aking the oars of some ship and then returning to ram it when
disabled. Both methods were employed in early Greek as well as in Roman
warfare.]

[Footnote 56: Dio has evidently imitated at this point a sentence in
Herodotos, VIII, 6 (as shown by the phraseology), where it is remarked
that "the Persians [at Artemisium] were minded not to let a single soul"
of the Greeks escape. The expression is, in general, a proverbial one,
applied to utter destruction, especially in warfare. Its source is
Greek, and lies in the custom of the Spartans (see Xenophon, Polity of
the Lacedaemonians, chapter 13, section 2), which required the presence
in their army of a priest carrying fire kindled at the shrine of Zeus
the Leader, in Sparta, this sacred fire being absolutely essential to
the proper conduct of important sacrifices. Victors would naturally
spare such a priest on account of his sacred character; he regularly
possessed the inviolability attaching also to heralds and envoys: and
the proverb that represents him as being slain is (as Suidas notes) an
effective bit of epigrammatic exaggeration. Other references to this
proverb may be found (by those interested) in Rawlinson's note on the
above passage of Herodotos, in one of the scholia on the Phoenician
Maidens of Euripides (verse 1377), in Sturz's Xenophontean Lexicon, in
Stobaios's _Florilegium_ (XLIV, 41, excerpt from Nicolaos in
Damascenos), in Zenobios's _Centuria_ (V, 34), and finally in the
dictionaries of Suidas and Hesychios.

The following slight variations as to the origin of the phrase are to be
found in the above. The scholiast on Euripides states that in early
times before the trumpet was invented, it was customary for a
torch-bearer to perform the duties of a trumpeter. Each of any two
opposing armies would have one, and the two priests advancing in front
of their respective armies would cast their torches into the intervening
space and then be allowed to retire unmolested before the clash
occurred. Zenobios, a gatherer of proverbs, uses the word "seer" instead
of priest. That the saying was an extremely common one seems to be
indicated by the rather naive definition of Hesychios: _Fire-Bearer._ The
man bearing fire. Also, the only man saved in war.

Of course, this may be simply the unskillful condensation of an
authority.]

[Footnote 57: Reading [Greek: autas] (as Boissevain) in preference to
[Greek: autous] ("upon them").]

[Footnote 58: About sixty miles.