previous next

This chapter is most characteristic of H. and of the general Greek attitude to religion; cf. Xen. Mem. iv. 3. 16, the well-known answer of Delphi, given repeatedly, that the gods were pleased with worship νόμῳ πόλεως.

Strabo (805) says that he saw traces of the outrages of Cambyses on the temples of Heliopolis. The mad king was even credited with the destruction of the statue of Memnon, though this was really ruined by an earthquake in the time of Augustus. Cambyses, to Egyptian imagination, played the part that Cromwell is credited with in English cathedrals.

Zeno later declined to condemn nations that ate their dead; burial, he held, was a matter not of principle but of convenience. The point illustrates well the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics.


Καλλατίας. For a discussion of this cannibalism and for modern instances cf. iv. 26 n.

The name Callatiae (from Sans Kâla = black) points to the aboriginal inhabitants of India; they are otherwise unknown except for a vague reference in Hecataeus (fr. 177, F. H. G. i. 12); perhaps they are the same as the Παδαῖοι of c. 99.

The passage from Pindar (fr. 169), which H. here quotes, is preserved in Plato, Gorg. 484 B, where it refers to a ‘natural law’ that ‘the stronger should rule the weaker’. νόμος πάντων βασιλεὺς θνατῶν τε καὶ ἀθανάτων:—οὗτος δὲ δή, φησίνἄγει δικαιῶν τὸ βιαιότατον ὑπερτάτᾳ χειρί. H., quoting from memory, gives the passage a more general sense. Myres, A. and C. p. 157, says that νόμος is ‘the formal expression of what actually happens . . .’, ‘it answers to our law of nature . . . a more or less accurate formulation of the actual course of events.’

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide References (1 total)
  • Commentary references from this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: