CHAPTER 26
BRUCE LAFORSE
SHORTLY before the fateful battle of Cunaxa (401), Cyrus the Younger, the man who would be Great King, addressed his Greek officers telling them why they fought and how their lives would be enriched if they should defeat the army of his brother, Artaxerxes II. In his speech (Xen. An. 1.7.3–4), Cyrus draws on three common Greek perceptions that form part of a larger (and by then long-standing) Greek stereotype of the barbarian, the barbarian world, and the Greeks’ relationship with it. The first is that Greeks are “better and braver” and therefore a smaller number of them, Cyrus implies, can easily defeat a vast horde of barbarians. The calm, steadfast discipline and the courage of the Greeks will prevail over the noisy, ill-organized, and cowardly barbarians. Second, Cyrus says that he envies the Greeks their freedom, which he would rather have than all his own wealth and more. According to the stereotype, the Greeks, because they live in small, independent city-states under the rule of law, are free. By contrast, everyone in the Persian realm, apart from the Great King himself, even a prince such as Cyrus, was in Greek eyes not free but a slave (see Xen. An. 1.9.28–29; Eur. Hel. 276; Missiou 1993: 377–91). Hence Cyrus’s supposed envy of his Greek troops’ freedom. Third, Cyrus presents the Persian Empire as vast, wealthy, and, because it is defended by barbarians, easy for an army of Greeks to acquire. He expands on this point, telling the Greeks (1.7.6–7) they should not worry about the size of their reward as much since there were not enough of them to reward!
The chief elements of this stereotype of the Greek-barbarian dichotomy date back to the fifth-century Persian Wars; its roots, though, go back further still and can be glimpsed in the works of Archaic era poets such as Archilochus, Sappho, and Mimnermus, perhaps even Homer. The elements of the dichotomy are both clear and vague at once. The term barbarian, for example, most often refers to the Persians but by no means exclusively so; its limits were flexible and open to debate. There was no clear consensus in fourth-century Athens about the Greekness of the Macedonians, for example.
The surprising Greek repulse of the Persian invasions in the early fifth century produced the rough outlines. The Greeks, though comparatively poor, were politically independent, lived under the rule of law, valued free speech, and fought mainly in close-ordered ranks as hoplites: heavily armed infantrymen who fought hand to hand with shield and spear. The Persians lived as slaves under the rule of a capricious and all-powerful tyrant, amid debilitating luxury and plenty; they fought in vast, undisciplined armies, preferred weapons that struck from a distance such as the bow, or fought as cavalry. Often they had to be whipped into battle. These traits appear in numerous permutations, combinations, and varying degrees of fullness depending on the context, genre, date, and purposes of the writer or speaker. The general outline of the stereotype, however, is clear: Greeks were masculine, disciplined, self-ruled, free, hard, while barbarians were feminine, emotional, cowardly, cruel, enslaved, soft. More often than not the details were vague and necessarily so; the political and military realities of any given situation rarely approached the clarity of the stereotype in its purest form (which is not to imply that the stereotypes ever could represent actual conditions).
Indeed, the Greek success in the Persian Wars (499–479), from which the core beliefs of the Greek-barbarian stereotype arose, did not consistently reflect that dichotomy. For one thing, most Greek states fought on the Persian side (whether of necessity or in order to take advantage of the opportunity to get the upper hand in long-standing enmities with their Greek neighbors).1 Although Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea all arguably support the superiority of Greek hoplites over barbarian troops, the crucial victory at Salamis, a naval battle, does not fit the pattern as neatly. Similarly, the work that first lays out clearly the Greek-barbarian dichotomy, Aeschlyus’s Persae (472), also contains elements that undercut it. Present are the Greek reliance on hand-to-hand fighting with spears versus the Persian preference for the bow, as well as the portrait of the grasping, tyrannical, hubristic Eastern monarch in Xerxes (see E. Hall 1989: 56–100 for a full analysis of the Persae and its presentation of The Other). Yet the ghost of Darius, who laments Xerxes’s arrogance and folly, is an Eastern ruler of an entirely different and much more positive type, one that continued to appear in Greek writing (alongside the negative stereotype), notably in Xenophon (e.g., Oeconomicus 4.4–25,Cyropaedia, and the Younger Cyrus in the Persian Expedition) and Plato (Laws III 694b).
