Herodotus, Histories 1.56.2 · 1.56.2

Croesus's search narrows to two cities, Sparta and Athens, and Herodotus immediately files them under a bigger pair of labels: Dōrikou, "Dorian," and Iōnikou, "Ionian." This is the oldest division Greeks used to describe themselves, older than any single city, and Herodotus treats it as simply true, a fact his own inquiries confirm rather than invent. Sparta and Athens are not just two strong cities to him; they stand as the living heads of the two great branches of the Greek-speaking world.

Then he goes one layer deeper, to Pelasgikon and Hellēnikon, the Pelasgian and the Hellenic ethnos, "people." One of them, he says, never moved, oudamēi kō exechōrēse, "had never anywhere yet gone out"; the other was polyplanēton, "much-wandering," karta, "exceedingly so." The contrast matters, because Herodotus is about to tell the story of that wandering people in the very next lines, migration after migration, and the moving one turns out to be the ancestor of the Dorians he has just named at Sparta. In his account, being Greek is partly a matter of how far your ancestors travelled before they finally stopped.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Herodotus, Histories — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese