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CHAPTER TWO

Rulers and Rivers

As explained in chapter 1, my analysis of Greek ethnography’s environmental discourse attends to the boundaries between land and water (chapter 2) and differences between (and among) human and animal bodies (chapter 3), as well as the cultural practices described in chapters 4 and 5. This chapter shows how humans and other beings in Herodotus’s Histories and Diodorus’s Library build and rebuild the known world by constructing marvelous works such as pyramids, dams, and canals. These works (erga) are energy and material intensive, requiring tons of raw wood, stone, metal, and animal products, as well as the forced labor of humans and other animals. Erga also reroute rivers, sever bodies of land, and alter topography, sometimes forever. The massive effects of these engineering projects lead Herodotus and Diodorus to grapple with questions of environmental ethics: Under what circumstances should humans (and others) intervene in the world around them? Are there “natural” boundaries they should respect?

Both Herodotus and Diodorus distinguish between human-made and what are usually called natural features of the world. Herodotus says that some of the mouths of the Nile have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), picturing humans as secondary actors in Egypt. Diodorus uses different language, saying that the Egyptian king Sesoösis “erected many great mounds of land . . . in areas not naturally (physikōs) elevated” (1.57.1).¹ For both authors, “nature” (physis) has temporal priority over human action, operating before and within people and other beings. Yet contrary to modern assumptions, the distinction between the “original” operation of nature in the world and later human or nonhuman changes to land- and waterscapes has no inherent moral value. Readers of Herodotus and Diodorus learn that these human interventions are not good or bad per se, but rather are judged by their consequences for the human community.²

The most infamous engineering project Herodotus records appears in the second half of the Histories. In book 7, the Persian king Xerxes prepares to invade Greece by bridging the Hellespont, the strait separating Asia and Europe. Just as the bridge is complete, storms arise and destroy it. Enraged, Xerxes orders his men to abuse the water with whips, shackles, and brands, while he himself casts these insults:

Ὦ πικρὸν ὕδωρ, δεσπότης τοι δίκην ἐπιτιθεῖ τήνδε, ὅτι μιν ἠδίκησας οὐδὲν πρὸς ἐκείνου ἄδικον παθόν. Καὶ βασιλεὺς μὲν Ξέρξης διαβήσεταί σε, ἤν τε σύ γε βούλῃ ἤν τε μή. Σοὶ δὲ κατὰ δίκην ἄρα οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων θύει, ὡς ἐόντι καὶ θολερῷ καὶ ἁλμυρῷ ποταμῷ.

Bitter water, this is the punishment you pay our master for wronging him although you suffered no injustice from him. King Xerxes will cross you whether you are willing or not. How right it is that no one sacrifices to you, muddy and salty a river as you are. (Hdt. 7.35)

Herodotus strongly marks Xerxes as in the wrong, calling his men’s speech “barbaric and recklessly presumptuous” (7.35.1: barbara te kai atasthala) and the act itself “an honor without honor” (7.36.1: hautē hē acharis timē). Narrative clues reinforce Herodotus’s disapproval: Xerxes ignores omens (7.37) and even his own feelings of despair (7.45) but does not turn back. Like Agamemnon’s trampling of the carpet in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (to which this scene is often compared), the whipping of the Hellespont sums up and overdetermines Xerxes’s fall in the remaining books of the Histories.³

The scene is also crucial for scholars’ understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. Classicists have usually framed Xerxes’s act as “unnatural,” a transgression of predetermined natural boundaries. James Flory claims that Xerxes “profanes nature” with his act, while Henry Immerwahr argues that “the crossing of rivers . . . is always used to prove the hybris [violent arrogance] of the aggressor.”⁴ Since rivers had divine status in Greek religion, Thomas Harrison translates Xerxes’s “presumptuous” (atasthala) words as “impious” and says that the scene exemplifies “the moral that man should let his environment be.”⁵ Rosaria Munson agrees, tying Xerxes’s action to other “expansionist violations of rivers.”⁶ In this dominant view, there are natural boundaries in the Histories that humans “transgress,” “profane,” or “violate” by building bridges, redirecting rivers, and digging canals.

Other scholars have questioned this orthodoxy, pointing out Herodotus’s frequent admiration for bridges, canals, and other works of engineering, and arguing that Xerxes is punished for his insolence to the Hellespont, not for constructing the bridge itself.⁷ Although, as James Romm says, Herodotus draws on “tragic” language associating Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont with retributive justice (especially through allusions to a parallel scene in Aeschylus’s Persians), he employs a “more sophisticated, sophiē-reverencing impulse” that values human ingenuity (sophiē) when he describes Xerxes’s bridge.⁸

Most recently, Katherine Clarke has thoroughly examined Herodotus’s representation of land- and waterscapes, concluding that “geographical space . . . is an active player in the narrative” of the Histories and that it serves to characterize different players in the Greco-Persian wars.⁹ She demonstrates that the particular judgments of Herodotus’s text are context specific and complicated by focalization, the point of view from which human interventions are evaluated. Sometimes, as in the case of Xerxes, Herodotus himself condemns a work of human engineering; in others, this judgment is reported by Herodotus but attributed to his informants. For example, it is the Egyptians who disapprove of King Cheops’s pyramid, rather than Herodotus himself.¹⁰

Since Clarke has so persuasively laid out an alternative to the standard, totalizing view of “natural” boundaries in Herodotus’s text, this chapter focuses instead on the environmental lessons that readers can learn from his inquiry into how humans and other beings have changed the world over time. Xerxes’s violation of the Hellespont has the power to characterize him because Greeks do in fact worry about whether or not humans should intervene in land- and waterscapes, but this worry cannot be reduced to a blanket prescription against crossing rivers, building bridges, or undertaking related projects. The negative attention Herodotus draws to Xerxes’s interactions with the Hellespont throws into contrast the engineering works that he admires and invites readers to meditate on the difference (if any) between them.¹¹

Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s record of geographical change reveals that both humans and other beings, especially rivers, are responsible for remaking land- and waterscapes, and that they are judged on equal terms for how they change the world. In what follows, I argue four points. First, Herodotus and Diodorus are predisposed to positively value marvelous works (erga), not only because erga impress them and could be expected to delight readers, but also because they depend on these works for information about earlier centuries. Second, reading Xerxes’s bridge alongside other erga reveals that Herodotus does in fact place limits on human ingenuity, limits made more explicit by Diodorus. Both authors value engineering projects that benefit the ruled while immortalizing the ruler. Third, what we see in Herodotus and Diodorus is not the crossing of predetermined “natural” boundaries, but a demonstration of how those boundaries are made and can be remade by both humans and other beings. Fourth, the historian is not a passive observer of these boundaries-in-the-making, but a cocreator of them.

