The Persian wars were a time of incredible upheaval for Greece as many of her city states fought against daunting odds to preserve their autonomy against a vast empire, the size of which was not even comprehended by the small poleis of the Greek mainland and whose manpower and resources far outstripped anything that the Greeks, even allied, could muster. The events are most famously recorded by the historian Herodotus, who wrote some fifty years after the war about not just the events themselves but also about the rise of Persia and the histories of the two main Greek states who fought against her, Athens and Sparta. As a presentation of the Persian wars Herodotus’ account provides a wealth of information about not only the war but the cultures and history of the Persians and the Greeks. Additionally we also have the play the Persae, written by Aeschylus, eight years after the end of the Persian wars, which includes an account of the Battle of Salamis and, in a bold artistic advance, pictures events from the Persian perspective. Both presentations of the Persian wars provide us with information, or at least perspectives of what happened then but they also reveal aspects and characteristics of the time in which they were written and in this essay I shall explore a little into what we may learn about the contexts in which the works of Aeschylus and Herodotus were produced.
Aeschylus’ portrayal of the Persian wars is, as may be expected of a tragedy, set along dramatic lines. Performed just eight years after the tumultuous year of the Persian invasion, it depicts the return of the bedraggled Xerxes to his royal court at Susa devoid of his navy after having lost the battle of Salamis. The position of the Persians is a pretty poor one for they are depicted as being in a state of utter defeat. The historical context is one which in which Athens was an ascendant state its victory over the Persians at Salamis had left it with a sizable, professional navy with which it had gained the nucleus of what would later become, effectively, an Athenian naval empire stretching throughout the Aegean. Ascendant and victorious as she may have been, Athens still bore the scars of invasion. Her acropolis remained a blackened ruin, a monument to the savagery of the Persians who had put it to the torch in 480BCE. As with the city so too with its people, the terrible but glorious memories of evacuating Athens, watching her in flames from the island of Salamis , crushing the Persian navy in the straits off that same island, and playing a role in applying the final coup de grace at Plataea in 479BCE would have been fresh in their collective memory. Aeschylus himself was a member of the marathonomakhai, the hoplites who had fought at the earlier battle of Marathon in 490BCE when Athens had all but stood alone against a Persian invasion force led by Darius’ lieutenant Datis. In 478BCE, allied Greek states had sent out a naval expedition to free Cyprus from Persian control and as Margaret Miller suggests it was this expedition and its consequent (yet short-lived) success that led to Cyprus becoming the “locus of Greco-Phoenician and possibly Greco-Persian contact.”[1] The fall of Byzantium in 477BCE resulted in the capture of high ranking Persians who, though late released in suspicious circumstances, would have provided some insight into Persian culture for Greeks who had only ever seen Persians on the battlefield in a state of desperate combat or ignominious death.
The very subject matter of Aeschylus’ Persae is indicative of a great level of interest in Persia and the Persians, perhaps inevitable for a people whose only previous contact had been military confrontations and who were beginning to gain some further insights into what had essentially been a bogeyman figure.
