Herodotus, Histories 1.89.3 · 1.89.3
A ruse at the gates
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κάτισον τῶν δορυφόρων ἐπὶ πάσῃσι τῇσι πύλῃσι φυλάκους, οἳ λεγόντων πρὸς τοὺς ἐκφέροντας τὰ χρήματα ἀπαιρεόμενοι ὡς σφέα ἀναγκαίως ἔχει δεκατευθῆναι τῷ Διί. καὶ σύ τέ σφι οὐκ ἀπεχθήσεαι βίῃ ἀπαιρεόμενος τὰ χρήματα, καὶ ἐκεῖνοι συγγνόντες ποιέειν σε δίκαια ἑκόντες προήσουσι.
Station some of your spearmen as guards at every gate, to say to those carrying the goods out, as they seize them, that it must be tithed to Zeus. In this way you will not be hated by them for taking the goods by force, and they, granting that you are doing a just thing, will give them up willingly.
Word by word
The setting
Croesus, saved from the pyre, has just told Cyrus that the plundering soldiers are stripping away wealth that is now Cyrus's own, not his. Cyrus asked what to do; this is the end of Croesus's answer.
A note on this passage
Croesus's plan is theater, and he knows it. Apaireomenoi, "taking for themselves," is the very word for what the guards do to the goods at the gate, and it is also, two lines later, the word for what Cyrus would otherwise be doing by force, biē apaireomenos. The only thing that changes between the two acts is the story told about them: one is seizure, the other is a tithe owed to Zeus. Croesus, a king who has just watched his own city taken as spoil, understands exactly how a crowd can be made to feel virtuous about losing what it has.
The mechanism he proposes turns on synnontes, "granting" or "recognizing": the soldiers are not fooled so much as given a reason to agree. If they believe they are doing a dikaion, "a just thing," they will let the goods go hekontes, "willingly," and Cyrus keeps both the wealth and the men's goodwill. It is advice from a man who built an empire on gold and lost it, telling his conqueror how to keep what gold he has left.
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