ἱστορίαι Historiai
Hdt. 3.84 The Histories, Herodotus; served verbatim
The rest of the seven then considered what was the fairest way of making a king; and they decided that if another of the seven than Otanes should gain the royal power, that Otanes and his descendants should receive a yearly gift of Median clothing and everything else that the Persians hold most valuable. The reason for this decision was that it was he who had first planned the matter and assembled the conspirators. For Otanes, then, they choose this particular honor; but with regard to all of them they decreed that any one of the seven should, if he wished, enter the king's palace unannounced, except when the king was sleeping with a woman; and that the king should be forbidden to take a wife except from the households of the conspirators. As for the making of a king, they decided that he should be elected whose horse, after they were all in their saddles in the suburb of the city, should first be heard to neigh at sunrise.

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

← Hdt. 3.83 contents Hdt. 3.85 →

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

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