Herodotus’s history of the Persian Wars follows this pattern. Often the narrative reflects and reinforces the dichotomy. For example, Herodotus relates a conversation near the start of the invasion in which the exiled Spartan king Demaratus tells Xerxes that the Greeks’ independence and allegiance to the rule of law is what makes them formidable warriors who will fight regardless of the odds against them. Xerxes, however, refuses to believe that men will fight effectively if they are free and not under the compulsion of a single master (7.102–104). But in key ways Herodotus undercuts the stereotype. Demaratus, for example, refers specifically only to Dorian Greeks and in particular to Spartans; he pointedly excludes all other Greeks.2 Thus the Greek norm is not monolithic. In similar fashion barbarians do not always conform to the stereotype. Herodotus says that at Plataea the Persians matched the Greeks in courage and strength, though their equipment and training were inferior (9.62).
In the late fifth and throughout the fourth centuries Greek writers and speakers typically invoke Greek/barbarian stereotypes in contexts where they have little or no bearing on the immediate political or military conditions which, of course, in no way resemble those obtaining during the Persian Wars of a century or so earlier. The speech of Cyrus the Younger cited above is a case in point. Here the Greeks are not in a contest pitting Greek freedom against Persian tyranny. Rather the Greeks are mercenaries serving one side in a dynastic struggle within the Persian royal house; this is Persian against Persian, with Cyrus attempting to seize his brother’s throne. Nonetheless Cyrus casts his speech entirely in terms of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy: Greek skill and discipline versus an unorganized and noisy horde of barbarians; Greek freedom versus his own slavery; the vast wealth of Asia, poorly defended, awaiting those brave enough to take it. Patently, none of these points applied, at least not directly. But with a battle imminent Cyrus needed to boost the Greeks’ morale, bolster their loyalty, and spur their willingness to fight. Regardless of how inflated Xenophon’s numbers for the opposing army might be, there is no question that Artaxerxes’s troops considerably outnumbered the Greeks and Cyrus’s army. Arguably the most attractive inducement at Cyrus’s disposal was the potential wealth and power he might bestow once on the throne. However, there are some indications that at least some Greeks saw mercenary service as less than honorable and to some degree demeaning.3 Cyrus therefore took a tactful approach. He suggests that the largess he could distribute to his loyal followers as Great King would be the natural outcome of a Greek-led victory.
How did it come about that by the end of the fifth century even a Persian could give a speech to a Greek audience exploiting Greek stereotypes about Greeks and barbarians not only without eliciting a skeptical response but even to great positive effect? How did the Greeks, at least in some contexts, come to view themselves and foreigners in terms of these stereotypes; to what extent did they believe in, and act on, them? Addressing these questions requires glancing, briefly, at the development of Greek ethnicity, a focus of much recent scholarly work and debate (cf. J. Hall 2007; 2002; 1997; Malkin 2001; Isaac 2004; Mitchell 2007). A popular approach has been to posit that the Greeks defined what made them Greek by comparing themselves to peoples who were different and using them as a mirror (e.g., Hartog 1988; V. D. Hanson plays on this in the title of his 1995 book on nonelite Greeks, The Other Greeks.). This modern model of defining one by what one is not, that is, by The Other, though clearly useful in illuminating Greek perceptions of ethnic identity, has also occasionally obscured, or distracted attention from, relationships that do not easily fit a bipartite model (cf. Malkin 2001: 12–14 on the limitations of The Other, and Harrison 2000: 41–2). The Greek world, the non-Other world that the model supposes, was far from monolithic, despite the famous Athenian statement in Herodotus (8.144) that Greek ethnic solidarity rested on shared blood, language, temples, rituals, and customs. There was, of course, no united political entity called Greece; instead there were approximately a thousand independent city-states scattered throughout the Mediterranean world. Relations among them, notoriously, often were hostile. Moreover, spread out, as they were, all along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts and across three continents, different city-states bordered a wide range of Others. Within each city-state there were several groupings, such as tribe, clan, and economic class, that were at least as likely (if not more so) to claim priority as an individual’s chief means of identifying himself as was his Greekness, or even in some instances his membership in a particular city-state’s community.4 Of the items on the Herodotean list cited above some scholars recently have begun to question the extent to which language functioned as a shared characteristic.5 A similar reappraisal points out the numerous contrasts and idiosyncrasies in religious practices among city-states (Malkin 2001: 13–14; Cartledge 1993/2002: 177; E. Hall 1989: 173–80; cf. Thuc. 3.94). In short, there are reasons to suspect that the Athenians in Herodotus’s quote may have overstated the case. Furthermore, some of the characteristics that many if not most city-states shared are social and economic distinctions, not ethnic. Thus, intermarriage and ritualized guest-friendships, common between Greek and even non-Greek aristocrats, might make identification among elites, regardless of ethnicity or political allegiance, stronger than a tie between an elite and a commoner based solely on belonging to the same polis community (Mitchell 2007: 39–43; J. Hall 2007: 261). Recognition of shared values among elites, however, in no way guaranteed political unity, as the fierce rivalry among powerful families such as the Alcmaeonids, Philaids, and Peisistratids of sixth-century Attica attests.
