For Classicists and Egyptologists alike, the third book of Herodotus’ Histories tends to exist in the shadow of Book 2’s tour of Egypt’s marvels – excepting, perhaps, the garish enormities ascribed to Cambyses, ‘mad king’ par excellence. Fascination with his behaviour, however, has often produced more heat than light, a disparity that this volume (mostly stemming from a 2017 workshop in Heidelberg entitled ‘Religion, Violence, and Interaction? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Herodotus’ Narrative on Cambyses’) seeks to rectify. The ‘interdisciplinary experiment’ (p. 10) promised for this four-part collection is intended to confront the numerous knowledge gaps between Herodotus’ unhinged Cambyses and a lacunose historical record. While some of its findings could be further consolidated, this enterprise is largely successful in its clear-eyed source criticism, offering a template for future work on the Histories’ intricacies.
In the first section, focused on Herodotus’ text, E. Irwin imbues with fresh relevance a rewarding hermeneutic for its interpretation – the mirror held before the Histories’ readers. Because Herodotus conjures an ahistorical Cambyses, Irwin seeks alternative grounds for his representation, finding readers implicated in his aberrant behaviour and complicit in a wider rhetoric of imperialism, thereby confounding their easy condemnation – or diagnosis – of Cambyses’ supposed insanity. At the same time, as a tragic figure, Cambyses arouses a dissonant empathy in contemporaneous and postclassical audiences, who in their pity for the king’s faults become enmeshed in religious norms they might otherwise disdain. A brief review cannot capture this substantial chapter’s many productive observations. The only discordant note sounds in the ‘Challenge’ issued to overly straitened historical and literary approaches (p. 84), which perhaps misrepresents the sophisticated work of recent decades (especially wide-ranging projects by E. Baragwanath, R. Bichler, C. Pelling, A. Purves and R. Rollinger).
A. Bonifazi examines the linguistic construction of Cambyses’ demented character, casting Herodotus’ readers now as the spectators to a ‘zooming-in cinematic technique’ (p. 97) effected through deictic markers. This observation may be most helpful for documenting the particular impact (rather than the markedness) of deictics within this logos since such auteurism is widespread in Herodotus’ style (a predilection noted by Bonifazi). The chapter’s greater achievement lies in its presentation of nonverbal behaviour as an index of Cambyses’ turbata mens and the compelling application of cognitive linguistic theory to the narrative’s frequent negative markers and counterfactual conditionals: these what-ifs adumbrate a temperate ruler – precisely what the Herodotean Cambyses is not.
A. Ellis’s chapter on Herodotus’ (relative) relativism amplifies Irwin’s discussion of Presocratic thought in the historian’s presentation, outlining a distinctive strain of cultural relativism intercut with sceptical and positivist sentiments. The upshot is Herodotus’ all-too-human inconsistency as historian and anthropologist, oscillating between an enlightened inquirer’s open-mindedness and the settled views of the politically engaged intellectual. We gain valuable understanding of Herodotus’ untidy Weltanschauung, but one may wish that Cambyses himself received slightly more focus in this lengthy contribution: the king’s seeming openness to cross-cultural learning is suggestive (e.g. 3.14.7–11: surprised at first, he ultimately accepts Psammenitus’ exaggerated grief for his tablemate), and the Persian judges’ canny interpretation of nomoi to facilitate Cambyses’ incestuous marriage (3.31) foregrounds the power of intracultural relativism.
