworks, but their occasional intervention proves both the risk and reward of undertaking them. Erga can offend the gods and bring ruin upon the rulers who order them (not to mention the workers who get in the way), or they can ensure those same rulers’ fame and memorialization in historiography.27
When negotiating these risks, the best rulers alter land- and waterscapes to benefit their people rather than merely themselves. This principle emerges from a series of stories in book 1 that report the great works of various rulers, both Babylonian (Semiramis, Nitocris) and Persian (Darius, Cyrus). Semiramis, Herodotus reports, constructs dykes “worthy of mention” (axiotheētēs) that prevent a river from flooding the plane of Babylon (1.184). Nitocris, a later successor, leaves behind “monuments” (mnēmosuna, 1.185.1) that Herodotus considers worth describing but also has the foresight to defend against Median encroachment by diverting the Euphrates, fortifying it with embankments, and constructing an artificial lake to slow the river and make it less useful to attackers (1.185.2–6). These interventions are “worthy of wonder” (1.185.3: axion thōmatos) and thus enhance Nitocris’s later reputation, but Herodotus also emphasizes how she has transformed the river into a defense system for her people (1.186.1).28 Another, more modest undertaking benefits the populace in peacetime. Nitocris constructs a bridge that is lowered by day and retracted at night. During the day, the bridge eases the “nuisance” (1.186.1: ochlēron) of conducting business, but at night its absence prevents the Babylonians from robbing one another. Nitocris’s bridge and defense system are the ingenious projects of a responsible ruler.29
Herodotus uses another story about Nitocris to demonstrate the importance of rulers’ intentions in undertaking their erga.30 After describing Nitocris’s bridge, Herodotus reports that she built a tomb for herself above the city gates, inscribed with a message to future rulers:
Τῶν τις ἐμεῦ ὕστερον γινομένων Βαβυλῶνος βασιλέων ἢν σπανίσῃ χρημάτων, ἀνοίξας τὸν τάφον λαβέτω ὁκόσα βούλεται χρήματα· μὴ μέντοι γε μὴ σπανίσας γε ἄλλως ἀνοίξῃ οὐ γὰρ ἄμενον.
Any Babylonian king who comes after me and needs money may open the tomb and take as much as he requires, but if he opens it for any other reason, it will not go well for him. (Hdt. 1.187.2)
Darius, a later, Persian ruler of Babylon, breaks into this tomb both because he wants the promised money and because he dislikes walking under Nitocris’s corpse when he enters the city. Once inside, he is greeted with these words: “Only a terribly greedy person would open the tombs of the dead.”31 Herodotus calls Nitocris’s tomb a “trick” or “deceit” (apatē), but the story also celebrates her ingenuity and portrays Darius as a hypocrite. Darius, who would not be seen in public passing through the gates under Nitocris’s tomb, is willing to violate it by night. Nitocris, on the other hand, subverts her greedy successor from the grave.32
The contrast between Nitocris’s and Darius’s intentions in carrying out their erga provides the background for the next story in the series. This one concerns Cyrus, Darius’s predecessor and the famous founder of the Persian empire. Herodotus reports that Cyrus, like Xerxes, punishes (1.190.1: etisato) the River Gyndus for obstructing him and killing one of his sacred horses, dividing the river into 360 channels (1.189).33 Although Nitocris also diverts rivers, her goal is to defend her people. Cyrus, on the other hand, aims only to satisfy his injured pride. Like Darius, who opened Nitocris’s tomb for the wrong reasons, Cyrus’s arrogance provokes him to alter the Gyndus. Although Cyrus and Nitocris both change the course of rivers, the difference in their motivations is crucial.34
The account in book 2 of Cheops, an Egyptian king, also focuses on rulers’ intentions. Obsessed with building a pyramid for himself, Cheops stops all other work in Egypt to enslave the Egyptian population and complete the project. Herodotus says that the wicked (kakotētos) Cheops drove the Egyptians into “total misery” (pasan kakotēta) by “wearing them out” (tribomenō) over ten years (2.124.1–3). Cheops has erected a monument Herodotus would normally be inclined to admire, but at a terrible price. He even forces his daughter into sex work to raise funds for the project. She does as ordered (tēn . . . tachthenta prēssesthai), but asks each of the men for a tip. With the blocks they give her she builds her own pyramid, making sure that no one forgets her role in Cheops’s marvel (2.126).
Katherine Clarke notes that Cheops’s story is told from the perspective of Herodotus’s Egyptian informants, and that Herodotus does not himself judge Cheops for enslaving them.35 This may reflect his admiration for Cheops’s erga and his dependence on them for information about the world, but it also foregrounds the personal toll the pyramids have taken on the Egyptian people. In particular, this episode may reflect ideas passed among Herodotus’s lower-class informants.36 Like the stories Sara Forsdyke documents in her study of ancient Greek popular ideology, the tale of Cheops’s daughter celebrates an enslaved person’s wit at the expense of her enslaver. Her cunning does not put Cheops’s daughter in her father’s place but does allow her to enjoy some of the distinction he has accrued to himself by enslaving her. In building her own pyramid with materials siphoned from her father’s project, she criticizes the inequity between enslavers and enslaved without overturning the social order.37 The story of Cheops’s daughter also embodies the kind of world making most dear to Herodotus. While Cheops’s pyramids have come at a great cost to his people, his daughter’s pyramid memorializes her without adding to others’ suffering, since she uses blocks that have already been quarried and transported.38 She capitalizes on a bad situation to memorialize her experience and simultaneously provides Herodotus with evidence of the past.
Herodotus uses the earth- and waterworks of the world’s rulers to reflect on several dynamics: risking divine wrath versus winning immortal reward, the motivations that lead people to intervene effectively in land- and waterscapes and those that lead them to ruin, and the costs and benefits of these interventions for the ruled. Diodorus develops the last of these dynamics into a consistent principle: the best rulers undertake erga that simultaneously enhance themselves and benefit others.
BENEFACTIONS
Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus regularly evaluates the costs and benefits of marvelous works. The hanging gardens of Babylon were requested of an Assyrian king by a woman who missed the landscape of her Persian home and wanted the king to re-create it “with the ingenuity of a garden” (2.10.1: dia tēs tou phutourgeiou philotechnias). Diodorus comments that the gardens were very expensive (2.10.4: polutelōs), but also “entranced those beholding” them (2.10.6: tous theōmenous psychagōgēsai). The pleasure gardens (paradeisa) that the Assyrian queen Semiramis constructs, on the other hand, are located on a high plateau, which she views (apetheōrei) from an even higher vantage point, ensconced in buildings “expensive and made to satisfy her desire for luxury” (2.13.3: polutelē pros truphēn epoiēsen). Unlike the hanging gardens of Babylon, which were available to many onlookers, Semiramis designs these gardens for her sole enjoyment. Diodorus goes on to observe that she ensures her dominance in the regime, as in this place, by refusing to remarry after her husband’s death, instead having sex with a series of men who are made to disappear (2.13.4: ēphanize). This extreme self-interest and self-absorption