ἱστορίαι Historiai
Hdt. 1.97 The Histories, Herodotus; served verbatim
The number of those who came grew ever greater, for they heard that each case turned out in accord with the truth. Then Deioces, seeing that everything now depended on him, would not sit in his former seat of judgment, and said he would give no more decisions; for it was of no advantage to him (he said) to leave his own business and spend all day judging the cases of his neighbors. This caused robbery and lawlessness to increase greatly in the towns; and, gathering together, the Medes conferred about their present affairs, and said (here, as I suppose, the main speakers were Deioces' friends), “Since we cannot go on living in the present way in the land, come, let us set up a king over us; in this way the land will be well governed, and we ourselves shall attend to our business and not be routed by lawlessness.” With such words they persuaded themselves to be ruled by a king.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Hdt. 1.96 contents Hdt. 1.98 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

The Histories, Herodotus — translated by A. D. Godley, 1920–25
Perseus Digital Library — Herodotus, The Histories (Godley translation) · A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann, 1920–25
license: public-domain (US: pre-1930 publication); Perseus digital edition CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded in ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md