And Aristeas son of Kaustrobios, a man of Prokonnesos, composed verses saying he reached the Issedones while seized by Apollo; and dwelling above the Issedones, the one-eyed Arimasps-men; and above them, the gold-guarding griffins; and coming down from them, the Hyperboreans by the sea; [and that] all of these except the Hyperboreans, beginning with the Arimasps, were always attacking their neighbors; and the Issedones were being forced out of their country by the Arimasps; and the Skythians by the Issedones; and the Kimmerians, living by the southern [or damp, νοτία] sea, pressed by the Skythians, were abandoning their country. Thus this [story] also doesn’t agree with the Skythians about their country.
Author: Herodotos
Title of Work: Histories
Location in Work: 4.13
Date of Work: c. 420 BCE
Original Language: Greek (Ionic)
Original Text:
ἔφη δὲ Ἀριστέης ὁ Καuστροβίου ἀνὴρ Προκοννήσιος, ποιέων ἔπεα, ἀπικέσθαι ἐς Ἰσσηδόνας φοιβόλαμπτος γενόμενος, Ἰσσηδόνων δὲ ὑπεροικέειν Ἀριμασποὺς ἄνδρας μουνοφθάλμους, ὕπερ δὲ τούτων τοὺς χρυσοφύλακας γρῦπας, τούτων δὲ τοὺς Ὑπερβορέους κατήκοντας ἐπὶ θάλασσαν· τούτους ὦν πάντας πλὴν Ὑπερβορέων ἀρξάντων Ἀριμασπῶν αἰεὶ τοῖσι πλησιοχώροισι ἐπιτίθεσθαι, καὶ ὑπὸ μὲν Ἀριμασπῶν ἐξωθέεσθαι ἐκ τῆς χώρης Ἰσσηδόνας, ὑπὸ δὲ Ἰσσηδόνων Σκύθας, Κιμμερίους δὲ οἰκέοντας ἐπὶ τῇ νοτίῃ θαλάσσῃ ὑπὸ Σκυθέων πιεζομένους ἐκλείπειν τὴν χώρην. οὕτω οὐδὲ οὗτος συμφέρεται περὶ τῆς χώρης ταύτης Σκύθῃσι.
Reference Edition: Wilson, Herodoti Historiae
Translation Notes: It’s important when translating this text to clarify that all of the information after ‘composed verses saying’ through ‘abandoning their country’ was explicitly attributed by Herodotos to the Arimaspeia. This is clear in the Greek from the continuous use of infinitive verbs, from ἀπικέσθαι through συμφέρεται, signaling a contiguous block of indirect speech, introduced with ἔφη δὲ Ἀριστέης.
It’s also important in this text to preserve the direct meanings of ὕπερ (‘above’) and κατήκοντας (‘coming down’): recent English translations have either stripped out the important information about the elevation (see commentary) by rendering both ὕπερ and κατήκοντας as ’north’ or ‘beyond,’ or have correctly translated ὕπερ as ‘above’ but mistranslated κατήκοντας as another ‘above’.
See the general commentary on the uncertain meaning of νοτία θαλάσσα.
Source of Date of Work: Herodotos 9.73.3
Commentary:
The introduction to this text suggests that the Arimaspeia had a first-person narrator identified as Aristeas son of Kaustrobios from Prokonnesos. There is a parallel example of an extant Archaic poem with a first-person, self-naming narrator (Hesiod, Theogony, 22-24). Another text by Pliny the Elder might suggest a third-person narrator, depend on how a key word is interpreted: Pliny says Aristeas’ soul visam (which means ‘was seen,’ but was often used in the sense of ‘seemed to be’) flying from his mouth in the image of a raven.
The meaning of Herodotos’ statement that Aristeas claimed to have traveled while φοιβόλαμπτος – literally ‘Apollo-seized’ or ‘Apollo-taken’ – has been disputed. Most studies of the Arimaspeia (reviewed in Dowden, Apollon, 294-296) have concluded that Herodotos was referring to the manner of travel described by Maximus of Tyre, who wrote that Aristeas had claimed his soul departed from his body, flew like a bird and surveyed the world while his body lay cataleptic (here and here). Other stories about Aristeas suggest that such a story of extracorporeal flight was well known: aside from Pliny the Elder’s story mentioned above, Herodotos wrote that Italian Greeks claimed Aristeas flew to them in the form of a raven in the company of Apollo 240 years after Aristeas composed his poem, and in a story Herodotos attributed to oral tradition, although Aristeas actually journeyed in the flesh, he had appeared to die just before starting his journey.