The next section situates the Cambyses logos alongside other sources documenting Egypt’s invasion. M. Wasmuth arranges the ancient sources in three subdivided tiers according to their chronological and spatial ‘closeness’ to the relevant events. This methodology occasionally risks confusion (since, as Wasmuth concedes [p. 154], it can be ‘arbitrary’ in how such closeness is assessed) and is hampered by infelicitous formatting. Awkward presentation aside, the effort to rationalise the vexed constellation of extant sources is welcome. Wasmuth’s reclamation of several important primary and secondary sources from inherently negative interpretation is also helpful in stimulating fresh juxtaposition of the historical Cambyses to his deranged counterpart in Herodotus’ (tertiary) source. Schütze examines the Egyptian reception of both Cambyses and Amasis, relying on a more sharply derogatory reading of the available sources than Wasmuth (e.g. the lack of royal title afforded Cambyses as an ‘illegitimate king’ in the petition of Petiese in P. Ryl. Dem. 9; pp. 191–4). The findings are convincing if unsurprising for the logic of contested dynastic rule: a serial damnatio of usurpers beginning with Cambyses’ efforts to denigrate his predecessor Amasis, followed hard by the delegitimisation of the Teispid monarch by his successor Darius I. R. Bichler follows neatly in exploring Cambyses’ post-Herodotean reception, showing the Persian’s most notorious acts to be so paradigmatic that passing allusion is often sufficient for Hellenistic and Roman authors. In fuller treatments alternative receptions emerge, appraising Cambyses’ Ethiopian campaign as a greater military success than Herodotus allows. Bichler’s appendix cataloguing the myriad names associated with Cambyses’ family in the non-Herodotean sources is a fruitful (though daunting) record of the morass that confronts the modern historian.
The penultimate section assesses the geopolitics permeating the Cambyses logos. G. Sperveslage discusses Cambyses’ purported alliance with Arab tribes, an arrangement attested only by Herodotus, and postulates that the historian may simply have transposed to Cambyses’ narrative the seventh-century bce Arab assistance to Assyrian invaders documented in the annals of Esarhaddon. Pointing, however, to a substantial Qedarite sanctuary at Tell el-Maskhuta after 600 bce, and therefore Arab control of a chokepoint into Egypt in the relevant period, Sperveslage considers plausible the possibility of this tribe as Cambyses’ historical allies. Despite this persuasive case, a reading of historical alliance may require added caution in using Tell el-Maskhuta alongside Herodotus’ account of later friendship between the two peoples: to the fifth-century historian, a thriving Arabian trading post combined with special Persian economic exemptions might seem a ‘special relationship’ in search of a tidy aetiology – say, a notional alliance during Cambyses’ invasion. Alternatively, might Darius’ dispensations originate even more directly in a need for ease of trade through the Sinai Peninsula during his own reign? Consequently, the no less compelling reading of repurposed annalistic material might be preferred.
D. Agut-Labordère begins this section’s turn towards Book 3’s ‘Ammonian tale’, tracing two entwined accounts (one Greek, one Ammonian) undergirding the Persian expedition into the Western Desert and overlaid by the historian’s elision of significant geographical realities. In this revealing source critique Agut-Labordère discerns Cambyses’ motive as outright control of Ammonian lands – a legible strategy of pre-emptive repression given both the region’s restive political history and the territory’s importance to ties between Egypt and Libya. O.E. Kaper focalises this broader political unrest through the rebellious Petubastis IV in arguing against several conclusions of the foregoing piece. Rather than military action unmoored from immediate threat, Kaper sees a direct response to rebellion initiated by Petubastis – hence the urgency of an otherwise undesirable foray into the desert. In this scenario the vanished expedition was likely worsted by rebels in the oasis, leaving an underinformed Herodotus to entertain its possible disappearance in a sandstorm (and to further confuse matters by conflating the Western Desert’s five oases as ‘Siwa’ and reducing their inhabitants to ‘Ammonians’). The synthesis of these chapters’ two competing interpretations may be a monarch attuned to pragmatic political and military strategies rather than, pace Herodotus, a king bent on impious folly.
Schwab’s contribution follows nimbly from the two previous in seeking Pindaric underpinnings to the Ethiopian campaign and Ammonian narrative, with special attention to the ‘sands’ running through these texts. The Ammonians’ speaking name is especially meaningful for Schwab since their ‘tale’ may ascribe the Persian disappearance to ‘the sand(y ones)’, that is, themselves, thereby encoding a self-referential encomium in the narrative. This intriguing point may slightly overreach (a sly allusion to victory does not a victory ode make), but the indication of possible rebellion latent in the narrative – perhaps even involving a rebel ‘Psammos’ – reveals novel virtuosity in this stormy stretch.
