Herodotus, Histories 1.24.3 · 1.24.3
"Kill yourself, or jump"
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οὔκων δὴ πείθειν αὐτὸν τούτοισι, ἀλλὰ κελεύειν τοὺς πορθμέας ἢ αὐτὸν διαχρᾶσθαί μιν, ὡς ἂν ταφῆς ἐν γῇ τύχῃ, ἢ ἐκπηδᾶν ἐς τὴν θάλασσαν τὴν ταχίστην·
He could not persuade them with this; instead the sailors ordered him either to kill himself, so that he might have a burial on land, or to leap into the sea at once.
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The sailors refuse the bargain and offer him two ways to die.
A note on this passage
The sailors' offer has a grim courtesy in it. If Arion kills himself on board, they will give him <em>taphē en gēi</em>, "burial in earth." If he jumps, he gets none. To a Greek audience that was not a small difference. In Homer the ghost of Patroclus cannot cross into Hades until his body is burned, and in the Odyssey the shade of Elpenor begs Odysseus to go back and bury him. An unburied death at sea was the worst kind.
So the murderers present themselves as offering a kindness, and Herodotus reports it flatly, still inside the "they say." The two choices echo the queen's offer to Gyges a few chapters earlier: two roads, and death at the end of both. This time the one who is forced to choose will find a third way.
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