THE HISTORIAN COMPLICIT

Herodotus and other historians are predisposed to admire works of engineering because they depend on them for information about the past. As Herodotus tells us in the opening lines of the Histories, he has recorded the display (apodeixis) of his inquiry “in order that the things done by people are not lost in time, and that great and amazing works (erga megala te kai thōmasta), some displayed (apodechthenta) by Greeks and some non-Greeks not be forgotten, in particular the cause of their conflict with one another” (1.1).¹² While Herodotus emphasizes his role in preserving erga, the common language of display also underscores the similarities between his endeavor and those who left erga behind. His accomplishment depends on those it records. It is a great work composed of other great works.¹³

Like the semantics of the English word work, erga can denote intangible achievements as well as tangible objects, “the finished product of an activity.”¹⁴ For example, the Greek victory over the Persians is an intangible ergon, but the Histories also describes many concrete works. These erga may have been lost in original physical form, but Herodotus’s record ensures their survival in text, and these tangible erga in turn motivate large sections of Herodotus’s narrative. In book 3, for example, Herodotus explains that he “has gone on so long about the Samians because they accomplished the three greatest works of all the Greeks,” a tunnel for piping water into town, a harbor mole, and the largest temple he has ever seen.¹⁵ These objects prove the stories Herodotus relates and provide moments of pause for lush, ekphrastic description.¹⁶ Lands that lack human beings lack information, but monuments can testify even in the absence of human informants.¹⁷

Objects “worthy of mention” can be as small as a dedication, if it is expensive enough (e.g., the six golden bowls of Gyges; 1.14), but are often very large and qualify as “monuments” (mnēmosuna). These monumental works include tombs, pillars and statues, fortresses, and even whole cities.¹⁸ The Greek word for monument, mnēmosunon, is closely related to the word for memory (mnēmosunē), like the English memorial. Monuments commemorate the past and are for historians the material basis of their own creation. Commensurate with their size and expense, mnēmosuna consume vast quantities of natural resources, especially stone and precious metals, but Herodotus (unlike Diodorus, as discussed later in this chapter) does not dwell on this fact.¹⁹

Herodotus ties one of these monuments directly to his own authorial achievement. The Egyptian king Moeris is known to the Egyptian priests for building pyramids, the forecourt of a temple, and an artificial lake (2.101). Herodotus calls these works the ergōn apodeixis, the “display of works” promised to readers in the proem as both the form and content of his inquiry. Later on, he says that Moeris’s lake is a thōma, “marvel” (2.149), even more closely identifying it with the “great and marvelous works” (1.1: erga megala te kai thōmasta) he set out to record. Herodotus’s experience of Moeris’s labyrinth, which he wanders through in amazement and claims (ironically) is beyond his power of description (2.148: ton egō ēdē eidon logou mezō), epitomizes his attitude to great works. The labyrinth implicates him both literally and figuratively, enfolding his body and challenging him to surpass its achievement.²⁰

Following Herodotus’s lead, Diodorus uses an architectural metaphor to draw out the competitive relationship between the erga of past rulers and his own work:

τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλα μνημεῖα διαμένει χρόνον ὀλίγον, ὑπὸ πολλῶν ἀναιρούμενα περιστάσεων, ἡ δὲ τῆς ἱστορίας δύναμις ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην διήκουσα τὸν πάντα τἄλλα λυμαινόμενον χρόνον ἔχει φύλακα τῆς αἰωνίου παραδόσεως τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις.

For these other monuments (mnēmeia) remain but a little while, being uprooted by many circumstances, but the power of history (historia), extending over the whole world, possesses in time—which destroys everything else—a guardian for ensuring perpetual transmission to posterity. (Diod. Sic. 1.2.5)²¹

Diodorus disparages people’s desire to leave behind physical memorials rather than memorials of virtue, but he too preserves these “monuments of stone” (10.12.2).

Like Herodotus’s mnēmosuna, Diodorus’s semantically equivalent mnēmeia often radically transform land- and waterscapes. Semiramis, the queen of Assyria, cuts through a mountain to make an “immortal memorial” for herself (2.13.5: athanaton mnēmeion), and the Roman censor Appius Claudius levels heights and fills valleys for the same purpose (20.36.2). When these monuments endure, they are also useful to the historian. As Diodorus comments, Semiramis’s memory benefits from the many memorials she left in her wake (2.14.1). Diodorus’s monument of these monuments, the Library, claims to be the ultimate memorial. But his achievement relies on the ambitious building projects of great rulers and heroes.

As Clarke argues, the “consistent alignment of the historian” with rulers’ erga “seems to reinforce admiration rather than dismay.”²² I would go further and assert that historians’ interest in amazing works and reliance on them for information mute historiography’s ability as a genre to criticize human activity. The Hellespont scene in Aeschylus’s Persians provides a helpful contrast. Whereas Herodotus’s disapproval focuses on Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont, Aeschylus has Darius lament Xerxes’s decision to offend the gods by enslaving the Hellespont with fetters and “changing its form into a road” (Hdt. l.747: porou meterruthmize). In this tragic setting, the bridge is as much of a sacrilege as the shackles are.²³ For Herodotus, on the other hand, the bridge is an artifact of history; the historian has a vested interest in making a distinction between the bridge Xerxes constructs, his bad reasons for constructing it, and the tantrum he throws when the bridge is destroyed.

Historians’ reliance on great works, including those that testify to their actor’s memory by altering geography, limits the degree to which they can criticize the undertaking of these works. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern critique, moments when Herodotus and Diodorus evaluate the merits of these projects and the terms by which they judge them worthwhile.

MONUMENTAL RISKS AND REWARDS

Earthworks, including tunnels, walls, roads, and buildings, run through Herodotus’s Histories. Occasionally they are demanded by the gods, as when Pisistratus (1.64) and, later, the Spartans (1.67) rebury bodies to fulfill oracular demands. But most are initiated by human beings. Amasis, a Persian king engaged in a protracted war with the Barceans, swears an oath to last “as long as the earth stays the same” (4.201: est’ an hē gē hautē houtō echē) but makes sure to limit this promise by standing over a lightly covered trench. The city of Barcē is taken and its citizens captured or killed, the men’s bodies impaled and displayed along with the women’s cut-off breasts (4.202). Although Amasis has tricked the Persians with this earthwork, he suffers neither divine retribution nor the author’s disapproval.²⁴ On the contrary, Amasis’s “trick” (dolon) is the last in a series of moves and countermoves, as the Persians try to tunnel beneath the city and the Barceans counter-tunnel (antorussontes) in return (4.200). Elsewhere, Herodotus reports without additional comment the frequent earthworks provoked by the demands of war, both offensive (1.162) and defensive (1.163, 4.3). The Histories take for granted that people will manipulate the landscape to make war and protect themselves.

Herodotus takes a similar view of waterworks, including bridges (like Xerxes’s), harbor moles, dams, dykes, canals, and a marvelous oxhide irrigation pipe (3.9). When the Lydian king Croesus crosses the River Halys, Herodotus wonders whether he used existing bridges or employed Thales of Miletus to divert the river around his army but does not judge the work itself (1.75). When describing a massive Samian irrigation tunnel and harbor mole, he expresses admiration and classes these achievements with the colossal temple the Samians also constructed, calling the three of them the greatest works of all the Greeks (3.60).

Nevertheless, Herodotus recognizes moments when humans are forbidden to undertake these projects. The Cnidians begin a canal to fortify themselves from Persian invasion but notice that their workers suffer an unusually high number of injuries. They consult an oracle, who scolds:

Ἰσθμὸν δὲ μὴ πυργοῦτε μηδ’ ὀρύσσετε

Ζεὺς γάρ κ’ ἔθηκε νῆσον, εἴ γ’ ἐβούλετο.

Do not fortify or dig up the Isthmus.

Zeus would have made an island if he had wanted to. (Hdt. 1.174)

Like Xerxes, the Cnidians are wrong to undertake this alteration of their world; unlike him, they heed warnings and stop before catastrophe strikes.²⁵ In a similar situation in book 2, the Egyptian king Necos starts digging a canal, which the Persian king Darius will later finish when he has conquered the region. An oracle stops Necos, saying that he is helping his Persian enemy (2.158).²⁶ In Herodotus’s world, the gods are not usually in the business of approving or forbidding earth- and waterworks, but their occasional intervention proves both the risk and reward of undertaking them. Erga can offend the gods and bring ruin upon the rulers who order them (not to mention the workers who get in the way), or they can ensure those same rulers’ fame and memorialization in historiography.²⁷

When negotiating these risks, the best rulers alter land- and waterscapes to benefit their people rather than merely themselves. This principle emerges from a series of stories in book 1 that report the great works of various rulers, both Babylonian (Semiramis, Nitocris) and Persian (Darius, Cyrus). Semiramis, Herodotus reports, constructs dykes “worthy of mention” (axiotheētēs) that prevent a river from flooding the plane of Babylon (1.184). Nitocris, a later successor, leaves behind “monuments” (mnēmosuna, 1.185.1) that Herodotus considers worth describing but also has the foresight to defend against Median encroachment by diverting the Euphrates, fortifying it with embankments, and constructing an artificial lake to slow the river and make it less useful to attackers (1.185.2–6). These interventions are “worthy of wonder” (1.185.3: axion thōmatos) and thus enhance Nitocris’s later reputation, but Herodotus also emphasizes how she has transformed the river into a defense system for her people (1.186.1).²⁸ Another, more modest undertaking benefits the populace in peacetime. Nitocris constructs a bridge that is lowered by day and retracted at night. During the day, the bridge eases the “nuisance” (1.186.1: ochlēron) of conducting business, but at night its absence prevents the Babylonians from robbing one another. Nitocris’s bridge and defense system are the ingenious projects of a responsible ruler.²⁹

Herodotus uses another story about Nitocris to demonstrate the importance of rulers’ intentions in undertaking their erga.³⁰ After describing Nitocris’s bridge, Herodotus reports that she built a tomb for herself above the city gates, inscribed with a message to future rulers:

Τῶν τις ἐμεῦ ὕστερον γινομένων Βαβυλῶνος βασιλέων ἢν σπανίσῃ χρημάτων, ἀνοίξας τὸν τάφον λαβέτω ὁκόσα βούλεται χρήματα· μὴ μέντοι γε μὴ σπανίσας γε ἄλλως ἀνοίξῃ οὐ γὰρ ἄμενον.

Any Babylonian king who comes after me and needs money may open the tomb and take as much as he requires, but if he opens it for any other reason, it will not go well for him. (Hdt. 1.187.2)

Darius, a later, Persian ruler of Babylon, breaks into this tomb both because he wants the promised money and because he dislikes walking under Nitocris’s corpse when he enters the city. Once inside, he is greeted with these words: “Only a terribly greedy person would open the tombs of the dead.”³¹ Herodotus calls Nitocris’s tomb a “trick” or “deceit” (apatē), but the story also celebrates her ingenuity and portrays Darius as a hypocrite. Darius, who would not be seen in public passing through the gates under Nitocris’s tomb, is willing to violate it by night. Nitocris, on the other hand, subverts her greedy successor from the grave.³²