The final section scrutinises the relationship of Cambyses to local religious infrastructure. Conceding that the invasion’s historical chronology cannot preclude the Herodotean Cambyses’ misdeeds, D. Kahn’s measured assessment assigns Persian malfeasance to war’s hell rather than to the monarch’s mental disturbance. Notably, Kahn rejects Kaper’s argument concerning Cambyses’ doomed response to Petubastis’ insurgency, highlighting misalignment in the relevant dates and the absence of anything in the rebel’s royal names to commemorate such a towering victory. Kahn does, however, underscore the names’ emphasis on the rebel king’s embellishment of temples as an evocative contrast with their possible destruction by Cambyses. Nevertheless, any such devastation would comport with Near Eastern practice for answering armed unrest, and these allegations seem likely to have been magnified by an Egyptian priesthood smarting from reduced religious expenditures. The lurid madness of Herodotus’ monarch becomes, in Kahn’s accounting, the banal callousness inherent to empire.
F. Wespi probes priestly elites’ entrenched hatred for the Persian invader by synopsising the papyrus fragments that constitute ‘Cambyses’ decree’ on the resources allocated to Egyptian temples (the Roman P. Florence PSI inv. D 102 and the Ptolemaic P. Bibl. Nat. 215 verso). Wespi’s conclusions are judicious: far from the outright elimination of temple subsidies, the king’s decree appears to limit governmental support while enhancing the temples’ (self-sustaining) estates. If not per se betokening the king’s insanity, Wespi grants that the new arrangement, requiring additional administrative labour by the priests, may itself have been onerous enough to secure Cambyses’ infamy. While Wespi’s sensitivity to nuance is to be credited, readers might wish for a stronger conclusion than deeming one of the chapter’s central questions – the extent to which Cambyses’ depiction in the Histories is clouded by priestly prejudice – as ‘better left unanswered for the time being’ (p. 365).
J.F. Quack closes the volume with Cambyses’ visit to the sanctuary of Ptah (i.e. ‘Hephaestus’) – an episode that has largely eluded Egyptologists’ previous scrutiny. Quack illuminates the dense network of realia reflected in this scene, beginning from the (diminutive) cult figure that Cambyses supposedly ridicules and the mysterious Cabeiri. The resulting investigation uncovers an astonishing complex of Egyptian, Phoenician-Punic and Greek religious practice and iconography underlying this episode. Having established the plausibility of dwarfish cult images as the object of Cambyses’ derision, Quack locates the transmission of the king’s behaviour to Herodotus as part of an oral tradition centred on Sethian motifs of sacrilege. Quack concludes on a fitting note of caution: in any rush to uncover a historical reality that we suspect as having been obscured by Cambyses’ ‘madness’, we must take care not to occlude genuine derangement as a possibility and proximate cause.
The volume features about two dozen typographical errors as well as frequent formatting inconsistencies, the most apparent of which is the tendency of names to alternate between different forms of transliteration; generally, however, these present a distraction rather than a barrier to understanding. Of great use are the index nominum, rerum et locorum and the index fontium, the latter of which is helpfully subdivided into Greek and non-Greek sources (though, unexpectedly, with German-language headers in an otherwise Anglophone work).
Due to the complex state of the source materials, the occasionally untranslated non-English text and the contributors’ sometimes esoteric prose style, this work will be most valuable for Egyptologists and scholars of Greek literature, history and philosophy at a postgraduate level and beyond. Its lively design, however, is to be commended: the collection stages debates ‘in real time’ in a way that few conference volumes manage, placing readers in the enviable role of front-row observers to spirited disputation. Herodotus’ text has long been a rich site of interdisciplinary excavation for the intrepid explorer; this volume embraces the opportunity for dynamic new thinking across scholarly deserts, leading the way to oases of fresh insight.
