Thucydides

Heralds and Corpses in ThucydidesAuthor(s): Donald LateinerSource: The Classical World, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Oct., 1977), pp. 97-106Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Classical Association of theAtlantic StatesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4348795 .

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OCTOBER 1977 THE CLASSICAL WORLD 97

Heralds and Corpses in Thucydides

Thucydides eschews political and religious preaching. He writes not from a pro- or anti-Athenian point of view but with concern for the survival of Hellenic values in a largely lawless world. Those who deny Thucydides' engagement in the war he chronicles must explain away every reader's sense of tragic loss. Heralds and corpses contribute to Thucydides' generally indirect presentation of a crisis of Hellenic values. I will analyze passages in which heralds appear, and the return of corpses receives more than cursory mention. These incidents, often marking significant crises of behavioral pat- terns, help shape our responses to a selective and carefully managed narrative. I argue below that these two types of incidents which pertain to Greek religion and morality operate in Thucydides as indicators of societal standards, and as a kind of punctuation or structuring device. A historian who hopes to be useful need not - in fact cannot - be indifferent to social values and their effective literary presentation.

The rightly recognized scepticism of Thucydides towards religion, oracles, and superstition' does not obscure his belief in the usefulness and desirability of traditional social practices and attitudes. Three passages which impress us with their authorial earnestness - the epitaphios, the plague, and stasis in Corcyra - either praise the social cohesion of the polis or sadly report the dissolution of community and civility. Kinesis (Thuc. 1.1.2) includes civic as well as external disruption;2 at the end of his preface (1.23.2) the more specific word stasis is mentioned. Well over half the description of the plague concerns not symptoms, treatment, and mortality, but the social and religious effects (hiera, nomoi, theon phobos, sebein, dike). In the end religion was totally ignored (2.47.4). Events in Corcyra are later generalized for Greece (3.82-83). War, by snatching away the prosperity of peace, debases the sen- timents and decisions of cities and individuals (82.2). Words become tools of propaganda (82.4), trust in divine law evaporates, piety disappears (82.8) along with the moderate parties who maintain it. Confidence in other men is replaced by readiness to defend only oneself; "simple goodness"3 and nobility are supplanted by every form of criminality (83.1). Thucydides' removal of the gods from historical causation does not deny their generally beneficial effect on social relations or even (logically) their existence. Nor

A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford 1956) 2:380, s.v. eusebeia; K. J. Dover in Gomme, ibid., 4:429, 462; J. H. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge 1942; repr. Ann Arbor 1963) 222; Albin Lesky, History of Greek Literature' (Bern 1963) 477-78 (in the 1966 transl. of Willis and de Heer); 0. Luschnat, "Thukydides," PWK Supplement-Band XII (1971) 1256-57. H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1971) 137: "In the history of Thucydides the gods are conspicuous by their absence ......

Only here and at 3.75.2 and 5.10.5 in Thucydides; never in Herodotus; not a commonly used noun.

The only use of the adjective euethes in Thucydides. Cleon's euitheia is an insult, in which sense both words are commonly employed. Decent treatment of suppliants (Eur. Heracleidae 127-31) and prisoners of war (lines 965-66) was an issue of this war.



98 THE CLASSICAL WORLD OCTOBER 1977

does he yet employ the gods as invisible policemen: expedit esse deos.4 None of us can know Thucydides' theology; in his History however, a community's failure to observe traditional religious and secular practices signals disease in the body politic.5

Thucydides knew that religion can cloak Realpolitik; he mentions the Suitors' oath (1.9.1), the curse of the Alcmaeonidae (1.126.1-2), that of Taenarus and also that of the Brazen House (1.128.1-2), Archidamus' solemn and selfserving invocation against the Plataeans, the mutilation of the Herms (6.27-28).6 He records such incidents neither as believer nor unbeliever, but reporter. The regular attention devoted to corpses, heralds, even trophies fulfills the function of reporter of the facts, but also provides a background, a normality by which later irregularities, including atrocities, can be gauged.' As de Romilly has said, the opposition of justice and force was "too simple a dialectic" for Thucydides; fairness and reasonableness were qualities which he considered morally desirable and even politically useful.' A degree of "gentle kindness" finds mention three times as desirable among citizens or as a gift from the gods.' Friendly tolerance, a related quality, is a theme of the epitaphios. The Greek world at peace, glimpsed only seldom, is the necessary artistic and sociological contrast for an understanding of the greatest war. Thucydides (and the Iliad) generally assume the reader's understanding of peacetime. Our attention is drawn to the non-military