Regardless of these gradual exchanges with the Persians, Aeschylus’ play provides the stereotypical image of the Mede as seen from a Greco-centric point of view. As such there is great emphasis upon the arrow as the primary weapon of the Persians; there are images of “Archers whose valiant fingers draw arrows to the ear”[2], “Asia’s conquering bows”[3], the slightly tongue in cheek question “has the drawn bow made Hellas quail?”[4] All these lines have an underlying tone of contempt and ridicule especially when contrasted to the image of the Athenians as those who “carry stout shields, and fight hand-to-hand with spears”[5] as well as the perceived uselessness of ranged weapons in the messengers report “our bows and arrows were no help; there overwhelmed by crashing prows, we watched a nation sink and die.”[6] Much is being made of the traditional image of the Persian coward and his love of the bow. Equally there is the image of the Persians as cowardly and melodramatic creatures in Xerxes’ actions as he “wailed aloud, and tore his clothes, weeping”[7] but it is really in the appearance of Greek customs in the actions of the Persian characters that it becomes clear that this is the Greek hackneyed cliché of the Persian. The image is a theatrical model exacerbating those characteristics which are allegedly oriental. This is indicative of several social and political realities of the time, a lack of actual knowledge about Persian customs and culture, and a residual sense of fear that required the public exorcism of ridicule upon the stage, the Greeks reduced the Persians to something they understood and in so doing could begin to overcome their fear of them. No attempt at representing Persian gods or Persian customs is made and perhaps this may have been due simply to the already stated fact that the Greeks did not know enough about the Persians to understand them in any other way than as the grossly, distorted caricatures that appear in this play. As far as the historical context informs us Persia and Greece had met only through war and the threat of war and the Persae is a good example of how war does not provide a providential basis for cultural exchange. So it is that we have the chorus of Persian nobles cry to Zeus[8], Atossa offers libations to the dead and propitiary gifts to the gods in semblance of Greek custom[9], and even Xerxes himself appeals to Zeus. As Persian inscriptions such as Behistun and later inscriptions such as that from Hamadan (ancient Ecbatana), in which Artaxerxes invokes divine protection for a royal building, it is Ahura mazda that is the supreme god of Persian culture not Zeus.
What of the Greeks themselves? Aeschylus, by effectively speaking about his own city via the medium of an external enemy, provides us with a couple of insights into the political and social climate of the time. The importance of democracy is evident in the Chorus’ line “they [the Athenians] are not called servants to any man”[10], this is a reasonably clear indication that the age of tyranny was over, and that an Athenian citizen as Pericles would go on to say “is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person.”[11] The Persian lack of understanding of democracy is inherent in the line “can they, masterless, resist invasion?”There is, as would be expected of a play by an Athenian for Athenians, a central focus upon the role of Athens during the Persian war. The chorus states that Xerxes’ reason for attacking Athens is because “Athens once conquered, he is master of Hellas”[12] suggesting a view of Athens as hegemon of the loose collection of allied Greek states. As well as just being the self-aggrandizement that one might expect in such a play this view may have reflected the political reality of Athens’ taking over the leadership of the Hellenic alliance, which as we see in Diodorus’ account was a serious cause of concern to the Spartans and nearly resulted in a military conflict between the two states[13]
As a portrayal of one’s defeated enemies only eight years after said enemy had razed one’s city to the ground, it is almost a little much to believe that the Persae is genuinely sympathetic. It might be easier to understand the Persae less as a sympathetic play and more of a vengeful one. Engaged in a tug of war in the Aegean with Xerxes’ remaining forces, the Athenians may have felt a little cheated of total retribution for the destruction of their city. They had won the battle of Salamis but played a less vital role in the land battle of Plataea. Aeschylus seems to concede that Plataea was a Spartan victory in the line “on the Plataean plain the Dorian lance shall pour blood, in unmeasured sacrifice”[14] whilst conversely the concentration upon the battle of Salamis helps to get across the idea that Salamis was indeed regarded as an Athenian victory.
