[294] Herodot. viii, 130; Diodor xi. 27.
[295] Herodot. viii, 131, 132: compare Thucyd. iii, 29-32.
Herodotus says, that the Chian envoys had great difficulty in inducing Leotychidês to proceed even as far as Delos,—τὸ γὰρ προσωτέρω πᾶν δεινὸν ἦν τοῖσι Ἕλλησι, οὔτε τῶν χώρων ἐοῦσι ἐμπείροισι, στρατιῆς τε πάντα πλέα ἐδόκεε εἶναι· τὴν δὲ Σάμον ἐπιστέατο δόξῃ καὶ Ἡρακλέας στήλας ἴσον ἀπέχειν.
This last expression of Herodotus has been erroneously interpreted by some of the commentators, as if it were a measure of the geographical ignorance, either of Herodotus himself, or of those whom he is describing. In my judgment, no inferences of this kind ought to be founded upon it: it marks fear of an enemy’s country which they had not been accustomed to visit, and where they could not calculate the risk beforehand,—rather than any serious comparison between one distance and another. Speaking of our forefathers, such of them as were little used to the sea, we might say,—“A voyage to Bordeaux or Lisbon seemed to them as distant as a voyage to the Indies,”—by which we should merely affirm something as to their state of feeling, not as to their geographical knowledge.
[296] Herodot. ix, 1, 2, 67; viii, 136.
[297] Herodot. viii, 128, 129.
[298] Herodot. viii, 134, 135; Pausanias, ix, 24, 3.
[299] Herodot. viii. 141. Λακεδαιμόνιοι δὲ ... ἀναμνησθέντες τῶν λογίων, ὥς σφεας χρεόν ἐστι ἅμα τοῖσι ἄλλοισι Δωριεῦσι ἐκπίπτειν ἐκ Πελοποννήσου ὑπὸ Μήδων τε καὶ Ἀθηναίων, κάρτα τε ἔδεισαν μὴ ὁμολογήσωσι τῷ Πέρσῃ Ἀθηναῖοι, etc.
Such oracles must have been generated by the hopes of the medizing party in Greece at this particular moment: there is no other point of time to which they could be at all adapted,—no other, in which expulsion of all the Dorians from Peloponnesus, by united Persians and Athenians, could be even dreamed of. The Lacedæmonians are indeed said here, “to call to mind the prophecies,”—as if these latter were old, and not now produced for the first time. But we must recollect that a fabricator of prophecies, such as Onomakritus, would in all probability at once circulate them as old; that is, as forming part of some old collection like that of Bakis or Musæus. And Herodotus doubtless, himself, believed them to be old, so that he would naturally give credit to the Lacedæmonians for the same knowledge, and suppose them to be alarmed by “calling these prophecies to mind.”
[300] Herodot. ix, 7.