Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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the trouble incurred to achieve greatness, it has a more poignant meaning in his detailed description of the Nubian miners’ suffering.40 Diodorus notes that the Egyptians enslave not only prisoners of war and criminals, but also those accused unjustly (adikois diabolais), and punish their families as well. Diodorus pays particular attention to these miners, describing them in unusual detail over the course of several sections. He notes the work that each age group performs as well as the gendered division of labor. This interest is technical but also illustrates his larger point that the demands of mining cause the Nubians immense pain:
προσούσης δ’ ἅπασιν ἀθεραπευσίας σώματος καὶ τῆς τὴν αἰδῶ περιστελλούσης ἐσθῆτος μὴ προσούσης, οὐκ ἔστιν ὃς ἰδὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐλεήσειε τοὺς ἀκληροῦντας διὰ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ταλαιπωρίας.
Because they have no way to care for their bodies or clothing to cover their shame, there is not anyone who would see them and not pity the poor things because of their overwhelming hardship. (Diod. Sic. 3.13.2–3)
Diodorus’s ethnography of the Nubian miners becomes oddly personal, forcing readers to imagine themselves in the position of the compassionate onlooker. Readers who take this role seriously will not only pity the Nubians but disapprove of the Egyptians, who extract gold at such a high price to the miners.
Elsewhere Diodorus seems ambivalent about the trade-off between suffering and reward. Spanish silver mines depend on forced labor (5.38) and also involve the diversion of rivers (5.37.3), but Diodorus marvels at the screws (modeled after Archimedes’s) that allow miners in Spain to remove huge amounts of water, admiring “with what little work” (5.37.4: dia tēs tuchousēs ergasias) the screws operate. The screws, which save human labor, elevate the Spanish operation above the Nubian one.41 Readers of these stories are invited to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the erga they describe, with human suffering on one side of the balance and gain on the other. Diodorus does not go so far as to argue that workers should own the means of production, but he is alert to vast inequities between owners and workers. He favors erga that benefit both ruler and ruled.
Like the Spanish miners, Diodorus’s Assyrian queen Semiramis also rides the edge of the cost-benefit equation, often by redeeming projects for her sole benefit with those that benefit others:
παραγενηθεῖσα δ’ εἰς Ἐκβάτανα, πόλιν ἐν πεδίῳ κειμένην, κατεσκεύασεν ἐν αὐτῇ πολυτελῆ βασίλεια καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἐπιμέλειαν ἐποιήσατο τοῦ τόπου περιττοτέραν. ἀνύδρου γὰρ οὔσης τῆς πόλεως καὶ μηδαμοῦ σύνεγγυς ὑπαρχούσης πηγῆς, ἐποίησεν αὐτὴν πᾶσαν κατάρρυτον, ἐπαγαγοῦσα πλεῖστον καὶ κάλλιστον ὕδωρ μετὰ πολλῆς κακοπαθείας τε καὶ δαπάνης.
Having arrived at Ecbatana, a city that lies in the plain, she built there an expensive (polutelē) palace and in every other way paid rather a lot of attention (epimeleian) to the region. For since the city was without water and no spring existed nearby, she made it all well-watered by providing, with great suffering and expense, the purest water in abundance. (Diod. Sic. 2.13.5)
This project causes great pain and expense but also brings much-needed resources to the region and probably cements Semiramis’s hold on it. Most important, the attention (epimeleia) she pays her own pleasure and status is matched by her strategic attention to others.
Diodorus saves his greatest admiration for works without a downside, like the lake that King Moeris of Egypt builds, which protects Memphis from flooding and serves farmers as a reservoir (1.51.5–7). This lake, Diodorus says, is “amazing” (thaumastē) for its “usefulness” (chreia), “helpfulness to all” (koinōphelia), and “inventiveness” (epinoia). A much earlier monument, the pillars of Heracles, achieve a similar result; they are an “everlasting work” (aeimnēston ergon) that also protects people from sea monsters (4.18.5).
Here too Semiramis excels. Like her late husband Ninus, Semiramis is motivated by “a desire for great deeds and an ambition to surpass the fame of her predecessor.”42 Her palace in Babylon has “an advantage” (proeiche) over the old palace, cementing her legacy, but also uses amazing figural ornamentation that “offer variegated pleasures to those who gaze on them” (2.8.7: poikilēn psychagōgian parechomena tois theōmenois). Herodotus’s descriptions of engineering projects may have brought his readers pleasure, but Diodorus makes the pleasure of gazing on marvelous works concrete and explicit by imagining an audience within the text to consume them. Whereas Herodotus provides only glimpses of the Persian point of view, Diodorus makes the Assyrian public central to his evaluation of these works.43
Diodorus also pushes readers familiar with Herodotus to reevaluate the engineering projects of the Histories, especially Xerxes’s rebuilt bridge across the Hellespont. Like Xerxes, Semiramis seems headed toward disaster when she constructs a bridge to invade India:
ὁ μὲν τῶν Ἰνδῶν βασιλεὺς ἀπήγαγε τὴν δύναμιν ἀπὸ τοῦ ποταμοῦ, προσποιούμενος μὲν ἀναχωρεῖν διὰ φόβον, τῇ δ’ ἀληθείᾳ βουλόμενος τοὺς πολεμίους προτρέψασθαι διαβῆναι τὸν ποταμόν. ἡ δὲ Σεμίραμις, κατὰ νοῦν αὐτῇ τῶν πραγμάτων προχωρούντων, ἔζευξε τὸν ποταμὸν κατασκευάσασα πολυτελῆ καὶ μεγάλην γέφυραν, δι’ ἧς ἅπασαν διακομίσασα τὴν δύναμιν.
The king of the Indians withdrew his force from the river, pretending to retreat out of fear, but in reality wanting to urge the enemy to cross the river. Since things were going according to her plan, Semiramis yoked the river by constructing a large, expensive bridge by which she got across her entire force. (Diod. Sic. 2.18.5–6)
Several elements of this story point to catastrophe: the Indians want Semiramis to cross, the bridge is “expensive,” and Semiramis is at the height of her power. Yet the bridge turns into an unexpected advantage when Semiramis decides to destroy it in the wake of her retreat. Although some of her men die in the stampede, the bridge kills an even greater number of Indians and provides Semiramis “great security” (2.19.9: pollēn asphaleian).44 This scene rewrites the drama of Herodotus book 8, in which Xerxes agonizes about whether and how to flee Greece (Hdt. 8.97) and the Greeks deliberate about whether to destroy his bridge and prevent his escape (8.109–10). Although Xerxes makes it across the bridge without Greek interference, his army has been ravaged by famine and disease (8.115) and crosses just in time; the bridge has already been damaged by another storm (8.117) and is gone by the time the Greeks arrive to destroy it (9.114). The bridge may save Xerxes’s life, but it does not prevent the Greeks’ pursuit. Instead, Xerxes’s desperate march to reach the bridge and what his men suffer along the way echo and confirm the mistake he has made in building it. While Xerxes’s bridge turns against him, Semiramis transforms her own bridge into a weapon.
Diodorus celebrates Semiramis and her risk taking because he sees doing little as a greater failing than attempting too much.45 Like Herodotus, Diodorus relies on building projects for information, but he goes beyond Herodotus by imagining what it would be like for a ruler to “play it safe.” One of these less ambitious rulers is Semiramis’s son Ninyas,