We can perceive a sense of general anger in the astonished question of the queen Atossa “what safe? Is Athens then not ravaged at all?”[15]and it’s response from the Messenger that “while she has men, a city’s bulwarks stand unmoved.” This reveals a possible self-consciousness in Athenian society, for Athens, as already mentioned had been ravaged on no less than two occasions. Indeed as Herodotus recorded later in the century, Xerxes, considering whether to leave Mardonius to finish the job in Greece, is advised by Artemisia that
“if anything happens to Mardonius, it doesn’t really matter; besides, if the Greeks win, it won’t be an important victory, because they will only have destroyed one of your slaves. The whole point of this campaign of yours was to burn Athens to the ground; you’ve done that, so now you can leave”[16]
The propaganda of war and the machinery of spin appears to be in full motion in both Aeschylus’ glossing over of Athens’ destruction and Artemisia’s highlighting of it. A certain level of insecurity seems understandable in the Athenian mindset and consequently the Persae could be viewed as an exercise in propaganda, concentrating itself on the misery and suffering of the Persians in order to provide a counterbalance to the devastation of Athens. There is mention of Marathon in the earlier part of the play and the reasons for this are rather self explanatory but this all but disappears in the entrance of the ghost of Darius. Questions over why the ghost of Darius should escape the reminder that he too fell afoul of Greek arms lead to further questions as to the literal context of the Persae. Simonides in composing his elegy about the Greek victory of Plataea compared the Persian wars with the Trojan wars; the sheer inherent drama made it a suitable subject for transposition into verse and onto stage. As the heroes of Marathon and Salamis began to replace the gods, mythological heroes and the heroes of the Trojan War in both the visual and the literal arts they also began to assume the roles and the morality of the tradition they inherited. Thus the historical figure of Darius assumed the role of the wise man ignored, a Nestor attempting to reconcile Agamemnon and Achilles. Of course he was too late and Xerxes had already committed the folly of overreaching himself but it was important to get across the lesson that Xerxes’ error had been his hubris in attempting to conquer Greece. Darius is the contrast necessary to highlight this stunning folly and so we see a marked deviation from historical reality in comparison between father and son. The chorus even go as far to say that
“when our good king Darius, aged, all powerful, invincible, ruled like god over Persia…from battle our men returned without loss, unwearied, victorious, to their homes”[17]
Since there is no mention of the 6400 Persian troops who never returned from the field of Marathon it would appear that the historical facts are being warped to fit a dramatic device that owes much to the mythology of previous literature.
What Aeschylus’ presentation of Salamis as part of the Persian war suggests is a state which had survived against great odds and was rightly proud of its achievements. Politically it was secure in its democratic constitution and vocal about the benefits that this apparently brought. Socially, however, it remained slightly insecure about the damage it had sustained at the hands of its enemies, a factor which led to this depiction in art of the extent of its victory over its opponents and the depth of the losses that it had inflicted upon them.
Herodotus’ account of the Persian wars reveals a great deal more about the political and social contexts if a little less about the literal contexts of the time than Aeschylus’ Persae. This itself may be no more than a consequence of its composition, for whilst the histories were certainly intended to be read out to others, Herodotus was not an outright playwright but more a combination of researcher, journalist, historian and professor of ring composition. Herodotus’ work reflects a much more complex understanding of Persia by the Greek states and a much less cohesive relationship among themselves. For a start, at the time that Herodotus began writing his histories Athens and Sparta were on a collision course which would see the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war and ultimately the collapse of the Athenian empire. With the history of Athens and Sparta and their previous alliance featuring heavily in the histories it is likely that Herodotus wrote with a view that this history viewed from his own time might reflect upon the issues of the present day.
