The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

the people living in the area west of the Caspian Sea, that is, around the mountain range
of Caucasus:
Many and every sort of nation the Caucasus contains within itself, most of them
living from the fruit of the wild trees. Among them, they say, there are trees with
leaves such that, when they crush them and mix them with water, they can paint
(e0ggra&fein) on their clothes (e0sqh~ta) zw|~a. These zw|~a do not wash out but
grow old with the wool, as though they were woven into it at the beginning.
(1.203) [99]
All that can be understood from this passage is that the plural zw|~a are some kind of
decorative elements on clothes (e0sqh~ta) from a distant place in the Caucasus. 369 As was
the case with Empedocles’ fragment, the passage provides no information about the
appearance of zw|~a—a usage that again suggests the general sense of the term. Unlike
those of the previous fragment, however, these zw|~a do not appear in a religious context.
The meaning of zw|~a is not easy to determine, and this difficulty is reflected in the
variety of the modern translations of the term. Alfred Godley, for example, translates
zw|~a as “figures.” 370 In agreement with him are Joseph Blakesley, Liddell and Scott,
George Macaulay and David Lateiner, and Robin Waterfield. 371 Aubrey De Sélincourt
and John Marincola distinguish between two different meanings for the twice-mentioned
(Cambridge, 2000) 75-101; for Herodotus’ contribution to a conceptual remodeling of the geography, and
therefore, picture of the world in the fifth century B.C., see J. S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient
Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, 1992) 32-41.
369 For e0sqh&j and the Latin “vestis” as words that refer primarily to clothing, see Donohue, The Problem of
Description 181-182, n. 86; also Lee, “The Myth of the Classical Peplos” 87, maintains that, in
Aeschylus’s Persians (472 B.C.) and Seven against Thebes (467 B.C.), the term e0sqh&j describes women’s
clothes. That Greek women were familiar with a garment called Kimberikon derives from Aristophanes’
Lysistrata (411 B.C.; line 45), where Calonike exclaims that she will wear a Kimberikon in order to force
men to stop fighting. The ancient scholia explain Kimberikon as a type of clothing, whose name results
from geography; they also give the variant reading kimm-, which may be associated with the Cimmerians, a
group of people living in the North Caucasus. For a detailed account of these scholia, and the suggestion
that the variant reading may be the result of confusion with the Cimmerians, see Donohue, The Problem of
Description 185, n. 95.
370 A. Godley, ed., tr., Herodotus I (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1920; repr. 1946) 257.
371 J. W. Blakesley, Herodotus, with a Commentary (London, 1854) 152, n. 685; LSJ 9 760, s.v. zw|~on; G. C.
Macaulay, tr., rev. D. Lateiner, The Histories. Herodotus (New York, 2004) 74; R. Waterfield, tr.,
Herodotus. The Histories (Oxford and New York, 1998) 89.
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