4See Polybius 6.56.6-12, 16.12.9; Cicero de rep. 2.26-7; Ovid ars 1.637. Lloyd-Jones (above, note 1) recognizes that Thucydides' lack of references to divine motivation leaves open the question of his own beliefs (141), a less important question for the student of his History (144). S. I. Oost, "Thucydides and the Irrational," CP 70 (1975) 193-94, claims that Thucydides accepts Greek religion in a general way, although he condemns credulity and withholds information on his own attitude. Oost argues that Thucydides recognizes "a supernatural connection" at 1.23.3, 2.17.1-2, and 7.50.4.

'An extensive parallelism in the vocabulary used for stasis and plague can be observed. Com- mentators justifiably employ the metaphor of "the diagnosis of political ills." Adam Parry's argument, "The Language of Thucydides' Description of the Plague," BICS 16 (1969) 106-18, that there was no technical medical vocabulary in Thucydides' time, does not detract from the parallels.

6Although Diodotus (3.44) and the Athenians at Melos are no models of morality, at least they, like Pericles (2.63.2), are relatively free of moral cant concerningforce majeure. Cleon is repulsive in the Mytilenean debate not least because of his pseudo-moral claims.

J. R. Grant, "Towards Knowing Thucydides," Phoenix 28 (1974), 81-94 speaks of Thucydides' "unquestioning acceptance" of "all the folderal about trophies" (93, n. 48) and refers to Luschnat (above, note 1) 1251, who states that Thucydides does not deviate in his political and personal values from conventional standards. I prefer to say that Thucydides respects conventional practices and traditional morality as civilizing, restraining forces without endorsing the mythology and theology on which they were based. The conflict between the power and promise of "value-free" rationalism and the need for an accepted social standard of conduct is pivotal for the Melian conference and much else in Thucydides.

"J. de Romilly, "Fairness and Kindness in Thucydides," Phoenix 28 (1974) 99. Brasidas (4.108.3) is the sole person in Thucydides credited with praote's.

'de Romilly (above, note 8) 96 on epioteros at 2.59.3, 7.77.4, 8.93.3.




passages in Thucydides not least because we feel a need for comparison (and relief).

Heralds "were inviolable" and "could circulate freely even during wars." The "law [of warl most generally observed was that of the sanctity of heralds.... Nor did Greeks frequently refuse a defeated army a truce for burying its dead."'? Heralds were part of Greek diplomacy, a convention necessary for negotiations, peaceful or otherwise, protected by religious sanc- tion anid tradition. Heralds were requisite once war was declared (see 1.146, 2.1, and 4.118.6, 13), and were employed to announce terms of war, surrender, departure, peace, etc., or regularly to return corpses, a necessary preliminary to the religious act of burial. One-third of the thirty-three oc- currences of keryx in Thucydides refer to recovery of the dead. To request your dead, to accede to your enemy's request, and to bury the unthreatening dead were solemn Hellenic obligations of such importance that Euripides' Adrastus equates them with Hellenism and Panhellenic morality itself (Sup- pliants 524-27, 537-40). Twice elsewhere in this play to bury the dead is to keep safe the laws of Hellenes and civilization (312-13, 670-72), and thosewho prevent such ceremony are criminals who confuse and destroy Hellenic customs (311). Unexceptionally and frequently a battle in Thucydides ends with a formula: e.g. "after the battle the Athenians set up a trophy and returned under truce to the Potidaeans their corpses" (1.63.3; cf. 2.82; 2.92.4; 4.38.4; 4.72.4; 5.74.2 etc.). The trophy announces the military result, the return of corpses is the victor's religious obligation.

