Herodotus, Histories 1.10.2 · 1.10.2

Herodotus switches into the present tense for the turn: kai hē gynē eporāi min exionta, "and the woman sees him going out." The sudden present puts us in the room at the instant it happens, and it is the one thing Candaules said would not happen. Then comes the sentence the story has been built to deliver. The king had promised that she would not even learn (mathein) she was seen (1.9.1). Now she learns (mathousa) exactly what her husband did, and "did not seem to have learned" (oute edoxe mathein). Herodotus uses the king's own verb twice, once for what she knows and once for what she lets him think.

Her silence is not shock. It is strategy, and the last words say so: en noōi echousa tisesthai, "keeping in mind to make him pay." Tisis, repayment, retribution, is one of the engines of the whole Histories. The first chapters are a ledger of women seized and paid back, and this story ends the same way: when Gyges takes the throne, the Pythia at Delphi warns that tisis for the old royal house will come on Gyges' fifth descendant (1.13). That descendant is Croesus.

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