The Spartans called in envoys from all their allies and brought a man before them. He was Hippias, son of Pisistratus, the tyrant who had been driven out of Athens some years before.

When the Spartans had laid out their plan, most of the allies disliked it, but no one spoke.

Then Socles of Corinth stood up. Surely, he said, the sky will go below the earth and the earth rise above the sky, men will live in the sea and fish where men lived before, now that you Spartans mean to abolish government by equals in the cities and bring tyrants back into them.

Having said this, he told a story. It began with a lame woman.

The Man They Meant to Bring Back

The cause of all this lay with the Spartans themselves.

They had learned that the Alcmaeonids had bribed the priestess at Delphi, so that the oracle kept telling Sparta to drive out the house of Pisistratus. The Spartans were angry: they had driven their own guest-friends from their country, and the Athenians showed no gratitude at all.

Something else troubled them. Cleomenes, king of Sparta, had brought back from the Athenian acropolis a set of oracles that had belonged to the Pisistratids, left behind in the temple when they were expelled. The oracles said that the Athenians would one day do Sparta much harm. The Spartans had not known this before; now they did.

They saw the Athenians growing stronger day by day and unwilling to obey them. They reasoned: if the Athenians were free, they would be a match for Sparta; held down by a tyrant, they would be weak and ready to do as they were told. So they sent to Sigeum on the Hellespont and fetched Hippias, who was living there in exile.

When the allied envoys had gathered, the Spartans told them: We did wrong. We trusted false oracles, drove our close friends from their homeland, and handed Athens to an ungrateful people. They had barely raised their heads when they threw us and our king out. Now they grow prouder and stronger, as their neighbours the Boeotians and Chalcidians have already found. So we have brought Hippias here, to restore him to Athens together with you, and give back what we took from him.

First Set One Up at Home

Socles' first words were those words about the world turned upside down.

Then he said: there is nothing more unjust or more bloody among men than tyranny. If you really think it good for cities to be ruled by tyrants, set up a tyrant among yourselves first, and then go looking to set them up for others. But you have never tasted tyranny, and in Sparta you take every care that none ever arises, while you would use it against your allies. If you had known it as we Corinthians have, you would bring better counsel than this.

Then he told what Corinth had been like long ago.

Labda, the Lame Girl

Corinth was then ruled by a few. They were called the Bacchiadae, and they married only among themselves.

One of them, Amphion, had a daughter who was lame, called Labda. None of the Bacchiadae would marry her, so she was married to Eetion, son of Echecrates, who lived in the village of Petra and was of Lapith stock, a descendant of Caeneus.

He had no children by this wife or by any other. So he went to Delphi to ask about offspring.

As soon as he entered the shrine, the priestess greeted him with verses: Eetion, worthy of honour, no one honours you. Labda is with child; she will bear a rolling millstone, which will fall on the men who rule alone and bring justice to Corinth.

Somehow this oracle reached the Bacchiadae. Corinth had once received another oracle that they had never understood. It said: an eagle conceives among the rocks; she will bear a lion, strong and eating raw flesh, and he will loosen the knees of many. Think well on this, you Corinthians who live by fair Pirene and lofty Corinth.

The two oracles meant the same thing. As soon as the Bacchiadae heard the one given to Eetion, they understood the earlier one.

The riddle in the verses lay in the names: "Petra" means rock, and "Eetion" sounds like eagle.

Ten Men and a Smile

Once they understood, the Bacchiadae kept quiet and resolved to destroy the child Eetion was about to have.

As soon as it was born, they sent ten of their own clan to the village where Eetion lived, to kill it.

The ten came to Petra, went into Eetion's courtyard, and asked to see the child. Labda knew nothing of why they had come. Thinking they asked out of friendship for the child's father, she brought the baby out and put it into the hands of one of them.

On the way they had agreed that the first man to take the child would dash it to the ground.

But as Labda handed it over, by chance (Socles says by the will of heaven) the child smiled at the man who took it. He saw it and was moved to pity, could not do it, and passed the child to the second man, and he to the third. So the child passed through all ten pairs of hands, and not one of them would do it.

