Herodotus, Histories 1.11.2 · 1.11.2
"Two roads lie before you"
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Herodotus — ὡς δὲ ὁ Γύγης ἀπίκετο, ἔλεγε ἡ γυνὴ τάδε.
The Queen — νῦν τοι δυῶν ὁδῶν παρεουσέων Γύγη δίδωμι αἵρεσιν, ὁκοτέρην βούλεαι τραπέσθαι. ἢ γὰρ Κανδαύλεα ἀποκτείνας ἐμέ τε καὶ τὴν βασιληίην ἔχε τὴν Λυδῶν, ἢ αὐτόν σε αὐτίκα οὕτω ἀποθνήσκειν δεῖ, ὡς ἂν μὴ πάντα πειθόμενος Κανδαύλῃ τοῦ λοιποῦ ἴδῃς τὰ μή σε δεῖ.
When Gyges arrived, the woman said this: "Now, Gyges, there are two roads before you, and I give you the choice which one you wish to take. Either kill Candaules and take me and the kingdom of the Lydians, or you yourself must die here and now, so that you may never again obey Candaules in everything and see what you should not."
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The setting
The queen speaks. Herodotus never gives her a name.
A note on this passage
The queen offers Gyges an hairesis, a "choice," literally a taking. Later Greek used the same word for the choice of a philosophy, then for a school or sect, and the Church turned it into "heresy," the opinion one chooses against the rest. Here it is as bare as it will ever be: two roads, and no third.
She also names his crime with precision. It is not, in her words, the lust of looking or the insult to her. It is that he might go on "obeying Candaules in everything" and "seeing what he should not." The two faults are one fault: a servant who would do anything his master asked, including look. The woman who was the object of everyone's gaze in the last chapter is now the only one in the story giving orders. Herodotus never tells us her name; later writers gave her several.
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