These norms of Hellenic behavior were seriously disturbed and damaged during the Peloponnesian War. We can observe a statement of normative Hellenic behavior in the return of corpses at 4.44.5-6. The Athenians have raided Corinthian territory, engaged the enemy near Solygeia, met with success, but then retreated in fear of enemy reinforcements. They collect their corpses except for two which they can not find. These they send for by herald and receive without demur.1 ' The Corinthians and the Athenians still believe

"J. A. 0. Larsen, The Oxford Classical Dictionary2 (Oxford 1972) 501, 1137, sw. Heralds; War, Rules of. See now W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War II (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1974) 251ff. His tables 9-11 show that Thucydides' interest in post-battle developments was greater than that of any other ancient historian (pp. 264-269 and 270). For inviolability, see, e.g., Euripides' Heracleidae 271; [Demosth.l 12.2-4. Further, in Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne, ed. J.-P. Vernant (Paris and the Hague 1968), see both J. de Romilly, "Guerre et paix entre cites," 207-20, and P. Ducrey, "Aspects juridiques de la victoire et du traitement des vaincus," 231-44. They emphasize the normality of war in fifth-century Greece and the religious basis of truces and rules of war. For earlier bibliography on heralds, see L. M. Wery, "Le meurtre des herauts de Darius en 491 et l'inviolabilite du h6raut," A C 35 (1966) 468, n. 1, 480, n. 43.

Plutarch, Nicias 6.5-7, records the event as signal proof of Nicias' remarkable piety. J. K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1970) 3-4, argues that Nicias' "action turned a clear victory into a formal defeat," but I doubt that either the Corinthians or the Athenians so perceived it, because stripping the enemy's troops, recovering all but two of one's own dead before departure,, and killing many more enemy troops than one has lost (212 against less than 50), amply compensate for an admission of lack of territorial control. See on this incident, Pritchett (above, note 10) 259-60 with note 53. The prosecution of Athens' generals after the battle of Arginusae offers the locus classicus of the religious obligation of commanders to recover their dead and the political capital to be made from failure to do so (Xenophon Hellenica 1.7).




that corpses are not to be regarded as negotiable instruments, no matter what the circumstances of battle. Respectful treatment of corpses saves both sides from acts of impurity and sacrilege.

Four incidents of the war attract the major share of references - including all significant ones - to heralds and corpses. I hope to demonstrate the important dramatic effects and structural significance of heralds and corpses in the Peloponnesian siege of the Plataeans, the Acharnanian successes of Demosthenes, the aftermath of the battle of Delion, and the Athenian expedition against the Syracusans.

(1) Heralds are prominent in the Plataean narrative because, in the earliest phase of the war, diplomacy was as important as warfare for achieving political objectives. After the Thebans sneak into Plataea and stage their coup de main (431), they determined to appeal to the Plataeans: a herald invites all sympathizers to join them in the agora (2.2.4). The Plataeans, however, overcome the revolutionaries and send their own herald (2.5.5) to the delayed main Theban force to complain about the attack. The herald's threat to execute the Theban captives was effective in gaining time to bring all the Plataeans safe within the walls. A messenger sent to Athens brought back to Plataea a herald (2.6.2), too late to prevent the execution of the Theban captives. So end the preliminaries of the undeclared war. We later find ambassadors (presbeis) at Plataea, in 429 when King Archidamus led the Peloponnesian besiegers (2.71). (Ambassadors, unlike heralds, may have some independent negotiating powers, and this fact decreases their symbolic potency: they employ reasoning faculties and are not mere "per- sonifications" of a city.) The Plataeans met with no success when they argued with their attackers and appealed to precedent (Pausanias), tradition, oaths, and the gods (2.71). Archidamus mentions freedom and justice, but his words are hollow. Subsequent diplomatic negotiations led the Plataeans to stand a siege. They did not dare to send even an inviolable herald to convey their decision but, in the hostile circumstances, announced it from the city wall (2.74.1).

The siege continued through the following winter until a party of Plataeans broke through the Peloponnesian-Boeotian lines. When those left in the town imagined that their fellow citizens had perished in their attempt to escape, they sent a herald to arrange return of corpses (3.24.3). Only here in Thucy- dides a herald discovers that there are no dead. The fruitless mission under- lines dramatically, as does the concluding formulaic sentence, the fortunate peripety for part of the Plataean garrison.

Next summer the starved Plataeans negotiated a surrender under terms brought by a Peloponnesian herald: turn over the city, be judged by the Lacedaemonians, no one will be unjustly condemned (3.52.2-3). This last clause correctly intimates that the future holds something further - and sinister. Heralds have punctuated at Plataea each major incident: the sur- prise attack, the repulse, the confirmed Athenian alliance, the rejection of Peloponnesian demands (presbeis), the escape of half the garrison, the surrender of the remainder.