The contrast between Nitocris’s and Darius’s intentions in carrying out their erga provides the background for the next story in the series. This one concerns Cyrus, Darius’s predecessor and the famous founder of the Persian empire. Herodotus reports that Cyrus, like Xerxes, punishes (1.190.1: etisato) the River Gyndus for obstructing him and killing one of his sacred horses, dividing the river into 360 channels (1.189).³³ Although Nitocris also diverts rivers, her goal is to defend her people. Cyrus, on the other hand, aims only to satisfy his injured pride. Like Darius, who opened Nitocris’s tomb for the wrong reasons, Cyrus’s arrogance provokes him to alter the Gyndus. Although Cyrus and Nitocris both change the course of rivers, the difference in their motivations is crucial.³⁴

The account in book 2 of Cheops, an Egyptian king, also focuses on rulers’ intentions. Obsessed with building a pyramid for himself, Cheops stops all other work in Egypt to enslave the Egyptian population and complete the project. Herodotus says that the wicked (kakotētos) Cheops drove the Egyptians into “total misery” (pasan kakotēta) by “wearing them out” (tribomenō) over ten years (2.124.1–3). Cheops has erected a monument Herodotus would normally be inclined to admire, but at a terrible price. He even forces his daughter into sex work to raise funds for the project. She does as ordered (tēn . . . tachthenta prēssesthai), but asks each of the men for a tip. With the blocks they give her she builds her own pyramid, making sure that no one forgets her role in Cheops’s marvel (2.126).

Katherine Clarke notes that Cheops’s story is told from the perspective of Herodotus’s Egyptian informants, and that Herodotus does not himself judge Cheops for enslaving them.³⁵ This may reflect his admiration for Cheops’s erga and his dependence on them for information about the world, but it also foregrounds the personal toll the pyramids have taken on the Egyptian people. In particular, this episode may reflect ideas passed among Herodotus’s lower-class informants.³⁶ Like the stories Sara Forsdyke documents in her study of ancient Greek popular ideology, the tale of Cheops’s daughter celebrates an enslaved person’s wit at the expense of her enslaver. Her cunning does not put Cheops’s daughter in her father’s place but does allow her to enjoy some of the distinction he has accrued to himself by enslaving her. In building her own pyramid with materials siphoned from her father’s project, she criticizes the inequity between enslavers and enslaved without overturning the social order.³⁷ The story of Cheops’s daughter also embodies the kind of world making most dear to Herodotus. While Cheops’s pyramids have come at a great cost to his people, his daughter’s pyramid memorializes her without adding to others’ suffering, since she uses blocks that have already been quarried and transported.³⁸ She capitalizes on a bad situation to memorialize her experience and simultaneously provides Herodotus with evidence of the past.

Herodotus uses the earth- and waterworks of the world’s rulers to reflect on several dynamics: risking divine wrath versus winning immortal reward, the motivations that lead people to intervene effectively in land- and waterscapes and those that lead them to ruin, and the costs and benefits of these interventions for the ruled. Diodorus develops the last of these dynamics into a consistent principle: the best rulers undertake erga that simultaneously enhance themselves and benefit others.

BENEFACTIONS

Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus regularly evaluates the costs and benefits of marvelous works. The hanging gardens of Babylon were requested of an Assyrian king by a woman who missed the landscape of her Persian home and wanted the king to re-create it “with the ingenuity of a garden” (2.10.1: dia tēs tou phutourgeiou philotechnias). Diodorus comments that the gardens were very expensive (2.10.4: polutelōs), but also “entranced those beholding” them (2.10.6: tous theōmenous psych­agōgēsai). The pleasure gardens (paradeisa) that the Assyrian queen Semiramis constructs, on the other hand, are located on a high plateau, which she views (apetheōrei) from an even higher vantage point, ensconced in buildings “expensive and made to satisfy her desire for luxury” (2.13.3: polutelē pros truphēn epoiēsen). Unlike the hanging gardens of Babylon, which were available to many onlookers, Semiramis designs these gardens for her sole enjoyment. Diodorus goes on to observe that she ensures her dominance in the regime, as in this place, by refusing to remarry after her husband’s death, instead having sex with a series of men who are made to disappear (2.13.4: ēphanize). This extreme self-interest and self-absorption mirrors Cheops’s obsession with building a pyramid and the people he sacrifices to indulge it, as described in the Histories.

Diodorus’s descriptions of mining, on the other hand, showcase mutual benefactions. While the bitumen quarried in Babylonia is available “for the people to extract freely” (2.12.1: ton laon epi ton topon apheidōs aruesthai), the Nubian gold mines are worked by convicted criminals, the falsely accused, and prisoners of war.³⁹ According to Diodorus, “much gold is acquired with much suffering and expense” (3.12.1: sunagomenou pollou pollēi kakopatheiai te kai dapanē), pollou pollēi directly contrasting the quantity of gold with the suffering it causes. Although elsewhere Diodorus uses the phrase “with much suffering and expense” and others like it to index, with some admiration, the trouble incurred to achieve greatness, it has a more poignant meaning in his detailed description of the Nubian miners’ suffering.⁴⁰ Diodorus notes that the Egyptians enslave not only prisoners of war and criminals, but also those accused unjustly (adikois diabolais), and punish their families as well. Diodorus pays particular attention to these miners, describing them in unusual detail over the course of several sections. He notes the work that each age group performs as well as the gendered division of labor. This interest is technical but also illustrates his larger point that the demands of mining cause the Nubians immense pain:

προσούσης δ’ ἅπασιν ἀθεραπευσίας σώματος καὶ τῆς τὴν αἰδῶ περιστελλούσης ἐσθῆτος μὴ προσούσης, οὐκ ἔστιν ὃς ἰδὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐλεήσειε τοὺς ἀκληροῦντας διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ταλαιπωρίας.

Because they have no way to care for their bodies or clothing to cover their shame, there is not anyone who would see them and not pity the poor things because of their overwhelming hardship. (Diod. Sic. 3.13.2–3)

Diodorus’s ethnography of the Nubian miners becomes oddly personal, forcing readers to imagine themselves in the position of the compassionate onlooker. Readers who take this role seriously will not only pity the Nubians but disapprove of the Egyptians, who extract gold at such a high price to the miners.

