Charles
CHIASSON Myth, Ritual, and Authorial
Control in Herodotus' Story of Cleobis and Biton
I argue that
Herodotus consciously, cunningly incorporates elements of
myth and initiatory ritual into his story of Cleobis and
Biton, which is told by Solon as secondary narrator but
focalized by the primary narrator of the Histories. The
introduction to the story contains elements (e.g., the
passive verb legetai) that signal
a transition from the realm of historically plausible
narrative&emdash;i.e., the story of the Athenian Tellos,
which precedes the story of Cleobis and Biton&emdash;to a
realm of ostensibly legendary discourse. In this realm I
discern both local and Panhellenic mythical features. The
unexpected death of the brothers as reward for service to
the goddess Hera parallels the legend of Trophonius and
Agamedes, whose recompense from Apollo for building his
first temple at Delphi proves to be the boon of peaceful
death in their sleep&emdash;a distinctively Delphic
display of the ontological and epistemological chasm that
separates mortal from immortal. In Herodotus' narrative
it is the unwitting prayer of the boys' mother to Hera
that precipitates their death, and in this association
between maternity and mortality we see a Panhellenic
mythical motif that is familiar from early Greek
hexameter poetry. An especially instructive parallel is
the Eleusinian queen Metanira, who in the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter inadvertently interrupts her son's
immortalization by the goddess, thus condemning him to
mortal existence. The angered Demeter berates Metanira
for her typically human ignorance of the future, while
Herodotus makes a similar point more sympathetically by
describing the mother of Cleobis and Biton as
perichares,
"overjoyed"&emdash;an adjective that elsewhere in the
Histories always foreshadows disaster
for the person so described, and here casts a transient
tragic shadow in an otherwise celebratory context.
Initiation ritual is reflected not only in the setting of
the narrative (the Argive festival known as the Heraia),
but also in details of vocabulary and emplotment that
call attention to the brothers' liminal status, poised
between childhood and manhood. At Hera's temple, Argive
women congratulate the mother and Argive men congratulate
her sons in a display of gender segregation that
underscores the brothers' social transition from the
female domestic world to the male civic world. Similarly,
although before their death Cleobis and Biton are
consistently referred to as either young men
(neaniai) or their
mother's children, after their death the Argives dedicate
statues of the brothers at Delphi "on the grounds
(hos) that they had proved to be
outstanding men (andron ariston genomenon)."
This phrasing implies not only attainment of adult
status, but also (to judge from Herodotus' other uses of
the phrase aner aristos genomenos) assimilation
of the brothers' feat to the ultimate civic service,
death in battle. In my view the particle hos
is critical, however: it marks the Argive accolades as
honorary, by significant contrast with Solon's choice as
olbiotatos, Tellos, who
in the fullness of his life was a father, grandfather,
and citizen-soldier who literally died fighting for his
polis. Thus the initiatory framework of the
story subtly indicates the reasons why Solon considers
Tellos more fortunate still than Cleobis and Biton.