To illustrate how key aspects of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy developed there follows a survey of the literary evidence from Homer through the fourth century. It in no way aims to be comprehensive or even broadly representative. Rather, it presents a few selected striking examples that should provide a general sense of how the stereotypes developed.
HOMER
The earliest Western work of literature, Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800) is set against a backdrop of war between Europeans (Greeks) and Asians (Trojans).6 Yet in the poem Trojans and Greeks are all but completely indistinguishable;7 none of the later Greek/barbarian stereotypes that Cyrus draws on, for example, appear. Both sides use the same weapons and tactics, both sides fight according to a single set of conventions and rules (van Wees 2004: 161–2). It is sometimes argued that Homer depicts the Greeks fighting in silent, orderly formations against a noisy and chaotic mass of Trojans and their allies. But in the two passages most frequently cited (3.1–9; 4.427–38) to support this assertion it is not Trojan disorder in the ranks that Homer highlights with his similes but rather the cacophonous sounds of the various languages spoken by the Trojans and their multiethnic allies (Baldry 1965: 9). In fact, the Trojans clearly do fight in disciplined formations when appropriate or necessary, for example when they have chased the Greeks back to the ditch and fortifications protecting the ships. The Trojans dismount from their chariots and form up into five well-ordered battalions (12.75–110).8
The heroes on both sides belonged to the same aristocratic world and shared in its values (as opposed to those of the commoners or demos). As a prelude to engaging in combat the Greek Diomedes and the Lycian Glaucus (a Trojan ally) announce to one another their respective genealogies (6.119–235). They discover that their grandfathers were guest-friends, an important form of ritualized friendship (xenos/xenia). Diomedes proposes that they respect the old alliance and not fight each other but instead find others to kill (6.215; 224–9). Diomedes and Glaucus belong to the same world. They share a common history, have the same gods, the same values, and fight by the same rules and conventions. In short, they in no way supply for one another a noticeably different Other. The scene stresses their sameness.
In the world of the Iliad the distinction between Greek and Trojan was not as sharply defined as that between elite and commoner (cf. e.g., 12.310–321). Homer does not provide much information on individual commoners on either side except for the striking portrait of the Greek rabble-rouser Thersites with whom Odysseus tangles before a meeting of the army (2.211–269). Odysseus had much more in common with Hector or Glaucus, clearly, than with Thersites who, though Homer depicts him as for the most part ugly, tactless, and abusive, is not an entirely unsympathetic figure; his fellows felt sorry for him even as they laughed at him (2.270).
ARCHAIC ERA POETRY
In the seventh and sixth centuries the rise of the Lydian and Persian empires, and their subjugation of the Greek cities along the west coast of what is now Turkey, began to sharpen a Greek perception of difference (Harrison 2002: 3–4 discusses elements of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy before the Persian Wars). In the Greek poetry of this period, which survives today chiefly in fragments, the Lydians, Medes (often = Persians), and Persians represent fabulous luxury and wealth, though not always necessarily in a negative way; the Eastern empires signified sophistication too (see further Millett, 49–52). Alcman (mid-to late seventh century) captures this in a poem (West 1993: 34, fragment 16) that contrasts the rusticity of a Greek swineherd with the urbane refinements of a Lydian of lofty Sardis (note too Sappho’s approval of Lydian luxury (West 1993: 44, fr. 98).
Archilochus (seventh century), though, suggests that from a humble Greek’s point of view the Lydian ruler Gyges is excessively wealthy and ambitious, grasping for too much (West 1993: 9, fr. 19); so too Anacreon (West 1993: 104, fr. 361). Similarly, a fragment of Xenophanes (late sixth to early fifth century) describes in vividly damning detail how adapting a uselessly luxurious Lydian lifestyle led his fellow Greek citizens of Colophon to lose their freedom at the hands of Persians (West 1993: 158, fr. 3). Finally, a gnomic saying traditionally attributed to Phocylides (first half of the sixth century) argues that a well-ordered Greek city, no matter how small, is better than a wealthy Eastern imperial capital such as Nineveh (Lattimore 1960: 23).
These last two poems prefigure key elements of the later Greek/barbarian dichotomy. For Xenophanes luxury is useless and made the Colophonians easier to conquer. He also associates it with repressive rule. Phocylides compares favorably a small and well-governed (kata kosmon) Greek city with the failed imperial ambitions of foolish (aphrainouses) Nineveh. Still, while Lydia was a byword for luxury it was not therefore also inevitably decadent and weak; both Mimnermus (West 1993: 30, fr. 14) and Sappho (West 1993: 37, fr. 16) refer to the intimidating Lydian cavalry: the military might of the empires to the east was formidable (Mitchell 2007: 128).