Elsewhere Diodorus seems ambivalent about the trade-off between suffering and reward. Spanish silver mines depend on forced labor (5.38) and also involve the diversion of rivers (5.37.3), but Diodorus marvels at the screws (modeled after Archimedes’s) that allow miners in Spain to remove huge amounts of water, admiring “with what little work” (5.37.4: dia tēs tuchousēs ergasias) the screws operate. The screws, which save human labor, elevate the Spanish operation above the Nubian one.⁴¹ Readers of these stories are invited to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the erga they describe, with human suffering on one side of the balance and gain on the other. Diodorus does not go so far as to argue that workers should own the means of production, but he is alert to vast inequities between owners and workers. He favors erga that benefit both ruler and ruled.

Like the Spanish miners, Diodorus’s Assyrian queen Semiramis also rides the edge of the cost-benefit equation, often by redeeming projects for her sole benefit with those that benefit others:

παραγενηθεῖσα δ’ εἰς Ἐκβάτανα, πόλιν ἐν πεδίῳ κειμένην, κατεσκεύασεν ἐν αὐτῇ πολυτελῆ βασίλεια καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἐπιμέλειαν ἐποιήσατο τοῦ τόπου περιττοτέραν. ἀνύδρου γὰρ οὔσης τῆς πόλεως καὶ μηδαμοῦ σύνεγγυς ὑπαρχούσης πηγῆς, ἐποίησεν αὐτὴν πᾶσαν κατάρρυτον, ἐπαγαγοῦσα πλεῖστον καὶ κάλλιστον ὕδωρ μετὰ πολλῆς κακοπαθείας τε καὶ δαπάνης.

Having arrived at Ecbatana, a city that lies in the plain, she built there an expensive (polutelē) palace and in every other way paid rather a lot of attention (epimeleian) to the region. For since the city was without water and no spring existed nearby, she made it all well-watered by providing, with great suffering and expense, the purest water in abundance. (Diod. Sic. 2.13.5)

This project causes great pain and expense but also brings much-needed resources to the region and probably cements Semiramis’s hold on it. Most important, the attention (epimeleia) she pays her own pleasure and status is matched by her strategic attention to others.

Diodorus saves his greatest admiration for works without a downside, like the lake that King Moeris of Egypt builds, which protects Memphis from flooding and serves farmers as a reservoir (1.51.5–7). This lake, Diodorus says, is “amazing” (thaumastē) for its “usefulness” (chreia), “helpfulness to all” (koinōphelia), and “inventiveness” (epinoia). A much earlier monument, the pillars of Heracles, achieve a similar result; they are an “everlasting work” (aeimnēston ergon) that also protects people from sea monsters (4.18.5).

Here too Semiramis excels. Like her late husband Ninus, Semiramis is motivated by “a desire for great deeds and an ambition to surpass the fame of her predecessor.”⁴² Her palace in Babylon has “an advantage” (proeiche) over the old palace, cementing her legacy, but also uses amazing figural ornamentation that “offer variegated pleasures to those who gaze on them” (2.8.7: poikilēn psychagōgian parechomena tois theō­menois). Herodotus’s descriptions of engineering projects may have brought his readers pleasure, but Diodorus makes the pleasure of gazing on marvelous works concrete and explicit by imagining an audience within the text to consume them. Whereas Herodotus provides only glimpses of the Persian point of view, Diodorus makes the Assyrian public central to his evaluation of these works.⁴³

Diodorus also pushes readers familiar with Herodotus to reevaluate the engineering projects of the Histories, especially Xerxes’s rebuilt bridge across the Hellespont. Like Xerxes, Semiramis seems headed toward disaster when she constructs a bridge to invade India:

ὁ μὲν τῶν Ἰνδῶν βασιλεὺς ἀπήγαγε τὴν δύναμιν ἀπὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ, προσποιούμενος μὲν ἀναχωρεῖν διὰ φόβον, τῇ δ’ ἀληθείᾳ βουλόμενος τοὺς πολεμίους προτρέψασθαι διαβῆναι τὸν ποταμόν. ἡ δὲ Σεμίραμις, κατὰ νοῦν αὐτῇ τῶν πραγμάτων προχωρούντων, ἔζευξε τὸν ποταμὸν κατασκευάσασα πολυτελῆ καὶ μεγάλην γέφυραν, δι’ ἧς ἅπασαν διακομίσασα τὴν δύναμιν.

The king of the Indians withdrew his force from the river, pretending to retreat out of fear, but in reality wanting to urge the enemy to cross the river. Since things were going according to her plan, Semiramis yoked the river by constructing a large, expensive bridge by which she got across her entire force. (Diod. Sic. 2.18.5–6)

Several elements of this story point to catastrophe: the Indians want Semiramis to cross, the bridge is “expensive,” and Semiramis is at the height of her power. Yet the bridge turns into an unexpected advantage when Semiramis decides to destroy it in the wake of her retreat. Although some of her men die in the stampede, the bridge kills an even greater number of Indians and provides Semiramis “great security” (2.19.9: pollēn asphaleian).⁴⁴ This scene rewrites the drama of Herodotus book 8, in which Xerxes agonizes about whether and how to flee Greece (Hdt. 8.97) and the Greeks deliberate about whether to destroy his bridge and prevent his escape (8.109–10). Although Xerxes makes it across the bridge without Greek interference, his army has been ravaged by famine and disease (8.115) and crosses just in time; the bridge has already been damaged by another storm (8.117) and is gone by the time the Greeks arrive to destroy it (9.114). The bridge may save Xerxes’s life, but it does not prevent the Greeks’ pursuit. Instead, Xerxes’s desperate march to reach the bridge and what his men suffer along the way echo and confirm the mistake he has made in building it. While Xerxes’s bridge turns against him, Semiramis transforms her own bridge into a weapon.

