his daughter into sex work to raise funds for the project. She does as ordered (tēn . . . tachthenta prēssesthai), but asks each of the men for a tip. With the blocks they give her she builds her own pyramid, making sure that no one forgets her role in Cheops’s marvel (2.126).
Katherine Clarke notes that Cheops’s story is told from the perspective of Herodotus’s Egyptian informants, and that Herodotus does not himself judge Cheops for enslaving them.35 This may reflect his admiration for Cheops’s erga and his dependence on them for information about the world, but it also foregrounds the personal toll the pyramids have taken on the Egyptian people. In particular, this episode may reflect ideas passed among Herodotus’s lower-class informants.36 Like the stories Sara Forsdyke documents in her study of ancient Greek popular ideology, the tale of Cheops’s daughter celebrates an enslaved person’s wit at the expense of her enslaver. Her cunning does not put Cheops’s daughter in her father’s place but does allow her to enjoy some of the distinction he has accrued to himself by enslaving her. In building her own pyramid with materials siphoned from her father’s project, she criticizes the inequity between enslavers and enslaved without overturning the social order.37 The story of Cheops’s daughter also embodies the kind of world making most dear to Herodotus. While Cheops’s pyramids have come at a great cost to his people, his daughter’s pyramid memorializes her without adding to others’ suffering, since she uses blocks that have already been quarried and transported.38 She capitalizes on a bad situation to memorialize her experience and simultaneously provides Herodotus with evidence of the past.
Herodotus uses the earth- and waterworks of the world’s rulers to reflect on several dynamics: risking divine wrath versus winning immortal reward, the motivations that lead people to intervene effectively in land- and waterscapes and those that lead them to ruin, and the costs and benefits of these interventions for the ruled. Diodorus develops the last of these dynamics into a consistent principle: the best rulers undertake erga that simultaneously enhance themselves and benefit others.
BENEFACTIONS
Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus regularly evaluates the costs and benefits of marvelous works. The hanging gardens of Babylon were requested of an Assyrian king by a woman who missed the landscape of her Persian home and wanted the king to re-create it “with the ingenuity of a garden” (2.10.1: dia tēs tou phutourgeiou philotechnias). Diodorus comments that the gardens were very expensive (2.10.4: polutelōs), but also “entranced those beholding” them (2.10.6: tous theōmenous psychagōgēsai). The pleasure gardens (paradeisa) that the Assyrian queen Semiramis constructs, on the other hand, are located on a high plateau, which she views (apetheōrei) from an even higher vantage point, ensconced in buildings “expensive and made to satisfy her desire for luxury” (2.13.3: polutelē pros truphēn epoiēsen). Unlike the hanging gardens of Babylon, which were available to many onlookers, Semiramis designs these gardens for her sole enjoyment. Diodorus goes on to observe that she ensures her dominance in the regime, as in this place, by refusing to remarry after her husband’s death, instead having sex with a series of men who are made to disappear (2.13.4: ēphanize). This extreme self-interest and self-absorption mirrors Cheops’s obsession with building a pyramid and the people he sacrifices to indulge it, as described in the Histories.
Diodorus’s descriptions of mining, on the other hand, showcase mutual benefactions. While the bitumen quarried in Babylonia is available “for the people to extract freely” (2.12.1: ton laon epi ton topon apheidōs aruesthai), the Nubian gold mines are worked by convicted criminals, the falsely accused, and prisoners of war.39 According to Diodorus, “much gold is acquired with much suffering and expense” (3.12.1: sunagomenou pollou pollēi kakopatheiai te kai dapanē), pollou pollēi directly contrasting the quantity of gold with the suffering it causes. Although elsewhere Diodorus uses the phrase “with much suffering and expense” and others like it to index, with some admiration, the trouble incurred to achieve greatness, it has a more poignant meaning in his detailed description of the Nubian miners’ suffering.40 Diodorus notes that the Egyptians enslave not only prisoners of war and criminals, but also those accused unjustly (adikois diabolais), and punish their families as well. Diodorus pays particular attention to these miners, describing them in unusual detail over the course of several sections. He notes the work that each age group performs as well as the gendered division of labor. This interest is technical but also illustrates his larger point that the demands of mining cause the Nubians immense pain:
προσούσης δ’ ἅπασιν ἀθεραπευσίας σώματος καὶ τῆς τὴν αἰδῶ περιστελλούσης ἐσθῆτος μὴ προσούσης, οὐκ ἔστιν ὃς ἰδὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐλεήσειε τοὺς ἀκληροῦντας διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ταλαιπωρίας.
Because they have no way to care for their bodies or clothing to cover their shame, there is not anyone who would see them and not pity the poor things because of their overwhelming hardship. (Diod. Sic. 3.13.2–3)
Diodorus’s ethnography of the Nubian miners becomes oddly personal, forcing readers to imagine themselves in the position of the compassionate onlooker. Readers who take this role seriously will not only pity the Nubians but disapprove of the Egyptians, who extract gold at such a high price to the miners.
Elsewhere Diodorus seems ambivalent about the trade-off between suffering and reward. Spanish silver mines depend on forced labor (5.38) and also involve the diversion of rivers (5.37.3), but Diodorus marvels at the screws (modeled after Archimedes’s) that allow miners in Spain to remove huge amounts of water, admiring “with what little work” (5.37.4: dia tēs tuchousēs ergasias) the screws operate. The screws, which save human labor, elevate the Spanish operation above the Nubian one.41 Readers of these stories are invited to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the erga they describe, with human suffering on one side of the balance and gain on the other. Diodorus does not go so far as to argue that workers should own the means of production, but he is alert to vast inequities between owners and workers. He favors erga that benefit both ruler and ruled.
Like the Spanish miners, Diodorus’s Assyrian queen Semiramis also rides the edge of the cost-benefit equation, often by redeeming projects for her sole benefit with those that benefit others:
παραγενηθεῖσα δ’ εἰς Ἐκβάτανα, πόλιν ἐν πεδίῳ κειμένην, κατεσκεύασεν ἐν αὐτῇ πολυτελῆ βασίλεια καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἐπιμέλειαν ἐποιήσατο τοῦ τόπου περιττοτέραν. ἀνύδρου γὰρ οὔσης τῆς πόλεως καὶ μηδαμοῦ σύνεγγυς ὑπαρχούσης πηγῆς, ἐποίησεν αὐτὴν πᾶσαν κατάρρυτον, ἐπαγαγοῦσα πλεῖστον καὶ κάλλιστον ὕδωρ μετὰ πολλῆς κακοπαθείας τε καὶ δαπάνης.
Having arrived at Ecbatana, a city that lies in the plain, she built there an expensive (polutelē) palace and in every other way paid rather a lot of attention (epimeleian) to the region. For since the city was without water and no spring existed nearby, she made it all well-watered by providing, with great suffering and expense, the purest water in abundance. (Diod. Sic. 2.13.5)
This project causes great pain and expense but also brings much-needed resources to the region and probably cements Semiramis’s hold on it. Most important, the attention (epimeleia) she pays her own pleasure and status is matched by her strategic attention to others.
Diodorus
