Herodotus, Histories 1.60.2 · 1.60.2

Herodotus gives Megacles a verb that paints the whole situation, perielaunomenos, "driven around and about," the same family of word used for driving cattle or chariots, now applied to a man pushed back and forth by his own faction fight. Beaten down by tēi stasi, "the feuding" he helped create, he reaches for the one tool left: an alliance by marriage, sealed through epekērykeueto, "he sent a herald," the formal, almost diplomatic channel a city-state would use with a foreign power, not with a man it had just expelled.

The offer itself is bluntly transactional: ei bouloito, "whether he wished," to have the daughter gynaika, "as wife," epi tēi tyrannidi, "on condition of the tyranny." The marriage is not a reward for the marriage's sake; it is the price of restoration, stated as plainly as a contract clause. Herodotus has now shown two different roads to power in two sections, a staged attack followed by a vote, and a backroom deal sealed with a daughter, and the second will prove just as fragile as the first.

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