Diodorus celebrates Semiramis and her risk taking because he sees doing little as a greater failing than attempting too much.⁴⁵ Like Herodotus, Diodorus relies on building projects for information, but he goes beyond Herodotus by imagining what it would be like for a ruler to “play it safe.” One of these less ambitious rulers is Semiramis’s son Ninyas, whose reign Diodorus calls “peaceful” (eirēnikōs, 2.21.1). This is not a compliment. While Ninyas does not undertake any wars, neither does he accomplish anything for his people. He does not even allow them to see him, too busy with “luxury and sloth and never feeling pain or anxiety.”⁴⁶ Semiramis loves luxury, but she also desires glory, and this propels her to change the world in ways that leave monuments for posterity and improve the lives of her people.

THE WORKS OF THE NILE

As I argue at the beginning of this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are disinclined to criticize works of engineering per se because they rely on them to craft their histories of the world. Instead, we have seen that these authors judge human intervention into land- and waterscapes individually by their motivations and effects. As I show next, both authors also represent rivers as changing the world around them and judge them by the same criteria that apply to human beings. While both authors are sensitive to whether and how rivers benefit the human community, Diodorus is again more explicit than Herodotus, noting rivers’ “benefaction” (euergesia) to human beings (Diod. Sic. 1.36.2).

The most prominent nonhuman actor in both Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s histories is the Nile, a river with a long hold on the Greek and Roman imagination.⁴⁷ As Herodotus says at the beginning of book 2:

Δῆλα γὰρ δὴ καὶ μὴ προακούσαντι, ἰδόντι δέ, ὅστις γε σύνεσιν ἔχει, ὅτι <ἡ>Αἴγυπτος ἐς τὴν Ἕλληνες ναυτίλλονται ἐστὶ Αἰγυπτίοισι ἐπίκτητός τε γῆ καὶ δῶρον τοῦ ποταμοῦ.

It is clear even to one who has not heard [the Egyptian account] before, but sees for themselves (if they have any sense) that the “Egypt” to which the Greeks sail is land acquired (epiktētos) for the Egyptians and a gift (dōron) of the river. (Hdt. 2.5)⁴⁸

αύτης ὦν τῆς χώρης τῆς εἰρημένης ἡ πολλή, κατά περ οἱ ἱρέες ἔλεγον, ἐδόκεε καὶ αὐτῷ μοι εἶναι ἐπίκτητος Αἰγυπτίοισι.

The majority of the land I have spoken about seems to me to be an additional acquisition (epiktētos) for the Egyptians, just as the priests say. (Hdt. 2.10.1)

This language of gift giving characterizes the Nile as a benefactor who has made Egypt for the Egyptians. “What was given from the river to the land and the land to the people” is correlated with the Egyptians’ periods of greatest fortune.⁴⁹ In these passages, Herodotus points out that the land the Greeks take for granted as “Egypt” has a history. Although the Egyptians are elsewhere known as one of the oldest societies on Earth (2.2), and Herodotus is often criticized for representing them as static, his portrait of Egypt is a land that has changed under the Nile’s direction.⁵⁰

The Nile’s actions in Egypt also illustrate the temporal dimension of physis and what Greek writers consider “natural.” Human action often succeeds the actions of other beings, like rivers; for example, as we saw earlier, Herodotus says that some of the Nile’s mouths have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), that is, dug by nonhuman forces. But the Nile has given land to Egypt that is epiktētos, “acquired in addition,” which posits an “Egypt” that predates the Nile’s actions. There is an “original” pre-Nilotic Egypt, just as the Nile had “original” prehuman mouths.⁵¹

A parallel passage in the Histories reveals additional connotations of epiktētos. In book 7, the Spartan king Demaratus explains that in Sparta, poverty is “native” (suntrophos), while valor is “acquired” (epaktos) through wisdom and law (7.102.1). Rosalind Thomas argues that Demaratus uses suntrophos and epaktos to contrast the effects of the Spartans’ physical environment with their cultural response.⁵² But set against the actions of the Nile, we should not understand this difference between physical environment and culture as a static division between preset, nonhuman nature and reactive, human society. Rivers are also capable of reacting to the world and remaking it as they see fit.

Since Herodotus says that the flow of the Nile is “different in nature” (2.35.2: physin alloiēn)—presumably different from other rivers—and “contrary in nature” (2.19.3: empalin pephukenai), we might assume that its actions are unique. But Herodotus elsewhere clarifies that other rivers give gifts as well:

τῶν γὰρ ταῦτα τὰ χωρία προσχωσάντων ποταμῶν ἑνὶ τῶν στομάτων τοῦ Νείλου, ἑόντος πενταστόμου, οὐδεὶς αὐτῶν πλήθεος πέρι ἄξιος συμβληθῆναί ἐστι. Εἰσὶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι ποταμοί, οὐ κατὰ τὸν Νεῖλον ἐόντες μεγάθεα, οἵτινες ἔργα ἀποδεξάμενοι μεγάλα εἰσί· τῶν ἐγὼ φράσαι ἔχω οὐνόματα καὶ ἄλλων καὶ οὐκ ἥκιστα Ἀχελῴου, ὃς ῥέων δι’ Ἀκαρνανίης καὶ ἐξιεὶς ἐς θάλασσαν τῶν Ἐχινάδων νήσων τὰς ἡμισέας ἤδη ἤπειρον πεποίκε.

Of the rivers that have deposited these lands, none is worthy of being compared for greatness with even one of the mouths of the Nile, which has five. But there are other rivers, none as enormous as the Nile, which have displayed great works (erga apodexamenoi megala). I could recite the names of others, but not least of these is the Achelōos, which flowing through Akarnania and terminating in the sea has already made half of the Echinades islands into mainland. (Hdt. 2.10.2–3)

While the Nile is preeminent in its benefaction, rivers characteristically act on and create the lands that Greeks are used to taking for granted. This process is ongoing and, Herodotus argues, historically significant. By calling the actions of even these minor rivers erga megala, Herodotus ties them explicitly to the erga megala he sets out to record in the proem and correlates the “displays” (1.1: apodechthenta; 2.10: apodexamenoi) of both humans and rivers. Rivers are agents who can “will” (2.11: ethelēsei) and “work hard” (2.11: ergatikou), and whose erga are worthy of the historian’s attention.⁵³

