Aeimnestos the Plataian Huxley, George L Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Winter 1963; 4, 1; ProQuest pg. 5 Two Notes on Herodotos George L. Huxley I Aeimnestos the Plataian B EFORE THE SPARTANS took Plataiai in the Archidamian war two men were chosen by the Plataians to speak on behalf of their city: Astymachos son of Asopolaos and Lakon son of Aeim­ nestos. Thucydides (3.52.5) remarks that Lakon was a proxenos of the Lakedaimonians; as proxenos he was well fitted to plead for his city, and his name Lakon shows that his father Aeimnestos had also been friendly with the Spartans. In calling his son Lakon Aeimnestos resembled Kimon, a friend of Sparta, who had a son Lakedaimonios. Upon these Plataians A. W. Gomme,1 remarked that they are Hnames that are only names to us, but notables of Plataia." This paper will suggest that the father of Lakon, Aeimnestos, is more than a name to us. One of the arguments used by Astymachos and Lakon is this: the Plataians deserve gratitude from the Lakedaimonians, for when a great panic had overtaken Sparta after the earthquake, and the helots had made off to Ithome in revolt, Plataia had sent one-third of her army to the aid of Sparta (Thucydides 3.54.5). The claim to have helped Sparta agrees with the statement of Thucydides (1.102.1) that others besides the Athenians had come to her assistance in the great helot revolt: Aigina (Thucydides 2.27.2 and 4.56.2) and Man­ tineia (Xenophon, Hellenika 5.2.3) also sent troops. Now Herodotos remarks that a certain Aeimnestos, a man re­ nowned at Sparta, had killed Mardonios at Plataiai (9.64.2); and he adds that Aeimnestos had been killed, and three hundred with him, in Stenyklaros in a Messenian war. Hude in his edition printed 'AptlJ,V~aTov here, but the manuscript tradition is very strongly in 1 A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides 2 (Oxford 1956) 337. 5 6 TWO NOTES ON HERODOTOS favor of'A€LJLV7}O"TOV CA'JLV7}O"TOV AB, 'A€tJLv7}O"TOV CP), and we should certainly read ~A£'JLV7}O"Tov. The reading 'A€LJLv7JU'TOV is also found in the military writer Aristodemos, who had read Herodotos.2 An Aeimnestos, then, was said to have killed Mardonios and was killed by the Messenians. Herodotos is careful not to call Aeimnestos a Lakedaimonian: he was, Herodotos wrote, a man renowned at Sparta, and he was killed in the great helot revolt. Since the son of an Aeimnestos ofPlataiai was called Lakon, and since he reminded the Spartans of the Plataians' help in the great helot revolt, we can identify the Aeimnestos killed at Stenyklaros with the father of Lakon. The plea of Lakon the proxenos, then, was deeply felt: his own father and many of his fellow citizens had died in the cause of Sparta, but now Sparta was about to ruin Plataiai. Plutarch in the Aristides (19) stated that a Spartiate killed Mar­ donios. The manuscripts give his name as OL(~7TV7}O"TOS, OEt7TVLO"TOS, or aplJLV7JO"Tos. Lindskog and Ziegler print 'AElJLV7JO"Tos, and that is doubtless what Plutarch wrote; but Plutarch's remark that the killer of Mardonios was a Spartiate cannot be accepted, for it is a mistaken inference by him or by his source from the words of Herodotos (9.64.2) av8pos EV E7TCXPTTI >.oylJLov. The same mistaken inference was made by Aristodemos. Herodotos (9.72) mentions a man of Plataiai to whom the Spartan Kallikrates spoke just before the battle of Plataiai in 479 B.C. Most manuscripts give his name as 'AplJLV'rJO"TOV but Hude's S has 'AElJLV7JO"Tov. The authority of S (Sancroftianus [Cantabr. Emm. 30]) is not great: it is much interpolated, and its unsupported testimony must be used with caution, as Hude remarked. Yet we may certainly read' A£lJLV'rJu'TOV in Herodotos 9.72. Here is the father of Lakon speaking with his Spartan friends before the battle of Plataiai. The Arimnestos whom Plutarch named in Aristides (11.5) as a Plataian general is plainly the same man, even if the manuscripts do not permit the reading 'A ' £LJLV'rJO"TOS. Pausanias (9.4.1 [Vol. 3.1, p. 313 H.-B.]) mentioned a statue of Arimnestos who fought in the battle against Mardonios and earlier led the Plataians at Marathon. Even if Pausanias called him Arim­ nestos, we cannot be sure that he read the name beneath the statue. 