But it is not our design to search into the lies of
Herodotus; we only make enquiry into those which he
invented to detract from the glory of others. He says: ‘It
is reported by the Athenians that Adimantus, captain of the
Corinthians, when the enemies were now ready to join
battle, was struck with such fear and astonishment that he
fled; not thrusting his ship backward by the stern, or leisurely
[p. 363]
retreating through those that were engaged, but
openly hoisting up his sails, and turning the heads of all
his vessels. And about the farther part of the Salaminian
coast, he was met by a pinnace, out of which one spake
thus to him: Thou indeed, Adimantus, fliest, having betrayed the Grecians; yet they overcome, and according to
their desires have the better of their enemies.’
1 This
pinnace was certainly let down from heaven. For what
should hinder him from erecting a tragical machine, who
by his boasting excelled the tragedians in all other things?
Adimantus then crediting him (he adds) ‘returned to the
fleet, when the business was already done.’
‘This report,’ says he, ‘is believed by the Athenians; but the Corinthians deny it, and say, they were the first at the sea-fight,
for which they have the testimony of all the other Greeks.’
Such is this man in many other places. He spreads different calumnies and accusations of different men, that he
may not fail of making some one appear altogether wicked.
And it has succeeded well with him in this place; for if
the calumny is believed, the Corinthians—if it is not, the
Athenians—are rendered infamous. But in truth the Athenians did not belie the Corinthians, but he hath belied them
both. Certainly Thucydides, bringing in an Athenian ambassador contesting with a Corinthian at Sparta, and gloriously boasting of many things about the Persian war and
the sea-fight at Salamis, charges not the Corinthians with
any crime of treachery or leaving their station. Nor was
it likely the Athenians should object any such thing against
Corinth, when they saw her engraven in the third place
after the Lacedaemonians and themselves on those spoils
which, being taken from the barbarians, were consecrated
to the Gods. And in Salamis they had permitted them to
bury the dead near the city, as being men who had behaved
themselves gallantly, and to write over them this elegy:
[p. 364]
Well-watered Corinth, stranger, was our home;
Salamis, Ajax's isle, is now our grave;
Here Medes and Persians and Phoenician ships
We fought and routed, sacred Greece to save.
And their honorary sepulchre at the Isthmus has on it this
epitaph:
When Greece upon the point of danger stood,
We fell, defending her with our life-blood.
2
Moreover, on the offerings of Diodorus, one of the Corinthian sea-captains, reserved in the temple of Latona, there
is this inscription:
Diodorus's seamen to Latona sent
These arms, of hostile Medes the monument.
And as for Adimantus himself, against whom Herodotus
frequently inveighs,—saying, that he was the only captain
who went about to fly from Artemisium, and would not
stay the fight,—behold in how great honor he is:
Here Adimantus rests: the same was he,
Whose counsels won for Greece the crown of liberty.
For neither is it probable, that such honor would have been
shown to a coward and a traitor after his decease; nor
would he have dared to give his daughters the names of
Nausinica, Acrothinius, and Alexibia, and his son that of
Aristeas, if he had not performed some illustrious and
memorable action in that fight. Nor is it credible that
Herodotus was ignorant of that which could not be unknown even to the meanest Carian, that the Corinthian
women alone made that glorious and divine prayer, by
which they besought the Goddess Venus to inspire their
husbands with a love of fighting against the barbarians.
For it was a thing divulged abroad, concerning which Simonides made an epigram to be inscribed on the brazen
image set up in that temple of Venus which is said to have
been founded by Medea, when she desired the Goddess, as
[p. 365]
some affirm, to deliver her from loving her husband Jason,
or, as others say, to free him from loving Thetis. The
tenor of the epigram follows:
For those who, fighting on their country's side,
Opposed th' imperial Mede's advancing tide,
We, votaresses, to Cythera pray'd;
Th' indulgent power vouchsafed her timely aid,
And kept the citadel of Hellas free
From rude assaults of Persia's archery.
These things he should rather have written and recorded,
than have inserted Aminocles's killing of his son.