In Diodorus, the Nile has even greater powers. Diodorus’s Egyptian informants say:

κατὰ τὴν ἐξ ἀρχῆς τῶν ὅλων γένεσιν πρώτους ἀνθρώπους γενέσθαι κατὰ τὴν Αἴγυπτον διά τε τὴν εὐκρασίαν τῆς χώρας καὶ διὰ τὴν φύσιν τοῦ Νείλου. τοῦτον γὰρ πολύγονον ὄντα καὶ τὰς τροφὰς αὐτοφυεῖς παρεχόμενον ῥᾳδίως ἐκτρέφειν τὰ ζωογονηθέντα· τήν τε γὰρ τοῦ καλάμου ῥίζαν καὶ τὸν λωτόν, ἔτι δὲ τὸν Αἰγύπτιον κύαμον καὶ τὸ καλούμενον κορσαῖον καὶ πολλὰ τοιαῦθ’ ἕτερα τροφὴν ἑτοίμην παρέχεσθαι τῷ γένει.

In the beginning, during the creation of the universe, human beings first came into existence in Egypt because of the mildness and nature (physis) of the Nile. For being very productive and providing nourishment on its own, it easily supported the creatures that had come to be. For the root of the reed and the lotus, and the Egyptian bean and the korsaion, as it is called, and many other plants such as these provide nourishment to the race of human beings. (Diod. Sic. 1.10.1)

This passage ties human beings to other animals and elevates the importance of the Nile to human life. Building on the Egyptians’ cosmology, Diodorus puts the Nile in parallel with human heroes, like Isis, Osiris, and Heracles, later immortalized for their great gifts to humankind. The Nile, Diodorus says, “in general surpasses all other rivers in the world in providing benefits to human beings.”⁵⁴ Like human rulers in the Library, Diodorus’s rivers compete with one another in benefaction and surpass those that, as we have seen, extract human labor without providing sufficient reward.⁵⁵ As one of the best benefactors, the Nile provides both “ease in toil” (tois men ergois eukopian) and “profit” (1.36.4: lusiteleian).

Yet like a human being, the Nile can also make mistakes. Although the land the Nile provides and irrigates is a great gift, Herodotus observes that this very beneficence may one day be the Egyptians’ undoing:

Εἴ σφι θέλοι, ὡς καὶ πρότερον εἶπον, ἡ χώρη ἡ ἔνερθε Μέμφιος (αὕτη γάρ ἐστι ἡ αὐξανομένη) κατὰ λόγον τοῦ παροιχομένου χρόνου ἐς ὕψος αὐξάνεσθαι, ἄλλο τι ἢ οἱ ταύτῃ οἰκέοντες Αἰγυπτίων πεινήσουσι, εἰ μήτε γε ὕσεταί σφι ἡ χώρη μήτε ὁ ποταμὸς οἷός τε ἔσται ἐς τὰς ἀρούρας ὑπερβαίνειν.

If, as I have said before, the land below Memphis (which is now increasing) should rise at the same rate as in the past, how could those living in Egypt not starve, provided that the land is not watered by rain nor the river able to irrigate the fields? (Hdt. 2.14)

The Nile’s best feature, its ability to provide land and irrigate it, will one day (Herodotus surmises) lead the Nile to create more land than it can water, causing drought and famine. Unlike animals in the Histories, rivers are not automatically regulated by the gods (7.10, 3.108).⁵⁶ Instead, they are judged by their effects on the human community; human well-being determines whether the Nile has crossed natural boundaries.

When rivers transgress, human beings are responsible for taming their excesses. Min, Egypt’s first king, dams and diverts the Nile to protect Memphis from being overwatered (Hdt. 2.99). When the river “steals” (Hdt. 2.109.2: pareloito; cf. Diod. Sic. 1.81.2) someone’s allotted land, the Egyptians respond by inventing the art of land surveying (Hdt. 2.109.3: geōmetriē). Should the Nile create more land than it can irrigate, as Herodotus fears, perhaps a ruler will build erga to keep the Nile within bounds. Diodorus reports this very eventuality: Uchoreus, Egyptian king and founder of Memphis, builds lakes and mounds to protect the people and their livestock from the Nile’s floods (1.50.5) and digs canals to increase the Nile’s “usefulness” (1.63.1: euchrēstian). There is no neutral “background” in which only human beings “artificially” intervene. Instead, the tug of war between humans and the Nile is ongoing, producing works upon works for the historian and the human community.

Both Herodotus and Diodorus highlight rivers, especially the Nile, in their accounts of the making of the world. In one sense, this is not surprising. The Greeks considered rivers divine, although evidence for cult activity is scarce.⁵⁷ As Brooke Holmes has shown, the river Scamander in Homer’s Iliad is a powerful force, a model to which Herodotus and Diodorus may have looked in their representations of the Nile. Egyptian informants also may have shaped Greek writers’ understanding of rivers.⁵⁸ Until Roman conquest, the Egyptians did not worship the river itself but rather its inundation, Hapi.⁵⁹ In Egyptian theology, human kings joined Hapi in the regular re-creation of the world by building temples, which represented earth.⁶⁰ Although primordial waters are common images in world cultures, kings’ and the Nile’s ongoing participation in creation offered Herodotus and Diodorus a model for describing how humans and rivers interact.⁶¹

Egyptian texts like the Hymn to the Nile, in circulation at least by the New Kingdom period (1550–1069 BCE), credit the river with both Egypt’s natural abundance and cultural achievements.⁶² Without Hapi, the god of the Nile flood, there are

No raw goods for finishing handwork,

no cloth for fashioning clothes,

No decking out offspring of rich men,

no shadowing beautiful eyes,

For lack of him, the trees all in ruins

—no perfumes to linger on anyone.

(9.7–12)⁶³

Egyptian texts emphasize that the Nile could be both creative and destructive, and that it was the job of the king, as the enforcer of Ma’at, the principle of order, to regulate the Nile on behalf of the Egyptian people.⁶⁴ Kings commonly commemorated their role in opening canals and their nilometers, devices for measuring the Nile floods, were famous in Greece and Rome.⁶⁵ Kings were responsible for rebuilding if the Nile floods damaged Egyptian settlements, and they claimed to turn the destructive power of the Nile against Egypt’s enemies.⁶⁶ Sometimes the destruction could not be overcome; when the Nile’s Pelusiac branch filled with silt, the capital city of the nineteenth dynasty (1292–1189 BCE), Pi-Ramesse, had to be permanently abandoned.⁶⁷ The Egyptian sources that Herodotus and Diodorus drew upon lived with the Nile’s annual gift as well as its potential for violence.

Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts reflect a portrait of royal and Nilotic action consistent with what we find in Egyptian literature. Like Egyptian texts, the Histories and Library document the ongoing process of creation as it is carried out by rulers and rivers; indeed, in both Greek and Egyptian texts it is often the ruler’s job to keep rivers in line. The process of creation is neither pregiven nor a pure cultural construct. Instead, both Nile and king make the world and are judged by how their actions benefit the Egyptian people.

HOW BOUNDARIES COME TO MATTER

Although Herodotus and Diodorus do not present humans intervening artificially in an otherwise fixed landscape, neither are their worlds constantly in flux. Rulers and rivers take concrete actions that remake the world, which persists until it is remade again. When Greek historians document erga, they reveal and document the flexibility of the world’s land- and waterscapes and simultaneously create a stable world, fixed at the time of writing or performance, for their readers to apprehend.⁶⁸ In particular, by freighting certain boundaries with narrative meaning, they materialize these boundaries as fixed and “natural,” and their transgression, for example, Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont, as unnatural. And because different historians see the world differently and draw on different erga, their histories result in different demarcations of the “natural.”

We can see how different boundaries materialize in Herodotus’s account of his predecessors and how they divide the world.⁶⁹ In Herodotus’s text, the borders between continents are a matter of debate, and he takes time to critique the Ionian Greek division of the world into Europe, Asia, and Libya, with the Nile dividing Libya from Asia (2.16). This schema is absurd, Herodotus argues, because it leaves Egypt split between continents. Instead, he claims that Libya and Asia are divided by “the boundaries of the Egyptians” (2.17.1: tous Aiguptiōn orous), and that Egypt is all the land “inhabited by the Egyptians” (2.17.1: hupo tōn Aiguptiōn). Herodotus returns to this critique in book 4, disparaging the Ionians threefold division of continents and asserting instead that the earth is “one” (4.45.2: miēi), but concluding that he will abide by their “conventions” (4.45.5: toisi . . . nomizomenoisi).

This critique, especially in book 4, has led scholars to conclude that Herodotus considers continental divisions “mere” conventions that bind him against his will.⁷⁰ While Herodotus is certainly troubled by the process that has led to the threefold division, and especially the naming of continents, he nevertheless asserts his own definition of continental borders. In book 2, he says that the “borders of the Egyptians” divide Egypt from the other continents, defining nations by the people who inhabit them. Yet we also know, from his description of the Nile’s activity, that the human population of Egypt depends on the Nile’s extent and the gift of the earth that it provides and irrigates (2.11). The borders of the Egyptians define Egypt, but the Nile has shaped how far the Egyptians extend. Neither human convention nor riverine agency has made Egypt on its own.⁷¹ Instead, Herodotus’s inquiry (historia) materializes Egypt as a flexible cocreation of the Nile and the Egyptian people.

The relationship between historia and erga accords with Karen Barad’s philosophy, which explains how different accounts of the world demarcate boundaries between objects. One of Barad’s most famous examples is a fetus as it is being imaged by ultrasound. Whereas we are used to speaking of the fetus as an object separate from the pregnant body and the ultrasound that sees it, Barad argues that fetus and ultrasound are an inextricable phenomenon. By seeing the fetus through the apparatus of the ultrasound, the fetus emerges as an object with boundaries that can be demarcated from the rest of the pregnant body. As Barad says, “The transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is ‘part of’ the body it images.”⁷² For Herodotus and Barad, agencies of observation, including the practice of history, are inextricable from the world they would seem to “peer innocently” at.

If there is no longer a world that we see and know from a distance, but rather one whose borders come into being through our interaction with and observation of them, then, as Barad argues, humans are much more accountable to the rest of the universe than we have usually realized. Because we make the world we seek to know, every act of knowledge making is also an ethical act. When the transducer “sees” the fetus, it separates the fetus from surrounding tissue and renders that tissue mere background. This can lead to the humanization of fetuses and the dehumanization of pregnant people, two morally weighty outcomes. When Herodotus documents Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont and gives it a “negative moral charge,” he naturalizes the boundary between Europe and Asia and casts the manner in which Xerxes yokes the continents as a transgression.⁷³ On the other hand, when we learn from Diodorus that Semiramis’s huge and expensive bridge, so similar to Xerxes’s, ensures her salvation, the border between India and Assyria “matters” less, in both senses of the word: it is less significant and less real.⁷⁴ Both Herodotus and Diodorus are fundamentally interested not in a given geographical morality but in the emerging accountability of rulers, rivers, and other beings to the worlds they make.⁷⁵

If the world can be made and remade, then human interventions must be measured by some other standard than a fixed sense of the natural. As we have seen, Herodotus and especially Diodorus do not conclude that humans (and others) can therefore intervene in the world however they wish; rather, they evaluate erga by their benefit to human beings. This is how they hold the agencies of the world accountable to the worlds they make. But Barad would say, and I agree, that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s standard is insufficient. The more humans see ourselves as cocreators with other beings, the more we realize our interdependence with those beings, the more we should understand that their benefit and ours cannot be easily separated. If the Nile has given human beings gifts, humans should provide for the other creatures of the Nile. Hints of such reciprocal relationships are explored in chapters 4 and 5.

This chapter has considered the role of historia and erga in the production of continents, countries, monuments, and transgressions, especially in Herodotus’s Histories. Chapter 3 turns to the boundaries of another set of categories: men versus women and humans versus animals. And now it is Diodorus’s turn to shine, for while Herodotus takes these divisions more or less for granted, Diodorus demonstrates their contingency and the role of women in remaking them.