And having said where Aristeas was from, I’ll tell the story I was hearing about him at Prokonnesos and Kyzikos. For they say that Aristeas, who was not of a lesser family among his townsmen, went into a fuller’s shop in Prokonnesos and died, and the fuller closed his shop in order to go and inform the relatives of the deceased. But they say that when the story that Aristeas had died had spread through town, a man of Kyzikos arrived from the town of Artake and raised a dispute, saying he had met Aristeas heading towards Kyzikos and had a conversation. And thus indeed he vigorously argued, and the relatives of the deceased came to the fuller’s shop bringing what they needed to carry him away, and when they opened the house, no Aristeas neither dead nor living was found. But after the seventh year he reappeared in Prokonnesos, and he composed the verses that are now called by the Greeks the Arimaspeian, and having composed them he disappeared a second time. That’s what [the people of] those towns say.
Author: Herodotos
Title of Work: Histories
Location in Work: 4.14.1-4.15.1
Date of Work: c. 420 BCE
Original Language: Greek (Ionic)
Original Text:
Καὶ ὅθεν μὲν ἦν Ἀριστέης ὁ ταῦτα εἴπας, εἴρηκα· τὸν δὲ περὶ αὐτοῦ ἤκουον λόγον ἐν Προκοννήσῳ καί Κυζίκῳ, λέξω. Ἀριστέην γὰρ λέγουσι, ἐόντα τῶν ἀστῶν οὐδενὸς γένος ὑποδεέστερον, ἐσελθόντα ἐς κναφήιον ἐν Προκοννήσῳ ἀποθανεῖν, καὶ τόν κναφέα κατακληίσαντα τὸ ἐργαστήριον οἴχεσθαι ἀγγελέοντα τοῖσι προσήκουσι τῷ νεκρῷ. ἐσκεδασμένου δὲ ἤδη τοῦ λόγου ἀνὰ τὴν πόλιν ὡς τεθνεώς εἴη ὁ Ἀριστέης, ἐς ἀμφισβασίας τοῖσι λέγουσι ἀπικνέεσθαι ἄνδρα Κυζικηνὸν ἥκοντα ἐξ Ἀρτάκης πόλιος, φάντα συντυχεῖν τε οἱ ἰόντι ἐπὶ Κυζίκου καὶ ἐς λόγους ἀπικέσθαι. καὶ τοῦτον μὲν ἐντεταμένως ἀμφισβατέειν, τοὺς δὲ προσήκοντας τῷ νεκρῷ ἐπὶ τὸ κναφήιον παρεῖναι ἔχοντας τὰ πρόσφορα ὡς ἀναιρησομένους· ἀνοιχθέντος δὲ τοῦ οἰκήματος οὔτε τεθνεῶτα οὔτε ζῶντα φαίνεσθαι Ἀριστέην. μετὰ δὲ ἑβδόμῳ ἔτει φανέντα αὐτὸν ἐς Προκόννησον ποιῆσαι τὰ ἔπεα ταῦτα τὰ νῦν ὑπ᾽ Ἑλλήνων Ἀριμάσπεα καλέεται, ποιήσαντα δὲ ἀφανισθῆναι τὸ δεύτερον. ταῦτα μὲν αἱ πόλιες αὗται λέγουσι·
Reference Edition: Wilson, Herodoti Historiae.
Source of Date of Work: Herodotos 9.73.3
Commentary:
Herodotos’ Histories is the earliest extant text to refer to Aristeas and the Arimaspeia, although another historian of the same era, Hellanikos, also used material from the poem, as did the earlier poet Alkman (to come in this collection). Herodotos also tells the earliest extant stories about Aristeas that are not drawn from the Arimaspeia, including this one, which is attributed to oral tradition in Prokonnesos and Kyzikos.