(2) Demosthenes' successes in Acharnania are underlined by heralds and negotiations about corpses. After the first battle (Olpae, 3.109.1-2), he agreed to return enemy corpses and to let the Peloponnesian contingents steal away, although not the mercenaries and Ambraciotes. The second battle (Idomeme) was an Ambraciote massacre. The next day an Ambraciote herald from the men who fought at Olpae came to request return of corpses, recovery of the casualties of the secretly arranged Peloponnesian withdrawal which the Am- braciotes tried to join. The grisly dialogue which follows is framed by two references to corpses (3.113.1; 113.5). The significance of this herald- literary, not military or political - appears in the unparalleled number of references to his office (four) and the care lavished on the reactions to unimagined disaster of this representative of Hellenic nomos. He sees, won- ders, does not know, supposes, contradicts, suddenly comprehends, is stun- ned and groans, goes off in disregard of his mission and sacral duty. For him, his people, and for us, the readers of the History, the bodies remain unburied on the battlefield. The human element, the chance to present a drama with sudden peripety, interests our scientific historian, who does not need to become asocial or disengaged to remain truthful and accurate. Both the herald and the corpses have contributed to Thucydides' story.

(3) Perhaps the most perplexing incident which Thucydides narrates con- sists ofthe negotiations which followthe battle of Delion (4.97.2-101.1) in late 424. "In this debate, curious as an illustration of Grecian manners and feelings," the victorious Boeotians by refusing to give up to the Athenians their dead "sinned against the most sacred international law of Greece" and against "principles universally accepted." At the same time the Athenian for- tification of a temple precinct "was a proceeding certainly rare, perhaps hardly admissible, in Grecian warfare. "I2 The battle of Delion was significant for military strategy in the Ten Years War because the defeat ended the Athenian land offensive. Thus one justifies the lengthy narrative of the battle (4.89-97) with its description of the over-complicated and unsuccessful Athenian strategy and the Boeotian victory. The subsequent narrative concerning corpses (seven references) and heralds (six), however, has no bearing on the course of the war. The twenty day period between first request for, and final title to the corpses was taken up by embassy and counter-embassy while the bodies rotted. Only twice elsewhere in Thucydides are corpses left un- attended and unburied: in Amphilochian Argos where return is not refused but the herald leaves in shock, and in the quarries of Syracuse.

The quarrel opens when (uniquely) herald meets herald. The Boeotians will not discuss return of corpses until the Athenians stop flouting Greek

"George Grote, History of Greece (New York 1864) 6:393-95, (correcting this text's "welfare" to "warfare"). Grote provides several close observations on this passage. W. C. West III, "A Bibliography of Scholarship on the Speeches in Thucydides, 1873-1970," in The Speeches in Thucydides, ed. P. Stadter (Chapel Hill 1973) 124-66, records no entries for this passage. S. T. Bloomfield, The History of Thucydides, 3 vols. (London 1829) 2:350-54 repeatedly complains of the passage's obscurity. Perhaps, as he says of the Boeotians, "Sophistry and subterfuge. . . are necessarily involved in obscurity." As late as 412. Thucydides reports the religious respect paid to the truce of the Isthmian games (8.9.1-2, 10.1).




custom, here "to keep hands off temples and other offerings to the gods." The Athenians treat sacred land as if it were unconsecrated: "they are doing everything there" (97.3). They are offered a truce for departure but instead send their own herald to justify their occupation by various partly true, false and sophistic arguments. They do not, they assert, wrong the holy area; they need it for self-defence; Greek law declares territory (and temples on it) to be the concern of the power in occupation, as the Boeotians' own history demon- strates. Sacred laws are commonly set aside, if men must do so (98.6) to maintain life and security, and the god will forgive them their unavoidable trans- gressions. The Athenians complain in turn that their enemies are guilty of more serious sacrilege (asebein) by their refusal to grant permission to the Athenians to recover their corpses. Conditions, concerning departure or anything else, may not be laid down - it is their traditional right to recover their corpses. After all, they say, the Athenians are not on Boeotian territory, but on Athenian ground gained by conquest.

