Style and Meaning in Herodotus 7.138-139:
Athens as the Defender of Greece
and the Historian as the Defender of Truth

Cecilia M. Peek (Brigham Young University)

“Here I am forced to declare an opinion which will be displeasing to most, but I will not refrain from saying what seems to me to be true.” (Herodotus 7.139.1).[1]

The opinion Herodotus here feels compelled to disclose — the view that may be difficult for most people to accept — is that Athens was the decisive factor in the defense against the Persian invasion of the Greek world in 480 BCE. Indeed, without the Athenian resistance, the historian informs his audience, all Greece would have been brought, more and less willingly, under the control of Persia.

The confrontation between Greeks and Barbarians is a subject that captured Herodotus’s imagination and one which he openly admits to have been a key motivation for his work, undertaken, among other things, in order to investigate the causes, progress, and outcome of the Persian wars. When he turns his attention (and all his formidable skill as a storyteller) to the threat posed by Xerxes and his numerous forces, the historian focuses on the role Athens played in the salvation of the free city-states of Greece. Without apology he celebrates this role, indulging betimes in an open panegyric of the heroes of Attica. His praise is at its most enthusiastic in 7.138-139. While the expressions of Herodotus’s admiration throughout this section of the history are in themselves significant, a thorough consideration of the passage reveals that its style and structure do as much to commend the Athenians as the more explicit terms of praise. The careful choice and placement of words, the recurrence of parallelism and antithesis, the repetition of key words and phrases, the use of chiasm and asyndeton, and an array of other devices all work together to underscore and realize Herodotus’s overt claim that the Athenians indeed saved Greece, and that they did so in spite of an opposing and weak-minded Greek majority.

Embedded in the rhetoric of the same passage is also the historian’s more subtle, but equally important, self-promotion. By means of those same devices he exploits on Athens’s behalf, he asserts his own, uniquely justified, right to tell that city’s tale. Herodotus claims to feel compelled by necessity to reveal his view of Athens, although it may be hateful to most men — that weak majority apparently may be as much a threat to the historian’s freedom of expression as it is a threat to the freedom of the Greek world. But in spite of that threat, Herodotus announces and defends his opinion. His duty is to tell the truth as he sees it, whatever the sentiments of the many may be. As that truth regards himself, he reveals it by implication rather than by pronouncement. Nevertheless, in the historian’s own rhetoric he becomes a symbol of the heroic type, the very type more explicitly represented by Athens.

This paper will examine the layers of presentation in the language of Herodotus 7.138-139. By identifying and explicating the rhetorical devices employed by the author, I will aim to demonstrate how those layers of presentation translate into layers of meaning: the explicit veneration of the Athenian polis and the implicit veneration of the man who had the audacity to tell her story.