Herodotus, Histories 1.60.5 · 1.60.5
Athena's own gift
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Heralds — ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, δέκεσθε ἀγαθῷ νόῳ Πεισίστρατον, τὸν αὐτὴ ἡ Ἀηθναίη τιμήσασα ἀνθρώπων μάλιστα κατάγει ἐς τὴν ἑωυτῆς ἀκρόπολιν. οἳ μὲν δὴ ταῦτα διαφοιτέοντες ἔλεγον· αὐτίκα δὲ ἔς τε τοὺς δήμους φάτις ἀπίκετο ὡς Ἀθηναίη Πεισίστρατον κατάγει, καὶ οἱ ἐν τῷ ἄστεϊ πειθόμενοι τὴν γυναῖκα εἶναι αὐτὴν τὴν θεὸν προσεύχοντό τε τὴν ἄνθρωπον καὶ ἐδέκοντο Πεισίστρατον.
O Athenians, receive Peisistratus with good will, whom Athena herself, having honored him most of men, is bringing back to her own acropolis. So they went about saying this, and at once a report came to the demes that Athena was bringing Peisistratus back, and those in the city, believing the woman to be the goddess herself, prayed to the mortal woman and received Peisistratus.
Word by word
The setting
The heralds' proclamation, and the city's credulous response.
A note on this passage
The proclamation is a small masterpiece of theater, and Herodotus gives it to us word for word: hēn autē hē Athēnaiē timēsasa, "whom Athena herself, having honored him." The verb katagei, "is bringing back," sits in the present tense, as if the goddess is doing it right now, before everyone's eyes, in the chariot rolling toward them. Nothing in the proclamation says Phye is a disguise; everything in its grammar invites the crowd to read the woman in armor as the deed of the goddess herself.
And they do. Peithomenoi tēn gynaika einai autēn tēn theon, "believing the woman to be the goddess herself," the city of Athens, Herodotus has just told us, the Greeks foremost in cleverness, prays to a costumed woman, prosēuchonto tēn anthrōpon, "they prayed to the human being." The sentence places theon and anthrōpon almost back to back, goddess and mortal in the same breath, so the reader cannot miss the gap Herodotus is pointing at between what Athens believed it saw and what was standing in the chariot.
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