They gave the child back to its mother, went outside, and stood at the door blaming each other, most of all the first man, for not doing as agreed. After a while they decided to go in again and all do it together.

The Chest

Socles said that evil for Corinth was fated to grow from Eetion's offspring.

Labda was standing by the door and heard everything said outside. Afraid that they would change their minds and come in a second time to take the child and kill it, she took it and hid it where she thought it least likely to be found: in a chest. She knew that if they came back to search, they would turn every place over.

They did come back and searched everywhere, and did not find it. So they decided to go home and tell those who had sent them that everything had been done as ordered. They went back and said just that.

The child grew up. Because he had escaped that danger in a chest, he was named Cypselus, after the word for chest.

The Two-Edged Oracle

When Cypselus was grown, he went to Delphi for an oracle and received an answer that could be read two ways. Trusting it, he attacked Corinth and took it.

The oracle said: happy is this man who comes down into my house, Cypselus son of Eetion, king of famous Corinth; happy he and his sons, but not his sons' sons.

Socles said that once Cypselus was tyrant, this is the man he was: he drove many Corinthians into exile, robbed many of their property, and took the lives of many more.

He ruled for thirty years, ended his life in prosperity, and was succeeded by his son Periander.

The Answer in the Cornfield

Periander was at first milder than his father. But after he began exchanging messengers with Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, he became far more bloodthirsty than Cypselus.

He sent a herald to ask Thrasybulus how he should arrange affairs so as to govern the city most safely and best.

Thrasybulus led the herald out of the city into a sown field. As he walked through the grain he kept questioning the herald about his journey from Corinth, again and again, and whenever he saw an ear standing above the rest he broke it off and threw it away, until he had ruined the finest and thickest part of the crop.

When he had crossed the field, he sent the herald home without a word of advice.

When the herald returned to Corinth, Periander was eager to hear the advice. The herald said that Thrasybulus had given none. He added that he wondered Periander had sent him to such a man, a madman who destroyed his own crops, and he described exactly what he had seen.

But Periander understood what Thrasybulus meant: he was to kill the outstanding men of the city. From then on he did every kind of evil to his citizens. Whatever Cypselus had left undone in killing and banishing, Periander finished for him.

Bread in a Cold Oven

Socles said that one day Periander stripped all the women of Corinth of their clothes, on account of his own wife, Melissa.

He had sent to the oracle of the dead on the river Acheron, in the land of the Thesprotians, to ask where a deposit left with him by a friend from abroad had been put. Melissa's ghost appeared. She said she would not tell, nor say where the deposit lay, because she was cold and had no clothes; the garments buried with her were of no use, since they had not been burned. As proof that she spoke the truth, she added that Periander had put his loaves into a cold oven.

When this was reported to him, Periander believed it, because the token was one only he could understand. At once he proclaimed that all the women of Corinth should go to the temple of Hera. They came in their finest clothes, as if to a festival. He had his guards posted there and stripped them all alike, free women and servants, heaped the clothes in a pit, and burned them while praying to Melissa.

When he sent a second time, Melissa's ghost told where the friend's deposit lay.

This Is a Tyrant

At the end Socles said: That, Spartans, is what tyranny is, and those are its deeds. We Corinthians were greatly astonished when we saw you sending for Hippias, and we are more astonished now to hear you say this. We call on the gods of Greece and beg you not to set up tyrants in the cities. If you will not stop, and try against all justice to bring Hippias back, know that the Corinthians do not consent.

Hippias answered him, calling on the same gods. He said that when the days came, as they were fated to, for the Corinthians to be tormented by the Athenians, then the Corinthians above all men would long for the Pisistratids.

Hippias answered so because he knew the oracles better than anyone.

The rest of the allies had kept silent until then. When they heard Socles speak so freely, each of them spoke up and sided with the Corinthians, begging the Spartans not to work revolution in a Greek city.

So the plan was dropped, and Hippias had to leave. Amyntas, king of Macedon, offered him Anthemus, and the Thessalians offered him Iolcus; he took neither and went back to Sigeum.