The Boetians seize on this last preposterous pretence. They retort: if the land is Boeotian, the terms for truce are clear; if the land is Athenian, let the Athenians act as they think best. The Boeotians thought their response quite cleverly constructed; they had stymied the Athenians. Either the Athenians had to be gone forthwith and ipso facto cede to the Boeotians in law and fact the Boeotian land (of the sanctuary) and Athenian land (Oropia, in which were the corpses), or they might remain in the tiny area of Boeotian territory under momentary Athenian control. Since, however, the corpses were outside the sanctuary and therefore Athenian control, they would not, then, obtain their dead which were in Oropia under Boeotian domination. The Athenian herald received this answer and departed in failure.

Arnold"3 considered the Boeotians vexatious for not returning the dead. Gomme observed that the Athenians were impudently asserting that Delion was "a permanent conquest." In fact, neither side wished for territorial aggrandizement; both sides were debasing words and, more significantly, their common Hellenic heritage, the laws of war in particular. Sacred acts became the subject of meaningless debate (which Cleon rightly decries, 3.38.7). The Boeotians flushed out and chased away the Athenian garrison a few weeks later and to another herald from Athens returned the corpses without quibbling (4. 101.1).

The negotiations at Delion illustrate in the realm of international diplomacy that which stasis in Corcyra indicates for the Hellenic city torn by internal dissension: the destruction of common bonds and mutual respect. Of this communality, precious in the eyes of Thucydides, heralds are the living embodiment, for their lives depend on the legal fiction that enemies are

13 As quoted in A. W. Gomme's Commentary 3:570. Note that in Euripides' Suppliants (ca. 420) also, Athenians are denied permission by Boeotians to bury dead soldiers. The incident at Delion was probably in Euripides' mind, but Thucydides' elaboration is due to his interest in Hellenic custom and to a desire to present accurately the stages of the quarrel, entirely un- tragic as it was. E. Delebecque, Euripide et la guerre du PXloponnise Paris 1951) 203-24 (Suppliants), is not helpful for Thucydides' narrative.




inviolable if they come as "heralds". Corpses too are beneficiaries of Hellenic convention even though they lie beyond politics and are valueless in them- selves. In the farcical arguments at Delion between heralds and about corpses, Thucydides describes in a specific incident the trivialization of politics and the diminution of religious and moral values caused by the Pelo- ponnesian War.

(4) Heralds sometimes appear less for any historical importance than for formal literary emphasis, generally to mark the commencement of action or closure. No less than five times heralds and their messages indicate the initiation of major hostilities (the entire war, 1.146, 2.1; the Plataean affair, 2.2.4; the Ten Years War, 2.12.3; the Archidamian siege of Plataea, 2.74.1 Ino longer safe for even a herald to parley]; and the Sicilian expedition, [6.32.11 Heralds at the close of an episode, primarily with reference to the recovery of dead soldiers, are even more common (Plataean escape, 3.24.3; Amphilochia, 3.113; fighting at Pylos, 4.38.4; Solygeia, 4.44.6; Delion, 4.97.2ff; Athenian military resistance in Sicily, 7.82.11. Thucydides in the later part of his work, we shall see, combines the literary function of heralds and corpses with the ethical and historical significance of their mission and existence.

In Sicily the structural functions of heralds and corpses are most obvious. Let us consider each in turn. In the latter part of his History, Thucydides uses the nouns keryx and kerygma but three times; each passage articulates a phase or section of the Sicilian narrative. Other references to heralds presumably seemed superfluous to Thucydides. At 6.32.1, in the remarkably pictorial description of the great Athenian fleet's solemn and hopeful departure from the Peiraeus, the role of the herald in beginning the new war is emphasized: a herald directs ceremonies for the entire fleet. Thucydides is not captivated by ceremony; rather, the picture signals to the reader the Sicilian war's commencement, although the irony of the prayer for success occurs to any reader after 413. In similar manner, Thucydides earlier indicated the beginning of the Ten Years War by the discontinuation of official com- munication by heralds (1.146, 2.1); and, more solemnly, the formal commencement of hostilities by perhaps the shortest speech in Thucydides, the herald Melesippus' dire and true prediction (2.12.3): "this day is the beginning of great disasters for the Greeks.""4 These two heralds mark the point of no return, the loosening of uncontrollable forces by symbolic act in a civilized setting. No herald appears again in the Sicilian history until the beginning of Book 7 (3.1). The Spartan Gylippus has arrived and encouraged the Syracusan troops. Before leading them into battle, he sent a herald to the Athenians, who offered to conclude with them a five-day truce if they wished to leave Sicily. The Athenians considered this offer beneath contempt and returned no answer. No immediate political effect is obvious, but the incident

