μολὼν λαβΠ(molṑn labé), literally “having come, take” or more colloquially “come and take them” was Leonidas of Sparta’s response when the Persians demanded that the Greeks surrender their arms at the Battle of Thermopylae. It has become a classic expression of defiance.
To the best of my knowledge our sole source for this is Herodotus. Herodotus also reported that Babylon had 100 gates (archaeologists have only discovered 8), that Persia had ants the size of foxes, and that lion cubs clawed their way out of the womb. It’s pretty clear that Herodotus freely intermingled facts and myths.
No complete contemporaneous manuscript of Herodotus’s Histories, purportedly written around 440 BC, has come down to us. The earliest extant manuscript is from the 10th century AD, some 1,400 years later, and it is undoubtedly some combination of fact, gossip, hearsay, fiction, and scribal interpolation.
But it’s a nice story.
In 2,000 years, people might question Brigadier General McAuliffe’s response to the German surrender request (“Nuts”).
While Herodotus and the later scribes probably embellished, reworded, mistranslated, misinterpreted, and interpolated missing sections, Leonidas’ response does not seem implausible, but there is no way to really know.
What we do not know far outweighs what we know, and this includes the past 100 to 150 years ago in the US. Eventually, much of today’s slang and technical jargon will become accepted as standard English, but even today, the entomology of much of it is unknown or wrong.
Furthermore, philology is important to understanding any written works, but I do not think there are very many philologists around. In 1,000 years, what is a historian to make of “a bad cat”? Was it a misbehaving feline animal, or was it a really cool guy. If it was a “cool guy”, what temperature does a guy need to be in order to be cool?
The differences between McAuliffe and Leonidas are
1) we’re pretty sure that McAuliffe existed. Leonidas might well be mythical.
2) In 2,000 years there will still be extant tens of thousands of references to McAuliffe’s retort (maybe even including the comments section of this blog) rather than the single, lonely report in a manuscript of unknown accuracy written 1,400 years after the events it was reporting.
I really hope the response to Phillip II of Macedon was real, the “if” response, since it was so perfect. However, that does make one wonder.
Steve
Which office is he running for?
The comment section of this blog will be a reliable source? I’ve got to step up my game.
GEORGE WASHINGTON FOR PRESIDENT!!!
steve:
I actually prefer the other reported response of the Spartan ephors to Philip. When Philip sent a dispatch asking if they wanted him to come as a friend or foe, their one word reply was “Neither”.