Afterword

Socles told this story to persuade the Spartans not to send a tyrant back to Athens.

But what he told in most detail was how a child survived: ten men standing in a courtyard, the child smiling at the first of them and passing from the first man's hands to the tenth's, and at last hidden by his mother in a chest.

That child became Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth.

The Bacchiadae tried to escape the oracle, and the men they sent could not bring themselves to do it. The millstone the oracle spoke of fell all the same.

Sources, versions, and editorial boundaries

1. Core narrative: Herodotus, Histories 5.90-94: 90 (the Spartans learn the Alcmaeonids bribed the priestess and see the Pisistratid oracles Cleomenes brought from the Athenian acropolis), 91 (they fetch Hippias from Sigeum, summon the allies and admit their mistake), 92 (the speech of Socles of Corinth: the opening image of the world turned upside down; the Bacchiadae and Labda; the oracle to Eetion and the earlier oracle to Corinth; the ten men and the child's smile; the chest; Cypselus' oracle, seizure of Corinth and thirty-year rule; Periander and Thrasybulus; Melissa's ghost and the burning of the clothes at the temple of Hera; conclusion), 93 (Hippias' reply; the allies side with Corinth), and the first part of 94 (Hippias refuses Anthemus and Iolcus and returns to Sigeum). English from Godley's translation (1920-1925); Greek from the public PerseusDL TEI edition (tlg0016.tlg001, eng2 and grc2), read section by section on 2 November; printed editions not checked and no page numbers given.

2. Levels of evidence: the whole of 92 is Socles' speech, which Herodotus introduces as "he spoke as follows"; the stories of Cypselus and Periander sit inside it, and the text marks them "Socles said." "By chance the child smiled" is, in the Greek, "by divine chance"; "evil for Corinth was fated to grow from Eetion's offspring" is also part of the speech. That Hippias "knew the oracles better than anyone" is Herodotus' own explanation (93). How and Wells (item 5) think Socles may be a historical person, but that the speech is strikingly unsuited to the occasion and no more historical than the Persian debate in Book 3.

3. Key phrases in Herodotus' Greek (PerseusDL grc2): the opening image, "ἦ δὴ ὅ τε οὐρανὸς ἔνερθε ἔσται τῆς γῆς καὶ ἡ γῆ μετέωρος ὑπὲρ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ" (5.92α.1); Labda, "θυγάτηρ χωλή" (5.92β.1); the oracle to Eetion, "Λάβδα κύει, τέξει δʼ ὀλοοίτροχον" (5.92β.2); the earlier oracle, "αἰετὸς ἐν πέτρῃσι κύει, τέξει δὲ λέοντα" (5.92β.3); the smile, "θείῃ τύχῃ προσεγέλασε τὸ παιδίον" (5.92γ.3); the hiding place, "ἐς κυψέλην" (5.92δ.1); the "two-edged oracle," "ἀμφιδέξιον χρηστήριον," with the line "αὐτὸς καὶ παῖδες, παίδων γε μὲν οὐκέτι παῖδες" (5.92ε.1-2); thirty years, "ἐπὶ τριήκοντα ἔτεα" (5.92ζ.1); the ears of grain, "ὅκως τινὰ ἴδοι τῶν ἀσταχύων ὑπερέχοντα" (5.92ζ.2); the cold oven, "ἐπὶ ψυχρὸν τὸν ἰπνὸν Περίανδρος τοὺς ἄρτους ἐπέβαλε" (5.92η.2). The Perseus text of Godley's translation adds the note "655 to 625" at "thirty years" in 5.92ζ; this is a modern conversion, not Herodotus.

4. Names: Socles (Σωκλέης; How and Wells, Sosicles), Bacchiadae (Βακχιάδαι), Amphion, Labda, Eetion, Echecrates, Petra, Caeneus, Cypselus, Periander, Thrasybulus, Melissa, Acheron, Thesprotians, Pirene, Hippias, Cleomenes, Sigeum, Anthemus, Iolcus, Amyntas.

