her late husband Ninus, Semiramis is motivated by “a desire for great deeds and an ambition to surpass the fame of her predecessor.”42 Her palace in Babylon has “an advantage” (proeiche) over the old palace, cementing her legacy, but also uses amazing figural ornamentation that “offer variegated pleasures to those who gaze on them” (2.8.7: poikilēn psychagōgian parechomena tois theōmenois). Herodotus’s descriptions of engineering projects may have brought his readers pleasure, but Diodorus makes the pleasure of gazing on marvelous works concrete and explicit by imagining an audience within the text to consume them. Whereas Herodotus provides only glimpses of the Persian point of view, Diodorus makes the Assyrian public central to his evaluation of these works.43
Diodorus also pushes readers familiar with Herodotus to reevaluate the engineering projects of the Histories, especially Xerxes’s rebuilt bridge across the Hellespont. Like Xerxes, Semiramis seems headed toward disaster when she constructs a bridge to invade India:
ὁ μὲν τῶν Ἰνδῶν βασιλεὺς ἀπήγαγε τὴν δύναμιν ἀπὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ, προσποιούμενος μὲν ἀναχωρεῖν διὰ φόβον, τῇ δ’ ἀληθείᾳ βουλόμενος τοὺς πολεμίους προτρέψασθαι διαβῆναι τὸν ποταμόν. ἡ δὲ Σεμίραμις, κατὰ νοῦν αὐτῇ τῶν πραγμάτων προχωρούντων, ἔζευξε τὸν ποταμὸν κατασκευάσασα πολυτελῆ καὶ μεγάλην γέφυραν, δι’ ἧς ἅπασαν διακομίσασα τὴν δύναμιν.
The king of the Indians withdrew his force from the river, pretending to retreat out of fear, but in reality wanting to urge the enemy to cross the river. Since things were going according to her plan, Semiramis yoked the river by constructing a large, expensive bridge by which she got across her entire force. (Diod. Sic. 2.18.5–6)
Several elements of this story point to catastrophe: the Indians want Semiramis to cross, the bridge is “expensive,” and Semiramis is at the height of her power. Yet the bridge turns into an unexpected advantage when Semiramis decides to destroy it in the wake of her retreat. Although some of her men die in the stampede, the bridge kills an even greater number of Indians and provides Semiramis “great security” (2.19.9: pollēn asphaleian).44 This scene rewrites the drama of Herodotus book 8, in which Xerxes agonizes about whether and how to flee Greece (Hdt. 8.97) and the Greeks deliberate about whether to destroy his bridge and prevent his escape (8.109–10). Although Xerxes makes it across the bridge without Greek interference, his army has been ravaged by famine and disease (8.115) and crosses just in time; the bridge has already been damaged by another storm (8.117) and is gone by the time the Greeks arrive to destroy it (9.114). The bridge may save Xerxes’s life, but it does not prevent the Greeks’ pursuit. Instead, Xerxes’s desperate march to reach the bridge and what his men suffer along the way echo and confirm the mistake he has made in building it. While Xerxes’s bridge turns against him, Semiramis transforms her own bridge into a weapon.
Diodorus celebrates Semiramis and her risk taking because he sees doing little as a greater failing than attempting too much.45 Like Herodotus, Diodorus relies on building projects for information, but he goes beyond Herodotus by imagining what it would be like for a ruler to “play it safe.” One of these less ambitious rulers is Semiramis’s son Ninyas, whose reign Diodorus calls “peaceful” (eirēnikōs, 2.21.1). This is not a compliment. While Ninyas does not undertake any wars, neither does he accomplish anything for his people. He does not even allow them to see him, too busy with “luxury and sloth and never feeling pain or anxiety.”46 Semiramis loves luxury, but she also desires glory, and this propels her to change the world in ways that leave monuments for posterity and improve the lives of her people.
THE WORKS OF THE NILE
As I argue at the beginning of this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are disinclined to criticize works of engineering per se because they rely on them to craft their histories of the world. Instead, we have seen that these authors judge human intervention into land- and waterscapes individually by their motivations and effects. As I show next, both authors also represent rivers as changing the world around them and judge them by the same criteria that apply to human beings. While both authors are sensitive to whether and how rivers benefit the human community, Diodorus is again more explicit than Herodotus, noting rivers’ “benefaction” (euergesia) to human beings (Diod. Sic. 1.36.2).
The most prominent nonhuman actor in both Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s histories is the Nile, a river with a long hold on the Greek and Roman imagination.47 As Herodotus says at the beginning of book 2:
Δῆλα γὰρ δὴ καὶ μὴ προακούσαντι, ἰδόντι δέ, ὅστις γε σύνεσιν ἔχει, ὅτι <ἡ>Αἴγυπτος ἐς τὴν Ἕλληνες ναυτίλλονται ἐστὶ Αἰγυπτίοισι ἐπίκτητός τε γῆ καὶ δῶρον τοῦ ποταμοῦ.
It is clear even to one who has not heard [the Egyptian account] before, but sees for themselves (if they have any sense) that the “Egypt” to which the Greeks sail is land acquired (epiktētos) for the Egyptians and a gift (dōron) of the river. (Hdt. 2.5)48
αύτης ὦν τῆς χώρης τῆς εἰρημένης ἡ πολλή, κατά περ οἱ ἱρέες ἔλεγον, ἐδόκεε καὶ αὐτῷ μοι εἶναι ἐπίκτητος Αἰγυπτίοισι.
The majority of the land I have spoken about seems to me to be an additional acquisition (epiktētos) for the Egyptians, just as the priests say. (Hdt. 2.10.1)
This language of gift giving characterizes the Nile as a benefactor who has made Egypt for the Egyptians. “What was given from the river to the land and the land to the people” is correlated with the Egyptians’ periods of greatest fortune.49 In these passages, Herodotus points out that the land the Greeks take for granted as “Egypt” has a history. Although the Egyptians are elsewhere known as one of the oldest societies on Earth (2.2), and Herodotus is often criticized for representing them as static, his portrait of Egypt is a land that has changed under the Nile’s direction.50
The Nile’s actions in Egypt also illustrate the temporal dimension of physis and what Greek writers consider “natural.” Human action often succeeds the actions of other beings, like rivers; for example, as we saw earlier, Herodotus says that some of the Nile’s mouths have been “dug” (orukta) by humans, while others are “original” (ithagenea, 2.17.6), that is, dug by nonhuman forces. But the Nile has given land to Egypt that is epiktētos, “acquired in addition,” which posits an “Egypt” that predates the Nile’s actions. There is an “original” pre-Nilotic Egypt, just as the Nile had “original” prehuman mouths.51
A parallel passage in the Histories reveals additional connotations of epiktētos. In book 7, the Spartan king Demaratus explains that in Sparta, poverty is “native” (suntrophos), while valor is “acquired” (epaktos) through wisdom and law (7.102.1). Rosalind Thomas argues that Demaratus uses suntrophos and epaktos to contrast the effects of the Spartans’ physical environment with their cultural response.52 But set against the actions of the Nile, we should not understand this difference between physical environment and culture as a static division between preset, nonhuman nature and reactive,
