as James Romm says, Herodotus draws on “tragic” language associating Xerxes’s punishment of the Hellespont with retributive justice (especially through allusions to a parallel scene in Aeschylus’s Persians), he employs a “more sophisticated, sophiē-reverencing impulse” that values human ingenuity (sophiē) when he describes Xerxes’s bridge.8
Most recently, Katherine Clarke has thoroughly examined Herodotus’s representation of land- and waterscapes, concluding that “geographical space . . . is an active player in the narrative” of the Histories and that it serves to characterize different players in the Greco-Persian wars.9 She demonstrates that the particular judgments of Herodotus’s text are context specific and complicated by focalization, the point of view from which human interventions are evaluated. Sometimes, as in the case of Xerxes, Herodotus himself condemns a work of human engineering; in others, this judgment is reported by Herodotus but attributed to his informants. For example, it is the Egyptians who disapprove of King Cheops’s pyramid, rather than Herodotus himself.10
Since Clarke has so persuasively laid out an alternative to the standard, totalizing view of “natural” boundaries in Herodotus’s text, this chapter focuses instead on the environmental lessons that readers can learn from his inquiry into how humans and other beings have changed the world over time. Xerxes’s violation of the Hellespont has the power to characterize him because Greeks do in fact worry about whether or not humans should intervene in land- and waterscapes, but this worry cannot be reduced to a blanket prescription against crossing rivers, building bridges, or undertaking related projects. The negative attention Herodotus draws to Xerxes’s interactions with the Hellespont throws into contrast the engineering works that he admires and invites readers to meditate on the difference (if any) between them.11
Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s record of geographical change reveals that both humans and other beings, especially rivers, are responsible for remaking land- and waterscapes, and that they are judged on equal terms for how they change the world. In what follows, I argue four points. First, Herodotus and Diodorus are predisposed to positively value marvelous works (erga), not only because erga impress them and could be expected to delight readers, but also because they depend on these works for information about earlier centuries. Second, reading Xerxes’s bridge alongside other erga reveals that Herodotus does in fact place limits on human ingenuity, limits made more explicit by Diodorus. Both authors value engineering projects that benefit the ruled while immortalizing the ruler. Third, what we see in Herodotus and Diodorus is not the crossing of predetermined “natural” boundaries, but a demonstration of how those boundaries are made and can be remade by both humans and other beings. Fourth, the historian is not a passive observer of these boundaries-in-the-making, but a cocreator of them.
THE HISTORIAN COMPLICIT
Herodotus and other historians are predisposed to admire works of engineering because they depend on them for information about the past. As Herodotus tells us in the opening lines of the Histories, he has recorded the display (apodeixis) of his inquiry “in order that the things done by people are not lost in time, and that great and amazing works (erga megala te kai thōmasta), some displayed (apodechthenta) by Greeks and some non-Greeks not be forgotten, in particular the cause of their conflict with one another” (1.1).12 While Herodotus emphasizes his role in preserving erga, the common language of display also underscores the similarities between his endeavor and those who left erga behind. His accomplishment depends on those it records. It is a great work composed of other great works.13
Like the semantics of the English word work, erga can denote intangible achievements as well as tangible objects, “the finished product of an activity.”14 For example, the Greek victory over the Persians is an intangible ergon, but the Histories also describes many concrete works. These erga may have been lost in original physical form, but Herodotus’s record ensures their survival in text, and these tangible erga in turn motivate large sections of Herodotus’s narrative. In book 3, for example, Herodotus explains that he “has gone on so long about the Samians because they accomplished the three greatest works of all the Greeks,” a tunnel for piping water into town, a harbor mole, and the largest temple he has ever seen.15 These objects prove the stories Herodotus relates and provide moments of pause for lush, ekphrastic description.16 Lands that lack human beings lack information, but monuments can testify even in the absence of human informants.17
Objects “worthy of mention” can be as small as a dedication, if it is expensive enough (e.g., the six golden bowls of Gyges; 1.14), but are often very large and qualify as “monuments” (mnēmosuna). These monumental works include tombs, pillars and statues, fortresses, and even whole cities.18 The Greek word for monument, mnēmosunon, is closely related to the word for memory (mnēmosunē), like the English memorial. Monuments commemorate the past and are for historians the material basis of their own creation. Commensurate with their size and expense, mnēmosuna consume vast quantities of natural resources, especially stone and precious metals, but Herodotus (unlike Diodorus, as discussed later in this chapter) does not dwell on this fact.19
Herodotus ties one of these monuments directly to his own authorial achievement. The Egyptian king Moeris is known to the Egyptian priests for building pyramids, the forecourt of a temple, and an artificial lake (2.101). Herodotus calls these works the ergōn apodeixis, the “display of works” promised to readers in the proem as both the form and content of his inquiry. Later on, he says that Moeris’s lake is a thōma, “marvel” (2.149), even more closely identifying it with the “great and marvelous works” (1.1: erga megala te kai thōmasta) he set out to record. Herodotus’s experience of Moeris’s labyrinth, which he wanders through in amazement and claims (ironically) is beyond his power of description (2.148: ton egō ēdē eidon logou mezō), epitomizes his attitude to great works. The labyrinth implicates him both literally and figuratively, enfolding his body and challenging him to surpass its achievement.20
Following Herodotus’s lead, Diodorus uses an architectural metaphor to draw out the competitive relationship between the erga of past rulers and his own work:
τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλα μνημεῖα διαμένει χρόνον ὀλίγον, ὑπὸ πολλῶν ἀναιρούμενα περιστάσεων, ἡ δὲ τῆς ἱστορίας δύναμις ἐπὶ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην διήκουσα τὸν πάντα τἄλλα λυμαινόμενον χρόνον ἔχει φύλακα τῆς αἰωνίου παραδόσεως τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις.
For these other monuments (mnēmeia) remain but a little while, being uprooted by many circumstances, but the power of history (historia), extending over the whole world, possesses in time—which destroys everything else—a guardian for ensuring perpetual transmission to posterity. (Diod. Sic. 1.2.5)21
Diodorus disparages people’s desire to leave behind physical memorials rather than memorials of virtue, but he too preserves these “monuments of stone” (10.12.2).
Like Herodotus’s mnēmosuna, Diodorus’s semantically equivalent mnēmeia often radically transform land- and waterscapes. Semiramis, the queen of Assyria, cuts through a mountain to make an “immortal memorial” for herself (2.13.5: athanaton mnēmeion), and the Roman censor Appius Claudius levels heights and fills valleys for the same purpose (20.36.2). When these monuments endure, they are also useful to the historian. As Diodorus comments, Semiramis’s memory benefits from the many memorials she left in her wake (2.14.1). Diodorus’s monument of these monuments, the Library, claims to be the ultimate memorial. But his achievement