However, J.D.P. Bolton in his 1962 book (Bolton, Aristeas) argued that the Arimaspeia was a story of travel in the flesh, which included an episode similar to the story Herodotos attributed to oral tradition in which Aristeas apparently died, but did not include any extracorporeal flight. Bolton proposed that some writer after Herodotos invented the story of Aristeas traveling out-of-body and that version became better-known than Aristeas’ own story. Bolton’s argument made two key points. First, in another text Herodotos wrote that Aristeas’ journey ended at the Issedones and relied on hearsay about further places, which would be a natural place to stop if he was walking but an inexplicable place to stop if he was flying. And second, Bolton pointed out that of four other texts that use the word φοιβόλεπτος (the Attic form of φοιβόλαμπτος), none refer to catalepsy or extracorporeal travel: three refer to prophetic speech (pseudo-Lykophron, Alexandra, 1460; Plutarch, Pompey, 48.4; Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime; 16.2) and one questions if someone divinely possessed can contemplate the god within (Plotinos, Enneades, 5.8.10.42). Bolton suggested that Aristeas’ possession while traveling could have meant ‘a sense of superhuman strength and confidence’ or having ‘felt possessed by his god and impelled to visit Apollo’s paradise.’
Bolton was rebutted mainly for lack of evidence (Burkert, Review; Dowden, Deux Notes). To this should be added that none of the texts that use φοιβόλεπτος suggest the meaning he proposed, and the only text Bolton cited to support his interpretation of φοιβόλεπτος, a story of a cave shrine to Apollo that gave men superhuman strength (Pausanias, 10.32.6), does not describe people so affected as possessed or seized. Although Bolton acknowledged that there is a much broader corpus of ancient Greek stories about divine possession and inspiration, his argument shunted most of that evidence aside by suggesting φοιβόλεπτος had a specific meaning different from other Greek terms for divine possession. A review of such stories reveals that ancient Greeks used a variety of terms to describe deities acting through humans without any clear distinction in meaning between these terms, including forms of λαμβάνω (‘take’ or ‘seize’), κατέχω (‘possess’), ἐνθουσιάζω (‘have god within’), ἐπιπνέω and ἐμπνέω (‘breathe on,’ and ‘breathe into’), and others. In Plato’s dialogue between Sokrates and Phaidros, Sokrates uses multiple such terms interchangeably. According to that dialogue, different deities inspired different kinds of human behaviors, and Apollo was particularly associated with prophesy and divination (μαντικός). A passage by the Roman poet Lucan shows that Apollo was believed to be able to inspire a person to see distant places, and stories by Plutarch and al-Kindī (citing ‘Aristotle’) show that people were believed to be able to perceive divine truths while cataleptic. Moreover, Bolton’s position that Herodotos didn’t know any story of Aristeas’ extracorporeal flight is difficult to accept given that Herodotos himself told a story of Aristeas flying in the form of a raven. As for Herodotos’ claim that Aristeas’ journey stopped at the Issedones, it was contradicted by other writers (see the commentary to that story).
Herodotos didn’t mention the Rhipai mountains, which are said in other texts (to come in this collection) to separate the Hyperboreans from the rest of the world. But the presence of the mountains is reflected in the upward direction from the Issedones to the Arimasps and from the Arimasps to the griffins – who apparently occupied the peaks – followed by descent to the Hyperboreans. Herodotos’ placement of a sea bordering the Hyperboreans, where other texts place them next to the world-encircling river Okeanos, is in line with his tendency to rationalize accounts of the supernatural. Herodotos mentioned Okeanos and the Hyperboreans together in another text (to come in this collection), but there and elsewhere in his book (2.21-23; 4.8) he cast doubt on Okeanos’ existence.
