Megabyzus for oligarchy, Darius for monarchy; but here the points of view seem purely Hellenic[1]. Herodotus prefaces his report of the discussion by saying, "Speeches were made which some of the Greeks refuse to credit; but made they were[2]": and elsewhere[3] he remarks with triumph that "those Greeks who do not believe" in Otanes having advocated democracy will be surprised to hear that Mardonius established democracies in the Ionian cities. The ground of this dramatic episode, then, was a story current among the Greeks of Ionia, but rejected by some of them as manifestly inconsistent with Persian ideas. The spirit of rhetorical dialectic may be traced again very clearly in the conversation between Solon and Croesus, where Solon refines on the distinction between wealth, good fortune, and happiness[4]. Still, it cannot be said that Herodotus
- ↑ Her. iii. 80—82. Similarly in Her. iii. 36 the Lydian Croesus utters Hellenic thoughts.
- ↑ Her. iii. 80, ἐλέχθησαω λόγοι ἄπιστοι μὲν ἐνίοισι Ἑλλήνων ἐλέχθησαν δ' ὦν.
- ↑ Her. vi. 43, ἐνθαῦτα μέγιστον θῶυμα ἐρέω τοῖσι μὴ ἀποδεκομένοισι ἑλλήνων Περσέων τοῖσι ἑπτὰ Ὀτάνεα γνώμην ἀποδέξασθαι, ὡς χρεὼν εἴη δημοκρατέεσθαι Πέρσας: where μὴ ἀποδεκομένοισι implies more than μὴ πιστεύουσι would have implied,—viz. that the statement was offered for acceptance, not simply by Herodotus himself, but by a widely-spread rumour.
- ↑ Her. i. 32. The question of Croesus to Solon had been—τίνα ἤδη πάντων εἶδες ὀλβιώτατον; Solon answers, in effect, that πλοῦτος is certainly an element of ὄλβος, but that complete ὄλβος requires εὐτυχία also, and that a man's life cannot be called εὐτυχής unreservedly until we have seen it to the end. Dean Blakesley observes (on Her. i. 32), that this "might have proceeded from the mouth of Protagoras, or Hippias, or any other of the μεριμνηταὶ λόγων alluded to by Euripides" (in Medea 1225 f.). If it has not the matured subtlety of the rhetorical dialectic, it may certainly be said to anticipate its spirit.
