Herodotus, Histories 1.59.4 · 1.59.4
The wounded mules
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τρωματίσας ἑωυτόν τε καὶ ἡμιόνους ἤλασε ἐς τὴν ἀγορὴν τὸ ζεῦγος ὡς ἐκπεφευγὼς τοὺς ἐχθρούς, οἵ μιν ἐλαύνοντα ἐς ἀγρὸν ἠθέλησαν ἀπολέσαι δῆθεν, ἐδέετό τε τοῦ δήμου φυλακῆς τινος πρὸς αὐτοῦ κυρῆσαι, πρότερον εὐδοκιμήσας ἐν τῇ πρὸς Μεγαρέας γενομένῃ στρατηγίῃ, Νίσαιάν τε ἑλὼν καὶ ἄλλα ἀποδεξάμενος μεγάλα ἔργα.
Having wounded himself and his mules, he drove the carriage into the marketplace as if he had escaped his enemies, who, he claimed, had wanted to kill him as he was driving out to the country; and he begged the people to grant him some guard for himself, having before this won fame in the campaign against the Megarians, when he took Nisaea and performed other great deeds.
Word by word
The setting
Peisistratus stages an attack on himself: he wounds himself and his mules, drives into the marketplace claiming his enemies ambushed him, and asks the people for a bodyguard, trading on his earlier fame as a general against Megara.
A note on this passage
The staging is deliberate down to the detail Herodotus singles out: trōmatisas, "having wounded," covers both the man and the mules, since a lone cut on Peisistratus could be an accident but blood on the animals too makes the ambush look real. He drives the zeugos, the yoked team, straight into the agorēn, the one place in Athens guaranteed to be full of witnesses, and performs panic for an audience. Herodotus will not let the performance stand unquestioned: dēthen, a small Ionic word that means roughly "or so he said," slides into the sentence right where the enemies' murder plot is described, Herodotus's own way of telling the reader not to believe a word of it.
The request that follows is carefully built on real credit: before this trick, Peisistratus had genuinely eudokimēsas, "won fame," taking Nisaian, the port of Megara, in an actual war. That history is not invented, which is exactly what makes the invented ambush effective, a proven general asking for protection sounds like prudence, not grasping. He is not asking to rule; he is asking for a few guards, the smallest possible request from a man the city already trusts, and that is precisely how the trap is built to work.
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