The latter part of this text is of great importance as it reveals contents of the Arimaspeia that can be matched to two real historical events of the of the late 8th to early 7th centuries BCE. The Arimaspeia’s Skythians (Σκύθαι) can be identified as the nation referred to as Ishkuza in Assyrian texts and Ishkuguli in Urartian texts (to come in this collection), which refer to them invading the country of Mana in what is now northwest Iran (Biblical Minni, also called Mannaea). The Assyrian texts mentioning this event date from the reign of the Assyrian King Esarhaddon (681-669 BCE). Likewise the Kimmerians (Κιμμέριοι) can be identified as people referred to as Gimri in Assyrian texts, which describe them living near Mana from the reign of Assyrian King Sargon II (722-705 BCE) through the reign of Esarhaddon, and in central Anatolia during the reign of Ashurbanipal (669-631 BCE). In both this text and the Assyrian texts, it is not clear if only a portion or all of the Kimmerians migrated to Anatolia, whereas in other versions of this story told by Herodotos (to come in this collection) the Kimmerians are said to completely abandon their homeland. The Assyrian texts contain no reference to Skythians attacking Kimmerians or causing the Kimmerian migration to Anatolia. Moreover a story told by Strabo (to come in this collection), which likely stems from an early Greek poet such as Kallinos, places Kimmerians in Anatolia a generation earlier than the Skythian invasion, during the reign of King Midas of Phrygia, a contemporary of Sargon II. No extant Assyrian text explicitly mentions the Kimmerian migration to Anatolia, but Assyrian and Greek texts describing Kimmerians active in Anatolia during the reigns of Ashurbanipal and King Gyges of Lydia (to come in this collection) make it clear such a migration had happened by the first half of the 7th century BCE. No people named anything like Issedones were mentioned in any Near Eastern texts.
The mention of the Kimmerians living by a southern sea (νοτία θαλάσσα) is difficult to interpret. Herodotos elsewhere uses similar language to describe seas on the south sides of islands (6.31), but it is not clear what sea could have been south of the Kimmerian country near Mana. One possibility is that the Arimaspeia used the word νοτία to refer to the southern part of the Caspian Sea. Another possibility is that the Arimaspeia merely referred to the Kimmerians living by a sea, and Herodotos supplied the description of the sea as νοτία, based on his belief that the Kimmerians lived north of the Black Sea, making that sea southern from the Kimmerian perspective. A third possibility is that the Arimaspeia’s geography was inaccurate or unrealistic. And a fourth possibility is that νοτία θαλάσσα was used in the Arimaspeia to mean ‘damp sea’ or ‘rainy sea.’ Although this meaning for νοτία θαλάσσα is not found in any other text, the most direct meaning of νοτία is ‘wet,’ and the southwest corner of the Caspian Sea is notoriously foggy and rainy. Later writers used νοτία θαλάσσα to refer to the Indian Ocean.
The Kimmerians also feature in another archaic story about the eastern edge of the world, in the Odyssey (to come in this collection), in which the Kimmerians are located by the world-encircling river Okeanos, in a country covered by clouds in perpetual night, reached by sailing south from Kirke’s island. It seems possible that the Odyssey’s description of the Kimmerian homeland could have been based on exaggerated rumors of the southwest Caspian region’s fog. Kimmerians are also connected to foggy waterfront locations in Herodotos’ and Strabo’s descriptions of purported former Kimmerian sites in what is now Ukraine (to come in this collection), most of which were concentrated on the foggy Kerch strait between the Azov Sea and Black Sea.
In the short final sentence of this text, Herodotos is saying the Arimaspeia disagrees with a legend he told earlier in his book (4.5-7) about the origins of the people called Skythians in what is now southern Ukraine, usually called Pontic Skythians, which he attributed to their oral tradition. As Herodotos makes clear in other stories (to come in this collection), he believed the Near Eastern Skythians and Pontic Skythians were the same people, and so in his mind the Arimaspeia’s story about Near Eastern Skythians contradicted the origin legend he told about Pontic Skythians.
Concordance: EGEP Aristeas T1a and F1; BNJ Aristeas (35) T2 and F2; EGF Aristeas F3a; PEG Aristeas T1 and F2; Bolton, Aristeas T&F 1