4No other herald in Thucydides is named. The formal introduction to this historically trivial person indicates the author's emphasis; see G. T. Griffith, "Some Habits of Thucydides when Introducing Persons," PCPhS 187 (1%1) 21-33. Only at 6.32 does a herald deal not with a foreign power but with his own people.




dramatizes the war's turning-point: the arrival of Gylippus and the Athenians' portentous refusal to negotiate. A herald rarely appears without corpses in question in Thucydides' work and is of correspondingly greater interest. This incident perhaps presents us with one of the historian's silent rebukes of the Athenian high command. "The lost chance" will haunt the reader and the Athenians. I do not suggest falsification of facts, only legitimate and necessary selection and manipulation to indicate historical importance. The last herald's speech (7.82.1) appears just before the army of Demosthenes surrenders. The offer of freedom to Athens' subjects who will now desert holds little military or even political significance, but it marks the effective end of a military force once considered invincible. Thus we have a herald at the beginning, crisis, and conclusion of the Sicilian expedition. Clearly divided "Aristotelian" episodes later became typical of Hellenistic histories. I I

In the "Sicilian books," a somewhat separate war is recorded and normal return of enemy corpses continues for a long time (see 6.71 bis, 72.1 lburiall, 97.5, 103.1; 7.5.3, 45.1-2). Corpses pointedly recur as Athenian resistance collapses and dies. The pathos of the Athenian disaster here, as in the plague at Athens, is emphasized by the Athenians' rapidly changing attitude towards their own dead.

This prior establishment of the "normal" rules of war and burial renders later Athenian negligence memorable and significant. This normality conditions the knowledgeable reader's expectations and informs the ignorant (who someday may not know the location of Epidamnus [1.241 or even that the Peiraeus is Athens' port [2.93.11). After their decisive victory in the last battle in the harbor, the Syracusans, according to custom, collect their dead and set up a trophy; "but the Athenians did not even consider asking for return of their corpses, overwhelmed as they were by the magnitude of their present evils" . . . (7.72.2). Never before were the Athenians disheart- ened to the extent of not requesting their dead who lay in the enemy's power. Even worse, when the Athenians departed from their camp, they left behind unburied corpses of close friends (75.3). The unburied, dishonored, and now deserted corpses evoke pity from us and the soldiers, and measure the Athenians' catastrophe." The Athenians will stoop further in their disregard of human decency and their duties to the dead. When Nicias' thirsty troops reached the Assinarus, they rushed forward heedless of the enemy above. The scene portrays the total breakdown of military, even human, order. Pressed by their sufferings, and their thirst, the Athenians rushed to the river in no order, each man wishing to be first, and they trampled each other and then

'5See Polybius' comments on Phylarchus (2.56.6-13); Duris' own preface (FGrHist. 76. Fl). and Plutarch's criticism of his dramatic "improvements'(Alc. 32.2=FGrHist. 76. F 70); and Livy's "compound episodes" (e.g. 1.53.4ff. is analyzed by P. G. Walsh, Livy. His Historical Aims and Methods [Cambridge 19611 178-9).

"The word ataphos occurs elsewhere only at 2.50.1 (the plague). In both contexts it illustrates a situation crushing men "beyond human endurance" so that they, "overwhelmed by their evils, begin to ignore both divine and human concerns" (2.52.3).




became entangled in their own equipment - some drowned, some were cut down by the enemy. The water quickly became muddied and bloodied. The description of the carnage immediately prior to Nicias' surrender runs (85. 1): "Finally when the many corpses were heaped upon each other in the river and the army was destroyed . . . ." Death itself is less evocative than heaped- up corpses. The mound of corpses projects the form of chaos.

