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239.
I return now to that place in my history where it earlier left off.1 The Lacedaemonians were the first to be informed that the king was equipping himself to attack Hellas; with this knowledge it was that they sent to the oracle at Delphi, where they received the answer about which I spoke a little while ago. Now the way in which they were informed of this was strange.
[2]
Demaratus son of Ariston, an exile among the Medes, was, as I suppose (reason being also my ally), no friend to the Lacedaemonians, and I leave it to be imagined whether what he did was done out of goodwill or spiteful triumph. When Xerxes was resolved to march against Hellas, Demaratus, who was then at Susa and had knowledge of this, desired to send word of it to the Lacedaemonians.
[3]
He, however, feared detection and had no other way of informing them than this trick:—taking a double tablet, he scraped away the wax from it, and then wrote the king's plan on the wood. Next he melted the wax back again over the writing, so that the bearer of this seemingly blank tablet might not be troubled by the way-wardens.
[4]
When the tablet came to Lacedaemon, the Lacedaemonians could not guess its meaning, until at last (as I have been told) Gorgo, Cleomenes' daughter and Leonidas' wife, discovered the trick herself and advised them to scrape the wax away so that they would find writing on the wood. When they did so, they found and read the message, and presently sent it to the rest of the Greeks. This is the story, as it is told.
1 Hdt. 7.220, where Herodotus mentioned the bare fact of the Spartans getting early intelligence of Xerxes' plans against Greece. Now he completes the story.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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References (23 total)
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- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), DI´PTYCHA
- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), EPICLE´RUS
- A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), TABULAE
- William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb, Chapter IV
- Smith's Bio, Cleome'nes I.
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- Herodotus, Histories, 7.220
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