The point of this story appears to be to provide an alternate explanation of Aristeas’ journey, casting doubt on the Arimaspeia’s story that Aristeas traveled extracorporeally while cataleptic, and suggesting instead that Aristeas traveled in the flesh. Following that interpretation, this story is part of a pattern in Herodotos’ Histories of rationalizing myths of divine action by providing alternative realistic explanations.
This story has no obvious unrealistic elements, but it leaves unexplained why Aristeas suddenly appeared to die in the fuller’s shop, how he disappeared from the shop, and how he got to Kyzikos. Given Herodotos’ tendency to rationalize stories of the supernatural, it seems most likely that Herodotos meant it to be understood that Aristeas faked his own death and surreptitiously left Prokonnesos by boat. The place where Aristeas was allegedly encountered by the man from Kyzikos and the direction he was said to be going imply that Aristeas ferried from Prokonnesos to the Anatolian mainland and from there began an overland journey (see map below).
But some later writers, influenced by the Arimaspeia and by Herodotos’ story of Aristeas flying to Italy 240 years after completing the Arimaspeia, interpreted Aristeas’ disappearance from the Prokonnesos fuller’s shop as supernatural: the anti-Christian polemicist Celsus, cited by Origen, and Apollonios the paradoxographer. Plutarch likely had the same idea when he retold this story with the location of Aristeas’ reappearance changed from Kyzikos to the much more distant Greek colony of Kroton, a center of Pythagoreanism in southern Italy (Plutarch, Romulus, 28.4).
There is also an alternate reconstruction of the Arimaspeia’s contents, by J.D.P. Bolton, according to which the Arimaspeia had no story of extracorporeal travel but featured a story similar to this text with Aristeas suffering a brief seizure before traveling in the flesh (Bolton, Aristeas, 140-141; see the commentary to Herodotos on Aristeas’ account of his journey).
The ending of this story, in which Aristeas disappears a second time, suggests he might have went on a second journey. This second disappearance can be read to suggest Aristeas was deathless, as it immediately the story in which Herodotos cites Italian Greeks claiming Aristeas flew to Italy 240 years after he composed his poem.
The second disappearance also fits with later stories by Apollonios, Celsus and in the Souda of Aristeas being able to separate his soul from his body at will, and of him traveling to Italy either from Prokonnesos or from Hyperborea. It seems possible that Herodotos’ story of Aristeas’ second disappearance and other stories of Aristeas’ secondary journeys might relate to the ending of the Arimaspeia, which might perhaps have closed with Aristeas departing or saying he would depart again.
Although the report that the author of the Arimaspeia was from the upper class makes sense, it is doubtful that any authentic information about Aristeas was passed down by oral tradition. And though there is nothing inherently doubtful about Herodotos’ claim to have heard such a rationalizing story from locals in Prokonnesos and Kyzikos, there is good reason to believe Herodotos sometimes falsely attributed his rationalizing stories to particular sources for effect. For example, it seems highly unlikely that Herodotos really heard a story explaining Zeus’ abduction of Io as her elopement with a Phoenician trader from ‘learned Persians,’ as he claimed (Herodotos 1.1).
In addition to the altered retellings of this story mentioned above, the Corinthian Discourse traditionally attributed to Dio Chrysostom includes a shortened version of this story, with an added conjecture that Aristeas’ body was carried off by his enemies (pseudo-Dio, Corinthian Discourse, 46). Besides citing Celsus’ altered version of this story (see above), Origen also retold this story verbatim (Against Celsus, 3.26). Aineias of Gaza briefly paraphrased this story, crediting it to both Pindar and Herodotos (Aineias, Theophrastos, pp. 63-64). And Ioannis Tzetzes retold this story in verse (Tzetzes, Histories, 2.726-735).
Concordance: EGEP Aristeas T4, T5a, T8, T9 and T11b; BNJ Aristeas (35) T2; EGF Aristeas T4, T5 and T8-9; PEG Aristeas T2, T5, T8, T11 and T19; Bolton, Aristeas T&F 12, 13, 16 and 17