Finally, the Athenian prisoners in the Syracusan quarries invite comment. In a sentence which barely pauses for twelve lines (87.1-2) as it details the horror of the prisoner-of-war camp, Thucydides reports among the bar- barities endured: "furthermore the corpses were heaped up all together." Here, and in the description of the plague at Athens (2.52.2, 7.87.2), the presence of corpses among the living is a hazard to health but more significantly, evidence of the degeneration of Hellenic behavior. The description of the plague mentions corpses three times: to indicate unmanageable numbers, the impossibility of honoring sacred precincts (cf. Delion above) and the confusion of sacred custom: "all the laws were thrown into confusion." The story of the quarries describes the limits of human endurance and indignity. In both, men are no more than rotting, undisposed rubbish.

Thus the final four instances of corpses in Book 7 articulate successive steps in the dehumanization of the Athenian forces. Mention - not casual, for many opportunities to mention dead bodies are ignored - impresses for- cibly on the reader the collapse of Athenian morale, then religion, decency, and finally ability to perform an elementary human obligation: burial of the dead."7 Disregard of impurity, neglect of one's own, is much worse than defilement of enemy corpses, impurity inflicted on others.

Thucydides, then, mentions heralds and corpses either substantively to illustrate the standard and the decline of Hellenic morality '* or formally to define the stages of an event. He forgoes many opportunities to mention either. War routinely produces heralds and corpses. As the war continued, heralds become relatively meaningless as symbols of normality, and they disappear from the History. The noun keryx and the uncompounded verb oc- cur thirty-eight times in Books 1-5, only three times afterwards, where they articulate important structural sections. Corpses become a more effective

At Sphacteria too, heralds play a prominent r6le in organizing the narrative after Cleon's arrival. Heralds announce the beginning of the end (4.30.4; as with Gylippus, 7.3.1), the end of the fighting (4.37.1-2), the end of negotiations (38.3), and the end of Spartan control of Sphacteria (38.4). They are, in other words, clarifying the stages of the action.

'The Athenian murder of the Spartan ambassadors traveling to Asia Minor (2.67) also illustrates the decline of behavior in war-time. Thucydides quietly balances this act against con- temporary Spartan executions of captured merchants, both Athenian allies and neutrals (67.4). Herodotus, however, sees in this incident (7.137.1-3) the long arm ot god (theiotaton), because the execution of Spartan ambassadors by the Athenians expiates a Spartan crime more than fifty years old, the execution of the Persian heralds who demanded submission to the King. Where Herodotus sees god and justice brought to completion in history, Thucydides observes cynical destruction of innocent or protected men who have been seized in total war. Both, however, find the executions noteworthy.




symbol. Returning the dead, or refusal to do so, roughly indicates the current level of Hellenic civility. The treatment of corpses in Thucydides, as in Attic drama, symbolizes man's relation to his fellow man and to his gods.'9 In 1-5 (save for the plague and after the battle of Delion), corpses indicate the normal observance of the laws of war. In 7.72-87, where the dead appear with unique frequency, both the large number of corpses and their sacrilegious treatment provoke the author's attention for men who should be beyond violence.

Heralds and corpses, I conclude, by their sanctity and helplessness, are in- tended to supply a definition of tradition and heighten the shock of violation. Indirect dramatic statement supplements the rare direct observation and judgement of a reticent author. Ordinary incidents involving heralds and corpses offer the expected, as do other Thucydidean formulae such as year endings, incident conclusions, and speech introductions. Thucydides' begin- nings, ends, and transitions offer a subject worthy of attention. The ex- ceptional incidents involving heralds and corpses, however, supply contrasts and parameters for an era not least significant for its disturbance and destruction of a hitherto shared community of values: "Greekness - sharing the same blood and language, common shrines and sacrifices for the gods, and similar manners and customs" (Herodotus 8.144.2).

University of Pennsylvania Donald Lateiner

9An important theme in Sophocles' Antigone and Ajax, Euripides' Suppliants and Trojan Women (the corpse of Astyanax; this play, like Thucydides' history, offers a social rather than an individual tragedy). Hecuba remarks (ibid. 1246-50) that the dead need no attention, but her rationalism is rationalization of a situation which is now worse than hopeless. It is not a representative view, for which see Suppliants: Greeks come to Athens in need of help to bury their dead (note esp. 306-13, 524-48, 670-72).



Thucydides

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