The histories begin with the rise of Persian power, the rapid expansion of the Achemenid Empire and its explosive contact with mainland Greece. There can be little doubt that issues pertaining to imperial expansion were informed by the increasingly overbearing attitude of Athens as hegemon of the Delian league. Historical fact viewed from the perspective of modern events and being understood via the inevitable anachronistic perceptions of the time, Herodotus’ account can tell us a great deal of what was happening in the political sphere of the late 5th century Greek world. Sara Forsdyke notes the similarities between the argument used by Xerxes in Herodotus 7, 11, that the Persians must “act or suffer” in attacking Greece before Greece attacked them, with the similarly pre-emptive tone used by the Corinthians in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War when admonishing the Spartans to move against Athens’ imperial interests[18]. Indeed there is even a direct reference to the Persian invasion when the Corinthian delegate points the finger of blame at the Spartans “we all know that the Persians, coming from the ends of the earth, reached right to the Peloponnese before meeting any opposition worth the name from you; and now you are choosing to ignore the Athenians”[19] and again in the same passage another parallel between Xerxes’ mistakes and the failings of the Athenians themselves makes it clear that the Athenian empire is being identified as similar to that of the Persians. We can assume Herodotus is using the example of Persian expansion and defeat as a model criticism of Athenian expansionism and that this perhaps says more about contemporary political debate than it does about what debates may have taken place between Xerxes and Persian nobles. Given the fact that Thucydides’ account echoes some of the arguments being used at the time that Herodotus was writing it seems likely that Herodotus would have been influenced by these more than whatever sources he could rely on fifty years after the conclusion of the Persian wars. Forsdyke also notes the comments of Herodotus on poverty and hardship resulting in a tough people whilst avarice and luxury create a soft people and argues that “Herodotus’ use of the anecdote about Pausanius’ ridicule of Persian wealth [and subsequent fall from grace due to that which he had ridiculed] therefore serves as an ironic symbol of the corruption of Greece by eastern wealth and luxury”[20] Additionally Herodotus records Demaratus as pointing out that “there has never been a time when poverty was not a factor in the rearing of the Greeks, but their courage has been acquired as a result of intelligence and the force of the law” and that “Greece has relied on this courage to keep poverty and despotism at bay.”[21] This may in itself be a reference to the gradual enrichment of Greece and increase of Eastern wealth as part of a corruption of the Greek character. Certainly iconographic evidence suggests that a culture of luxury persisted through the reactionary disdain of habrosynai (luxuries) and that wealthy Athenians “embraced Persian luxury and incorporated into their own world some of its symbols and practices.”[22] This provides considerable support for the idea that this austerity that was seen as so beneficial to the psychological and physical make-up of the Greek character had been ameliorated and watered down by the gradual and inevitable influx of Eastern wealth into Athens. The outstanding buildings including the Parthenon were indicative of this new sense of ornithotrophia (conspicuous display.) If Herodotus is indeed drawing attention to this subject it is an interesting insight into the social concerns of the time. It also sheds light upon Pericles announcement that “we regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than something to boast about”[23] as less of a statement of identity and more as a response to criticism. The presentation of the Spartans in the speech of Demaratus reveals a strict opposition to anything that would result in slavery for Greece, which may possibly reflect a contemporary view held in Herodotus’ time that the Spartans stood in opposition to attempts to impose any form of hegemony upon Greece; whilst this may have been true only in the most superficial of senses it certainly seems to be the case that the Spartans did stand in opposition to an increasingly bellicose Athens and painted themselves as liberators of Greece during the Peloponnesian war. It does seem that small island states that found themselves in thrall to Athens saw the Spartans as liberators up until the point that they were actually ‘liberated.’ Further into the conversation between Demaratus and Xerxes, Herodotus also outlines a similar view of the Greeks as autonomous and the Persian as failing to understand the benefit of this as was outlined in Aeschylus. Xerxes cannot understand how a man would, of his own free will, stand against a numerically superior force without being marshalled by a single man and “urged on by the whip.”[24] When this is compared with Herodotus’ glowing review of democracy in 5, 78, in which he regards Athenian courage as being founded upon self-determination it seems reasonable to conclude that democracy was a deep rooted ideology in Greek political thought and that it was seen to foster the better elements in its adherents.