5. Commentary: How and Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1912; OCR text of the archive.org scan commentaryonhero0002wwho), pp. 50-55, notes on 5.90-93. Points used: the speech is set shortly before Aristagoras came to Sparta, i.e. just before 500 BC (note on 5.90); the Etymologicum Magnum says Labda was named because her deformity resembled the letter Λ (5.92β); the "rolling millstone" plays on Petra (rock) and the "eagle among the rocks" on Eetion from Petra (5.92β); "two-edged" is best taken as favourable to Cypselus and his sons but foretelling his grandsons' fall, and the prophecy was made after the event (5.92ε); Melissa was probably killed, perhaps accidentally, by her husband, as in 3.50 (5.92η); the temple of Hera is that of Hera Bounaia on the slope of Acrocorinth at the west end of the city (same note). The sentence closing the Labda section, "the riddle in the verses lay in the names," draws on this note; Herodotus does not explain the puns.

6. Other versions (set side by side, not adjudicated): (a) Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.17.5 (2nd century AD), describes a cedar chest in the Heraion at Olympia, decorated with figures of ivory, gold and cedar, said to be the chest in which Cypselus was hidden and dedicated at Olympia by his descendants, adding that the Corinthians of that time called chests kypselai. How and Wells argue from the coins of Cypsela in Thrace that a kypsele was a cylindrical jar, and from its carvings and inscriptions that the chest was no earlier than 600 BC; the legend probably grew out of the name, though the chest may well have been a gift of the Corinthian tyrants. (b) Pausanias 2.4.4 makes the Cypselids descendants of Melas of Gonussa above Sicyon, unlike the Lapith descent in 5.92β. (c) Aristotle, Politics (PerseusDL Greek and Rackham's translation; Bekker pages): 1310b counts Cypselus among tyrants who rose as popular leaders; 1315b gives the Cypselid tyranny seventy-three and a half years, Cypselus thirty, Periander forty-four (the figures do not add up to the total; the text may be corrupt), Psammetichus three, and says Cypselus never kept a bodyguard; at 1284a and 1311a the story of the ears of grain has Periander advising Thrasybulus, the reverse of Herodotus. (d) How and Wells report a rationalized version in Nicolaus of Damascus that brings in Olympia; Nicolaus was not read for this piece and is cited only from their report.

7. Time: the map time is "c. 502 BC," for the occasion of Socles' speech, based on How and Wells' note on 5.90 ("shortly before the coming of Aristagoras, i.e. just before 500 BC") and on Hippias having left Athens before this (5.65). Herodotus gives no year; the year chosen is this piece's estimate and remains to be checked. Modern dates for Cypselus' seizure of Corinth and his reign (c. 657 BC, Busolt as cited by How and Wells; c. 655 BC, notes in Godley and Rackham) are not placed on the map.

8. Geography: Sparta from Pleiades place 570685 ("Sparta") and Corinth from Pleiades 570182 ("Corinthus/Korinthos"), both as approximate city sites. Corinth carries no time, since the Corinthian events in the story happened about a century and a half before the speech, at undetermined dates. Petra (placed by How and Wells south of Corinth on the northern slope of the Argive hills), Delphi, Miletus, the oracle of the dead on the Acheron, Sigeum and Olympia are undated or only mentioned and are not mapped.

9. Narrative boundaries: "driven out of Athens some years before" is the narrator's link, based on 5.65. In "Bread in a Cold Oven," "the token was one only he could understand" abridges 5.92η.3, where Herodotus explains that Periander believed it because he had lain with Melissa's corpse; the text does not expand on this. The last two sentences of the afterword are the narrator's. No dialogue or inner thoughts have been invented.

10. Rights: the ancient work and Godley's English translation are public domain; the Greek was checked in short passages against the public PerseusDL TEI text. How and Wells (1912) is public domain in the US. Pausanias (Perseus Greek and the Jones-Ormerod translation) and Aristotle (Perseus Greek and Rackham's translation) were read in short passages and are only paraphrased. The Chinese and English stories are original contemporary retellings by Shitu. Coordinates are from the Pleiades gazetteer; Wikipedia and Wikidata are not used as historical sources.