2 F. Jacoby, FGrHist 104 F 1 para. 2, 5. Cj. E. Matthias, Das Fragment des Aristodemos (Diss. Jena [Gotha 1874]) 14. GEORGE L. HUXLEY 7 The Arimnestos of Pausanias is plainly the notable Plataian Aeim­ nestos of Herodotos (9.64.2 and 9.72). We conclude that Aeimnestos the Plataian led the troops of his city at Marathon. At the battle ofPlataiai he killed Mardonios. In the great helot revolt of the 460s he led a Plataian force, and if the three hundred killed with him were Plataians, then at that time Plataiai had an army of nine hundred men, for Thucydides makes Lakon and Astymachos state that Plataiai sent one-third of her army to help Sparta. Lakon the son of Aeimnestos was a proxenos of the Lake­ daimonians in Plataiai; his tragic duty was to plead for his dty in the Archidamian war. Thucydides with his usual regard for relevance failed to remark that Lakon's father had died in the service ofSparta.3 II BEKO}] and BEKKO}] THE DELIGHTFUL and deservedly famous story of Psammetichos, the babies, and the shepherd in Herodotos (2.2) shows that f3€KOS was a Phrygian word meaning "bread." The manu­ scripts have both f3€KOS and f3€KKOS. Hude prints {J€K6s. Strabo (8.340) quotes a line from Hipponax T7 , QI ,/.. ~ , II I I I\.V7TPLWV ,..€KOS '(JUYOVCTL KU/LUUOVCTLWV 1TVpOV. (F 81 Knox. F 75 Diehl3). A. D. Knox proposed to read (>")EKOS instead of {JEKOS here; he doubted the existence of f3EKOS, because Aristophanes (Nubes 398) has the word f3€KK€CTEA7JV€, formed from {3EKKOS, and because the manuscripts of Herodotos give both {3EKKOS and {3EKOS. But his rejection of f3€KOS from the fragment of Hipponax was alto­ gether too violent. f3£KK€CTEA7JVOS shows that {3EKKOS was a genuine form, but it does not show that f3EKOS is a false form. In fact a genitive of f3EKOS in -ovs is attested by Aelius Aristides,l where the manuscripts 3 I thank Sterling Dow and W. G. Forrest for helpful conversations. For a similar problem of names in Herodotos see 6.105-106 where some manuscripts have CPH8'7r'1T[3-q~, others together with Plutarch, Mor. 862A have 4),).L1T1T[&r]S. 1 (Ed.) Samuel Jebb. vol. Z, p. 3. 8 TWO NOTES ON HERODOTOS have f3alKovs. More importantly, Phrygian inscriptions give PlKOS and confirm that it is a genuine form of the word.2 Hipponax knew something about Phrygia. He mentions Phrygian slaves sold to work in the mills at Miletos (F 19 Knox) and he names K ybebe, the mother of the gods, a Phrygian divinity. Is he using PJKoS knowing it to be a Phrygian word, or does he imply that it was Cyprian also? There are words common to Cyprus and to Phrygia. Phrygian &va corresponds to Laconian wf3a « *wFa) and recurs in Cyprian.3 Phrygian Fave",c corresponds to Homeric (F)avag, and the word o.vag continued in use in historical times in Cyprus. Thus there is nothing improbable in the use of the same word both in Cyprian and in Phrygian to mean "bread." f3JKoS, like Favag, may have been a Mycenaean Greek word, but there is no sign of it in the documents frOln Pylos and Knossos. The pe-ko in a cattle text from Pylos! can hardly be bread. We conclude that f3lKOS and f3/KKOS are both correct forms, and that fllKOS may have been a Cyprianfi word for "bread," the meaning it had in Phrygia.6 HARVARD UNIVERSITY May, 1962 2 Sir William M. Ramsay, in Jahreshefte des Ost. Arch. Inst. 8 (1905) Beibl. 95 = W. M. Calder, "Corpus Inscriptionum Neo-Phrygiarum," ]HS 31 (1911) 18.1, No. xxxiii = W. M. Calder (ed.), Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua 7 (Manchester 1956) No. 313; also Calder, MAMA 7, No. 454 and No. 495. cf O. Haas, Die Sprache 7 (1961) 83-85. a Oval "'vAal, Kthrpco£ Hesychius, ed. M. Schmidt, vol. 3-4, p. 231, 38-39. • Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge 1956) No.77. o Pliny NH 18.67 states that Cyprian wheat is dark and makes the bread black: con­ sequently the white Alexandrian is mixed with it. L. A. Moritz, Grain Mills and Flour in Classical Antiquity (Oxford 1958) 202, discusses this passage of Pliny and has doubts about the text. 6 The Phrygian formula in Calder, MAMA 7, No. 313 is: (4) LOS VL O'£p.Ovv KVOVp.aV££ KaKOVV a3aaK£T ,,£,,££p.€Vav Ell (5) ,),E8ov TLOS OVTav aKKEOL fJEKOS aKKaT/os TL 8PE')'POVV ELTOV I (6) aVTOS K£ ova K£ pOKa ')'fiyapLTp.EvoS aO'{3aTav T£VTOVS. The formula in the first six words means: "Whosoever does harm to this tomb ... " Line (6) perhaps means "may he and his village and his family(?) be expelled from his people." Compare W. M. Ramsay, Jahreshefte 8 (1905) Beibl. 95-98. With TfiVTOVS cf. Indo-European teufa (J. Pokorny, Indo­ germanisches etymologisches WOrterbuch 12 [Bern 1958] 1084).