In his presentation of the battle of Salamis, Herodotus provides an interesting insight into the nature of the times in which he lived. He records that those who remained neutral within the Peloponnese were as good as “collaborating with the Persians”, which is suggestive of a certain sense of justification for later actions, or moral authority within those states who did oppose the Persians. Indeed Forsdyke again notes that “the Athenians of Herodotus’ generation used the example of their ancestors exploits in the Persian wars as a reason for the maintenance and extension of Athenian power.”[25] Herodotus also records the uncertainty, dispute, and division within the Greek camp before the eventual decision to go out and face the Persian fleet. In 8, 84 Herodotus reveals the kind of mythologizing, which has taken place and the level of prestige that involvement in the battle brought to individual states as the Athenians claim first contact with the Persians whilst the Aeginetans claim that it was a ship sent to Aegina that scored the first kill. In both a social and political context this indicates that the actions of the Persian wars were being incorporated into the cultural identities of individual states in much the same way that the myths of the past had been. Equally accusations of cowardice or collaboration could still be relevant, as can be seen in 8, 94 as Herodotus records a rumour put about by the Athenians that the Corinthian contingent was retreating from the battle, missing the major part of it. This indicates that for political purposes accusation or affirmations of cowardice or heroism during the Persian wars was relevant in contemporary debate, as may be seen in the speech of Sthenelaidas, who accuses the Athenians of “blowing their own trumpet”[26] as regards the Persian wars but notes, correctly in my view, that past good deeds do not provide a moral blank cheque for present wrongdoings. At 7, 139 Herodotus provides a clear picture of the prevailing opinion about the conflict with Persia and the roles played by each state for he expresses his own whilst acknowledging it to be unfashionable. This view is that, had Athens surrendered to Xerxes, the Peloponnese would have fallen too and that the Spartans “would have been left all alone”, he concedes that the Spartans would have gone down fighting but that ultimately they would have been isolated, outmanoeuvred and destroyed and that Greece would have been enslaved. If Herodotus believed that such a view would ruffle a great deal of feathers it must have been because the popular view was that it was the Spartans who saw off the Persian invaders, presumably because of their main role in the battle of Plataea, and that Athens had played the auxiliary role. Whatever the truth of the matter it points to a divergence in popular opinion, possibly down what could be called party lines, between those who believed Sparta to have been the ultimate saviour of Greece and those who believed it to be Athens. This in turn points to the politicization of the issue, the bipolarity of the Greek world between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies and the destructive break down in relations between two states which had previously stood together in defending Greece.
To briefly summarise, the different presentations of the Persian wars with their views of the Persians and the Greeks themselves provide clues and hints as to the nature of the times that they were written. Aeschylus’ Persae was a bold play but it reveals the general lack of knowledge on behalf of the Athenians about who the Persians really were, it indicates that the populace still keenly felt the effect of the wars so much so that there seems to be some grim satisfaction in the description of the slaughter of the Persian garrison on Psyttalea. Herodotus provides a marvellous insight into the troubles of his own time by the depiction of the troubles of the past so much so that it may even be the case that his histories were intended as a form of commentary upon the dangers of Athenian imperialism. We certainly learn a great deal about the longer term effect that the Persian wars had upon Greek identity, the material changes that she underwent as she went on from her victory to expand across the Aegean and, in the case of Athens, build a naval empire, and we learn about the doubts and the concerns that were being voiced as the Greeks slid towards an internecine war between states which had once combined to see off a common enemy.
[1] Miller, pg 10
[2] Aeschylus, 46-75
[3] Aeschylus, 76-99
[4] Aeschylus, 140-175
[5] Aeschylus, 218-244
[6] Aeschylus, 278-310
[7] Aeschylus, 468-508
[8] Aeschylus, 509-544
[9] Aeschylus, 581-651
[10] Aeschylus, 218-244
[11] Thucydides, 2, 41
[12] Aeschylus, 218-244
[13] Diodorus, 11-50, it was the intervention of Hetoimaridas that talked the Spartans round to not disputing the Athenians command at sea.
[14] Aeschylus, 800-836
[15] Aeschylus, 311-352
[16] Herodotus, 8, 102
[17] Aeschylus, 837-887
[18] Forsdyke, pg 229
[19] Thucydides, 1, 69
[20] Forsdyke, pg 232
[21] Herodotus, 7, 102
[22] Miller, pg 189
[23] Thucydides, 2, 40
[24] Herodotus, 7, 103
[25] Forsdayke, pg 229
[26] Thucydides, 1, 86
