Note 199 — Chapter XI · THE CAMPAIGN OF PLATÆA.

I.e. A 1. In the days before scientific survey there was frequently the utmost confusion with regard to the application of names to the head streams of main rivers. This generally took the form of applying the name of the main stream to several of its feeders. The tendency of the local population was to apply the well-known name to that upper tributary which was in their immediate neighbourhood, and was therefore best known to them. Examples of this are frequent in England; the upper waters of the Thames are a case in point. In early sketch maps it will be found that the name Thames is applied with the utmost diversity to the head streams of the river, and even a tributary so far down as the Evenlode is sometimes given the name of the main river. This is, I fancy, what has taken place with regard to the Asopos. The Platæans, with whom Herodotus must have come in contact in the course of his visit to the region, called this stream, A 1, by the name of the main river, and consequently “Asopos” in Herodotus is to be understood to mean this stream up to its junction with the stream which comes from the west, rising not far from Leuktra, and, after that, to refer to what is really the main river. From Platæa itself the course of this stream is plainly traceable in the plain, running along the western base of the Asopos ridge. The stream coming from Leuktra is not visible, and it is quite conceivable that Herodotus never had any definite knowledge of its existence. In Leake’s time (vide his sketch map) the inhabitants of Kriekouki seem to have called the stream, A 6, Asopos. It is not so called at the present day. My own impression is, however, that Herodotus, although he heard the Platæans speak of A 1 as the Asopos, may in one passage refer to the stream from Leuktra with a special attribute: τὸν Ἀσωπὸν τὸν ταύτῃ ῥέοντα (H. ix. 31). A sentence previously, at the end of Chapter 30, he has a reference to the Asopos without any qualification, οὗτοι μὲν νὺν ταχθέντες ἐπὶ τῷ Ἀσωπῷ ἐστρατοπεδἐυοντο, and this reference is undoubtedly to A 1, which is to him, as other references in his narrative show, the upper Asopos “ordinarily so called.”