HERALDS FROM DARtTS PUT TO DEATH. 31)
- the Spartans threw the herald who came to them into a
well, desiring the unfortunate messenger to take earth and water from thence to the king. The inviolability of heralds was so ancient and undisputed in Greece, from the Homeric times down- ward, that nothing short of the fiercest excitement could have instigated any Grecian community to such an outrage. But to the Lacedaemonians, now accustomed to regard themselves as Uie first of all Grecian states, and to be addressed always in the character of superiors, the demand appeared so gross an insult as to banish from their minds for the time all recollection of established obligations. They came subsequently, however, to repent of the act as highly criminal, and to look upon it as the cause of misfortunes which overtook them thirty or forty years afterwards : how they tried at that time to expiate it, I shall hereafter recount. 1 But if, on the one hand, the wounded dignity of the Spartans hurried them into the commission of this wrong, it was on the other hand of signal use to the general liberties of Greece, by rousing them out of their apathy as to the coming invader, and placing them with regard to him in the same state of inexpiable he should be put to death, for having employed the Greek language as medium for barbaric dictation (Plutarch, Themist. c. 6). We should he glad to know from whom Plutarch copied this story. Pausanias states that it was Miltiades who proposed the putting to death of the heralds at Athens (iii, 12, 6) ; and that the divine judgment fell upon his family in consequence of it. From whom Pausanias copied this statement I do not know : certainly not from Herodotus, who does not mention Miltiades in the case, and expressly says that he does not know in what manner the divine judgment overtook the Athenians for the crime; "except (says he) that their city and country was afterwards laid waste by Xerxes ; but I do not think that this happened on account of the ont- rage on the heralds." (Herodot. vii, 133.) The belief that there must have been a divine judgment of some sort or other, presented a strong stimulus to invent or twist some historical fact to correspond with it. Herodotus has sufficient regard for truth to resist this mmulus and to confess his ignorance ; a circumstance which goes, along with others, to strengthen our confidence in his general authority. Hii silence weakens the credibility, but does not refute the allegation of Pau- anias with regard to MBtiades, which is certainly not intrinsicallf improbable. 1 Herodot. vii, 133.