The poetry from Homer until the Persian Wars contains only hints of the Greek/barbarian stereotypes that are to come. To the Greeks the imperial powers to the east are wealthy, sophisticated, and militarily powerful. It seems many Greeks found Eastern luxury alluring and they adopted Lydian and Persian fashions and customs. Even a critical poem like Archilochus’s renunciation of Gyges probably confirms an overall Greek fascination with such riches. The association of wealth with the East, of course, goes back to Priam’s Troy. However, the Greeks in the Iliad are not, by contrast, correspondingly poor. In the world of Homer’s successors in the seventh and sixth centuries the distinction in wealth between Greeks and the East is sharper and there are scattered hints that perhaps some Greeks saw advantages in their comparative poverty. But these hints are no more than that and quite rare.
AESCHYLUS: PERSAE
The stunning Greek repulse of Xerxes in 480/479, won despite seemingly overwhelming odds, and the immediately preceding period in which the Persian threat had loomed, helped crystallize a strong sense of Greek identity. Quite naturally this Greek identity defined itself in key ways as not Persian and as a result the Greek/barbarian dichotomy began to take a much fuller, discernible shape. However, aristocratic ties and sympathies across the dichotomy did not necessarily diminish significantly. Moreover, rivalries among Greeks, both within a polis and among poleis, remained strong, even fierce. At Athens, for example, supporters of the democracy linked its aristocratic opponents to a pro-Persian stance, not least because of Persia’s attempt in 490 to topple the democracy and reinstall the former Peisistratid tyrant Hippias in its place. The aristocratic Greeks’ taste for Eastern luxuries helped cement their identification, in democrats’ eyes, with the Persians (J. Hall 2007: 269–70; E. Hall 1989: 16). The defeat of Xerxes opened up space not for a united Greek world but for competition on a grander scale among Greeks. The Greeks may have had a heightened sense of what made them Greek (as opposed to Persian or barbarian) but they each also felt a correspondingly greater pride in their respective cities. These two paradoxical tendencies will continue to characterize Greek history through the fifth and fourth centuries, with the latter, polis patriotism, usually undercutting or modulating any trend toward greater Greek political unity.
Aeschylus’s Persae, presented in 472, establishes this pattern. It lays out for the first time the basic Greek/barbarian dichotomy. Yet at the same time it highlights the victories over Xerxes as distinctly Athenian, rather than simply Greek. Aeschylus presents Persia as fabulously wealthy, a vast empire encompassing a variety of peoples. The opening sixty lines of the play review the contingents of the enormous expedition Xerxes led out of Asia against Greece, elaborating Persian leaders and units, as well as those of the Egyptians, Lydians, Mysians, and Babylonians: Xerxes mustered the entire Orient. This power led the Persian King to overreach himself in the classical pattern of excessive wealth producing hubris that then leads to destruction (E. Hall 1989: 70). Xerxes, as Aeschylus presents him, rules absolutely and is accountable legally to nobody. His mother, the Persian Queen, as she awaits the news from Greece, tries to soothe her growing foreboding by reminding herself that even if his attempt to conquer the Greeks fails Persia cannot hold Xerxes accountable and that so long as he lives his reign will continue (210–14). Thus Xerxes can treat his subjects with a capricious cruelty; Aeschylus repeatedly underscores that Xerxes’s blind arrogance and folly led directly to the deaths of countless of his own soldiers. The Persian herald, for example, in describing the slaughter of Persian soldiers on the island of Psyttaleia notes that the troops themselves, who were in their prime, well-bred, and high-spirited, were hardly to blame (441–444; cf. also 740).
Persian rule for its Asian subjects meant paying tribute, being ruled as suppliants, making obeisance, no freedom of speech, in fact, no freedom at all. This description comes from the chorus of Persian elders as they lament Xerxes’s defeat and consider its ramifications, though the perspective is clearly Greek (584–597). Only the Great King is free; all his subjects are slaves. Xerxes’s defeat therefore has freed everyone else in Asia.
In Aeschylus the Persians value quantity and put a premium on having what would seem to be an overwhelming advantage in numbers of troops and ships. While their numbers are not insignificant—a reference to Marathon makes that point—the Athenians rely on skill and discipline. Unlike the Persians, whose chief weapon is the bow, the Athenians rely on spears and shields wielded in close formation. Greek honor gave pride of place to the heavy-armed hoplite infantryman who fought hand to hand with an eight-foot thrusting spear and a three-foot diameter concave shield of wood with a bronze overlay. This held true even in democratic Athens where far-reaching imperial ambitions gave wide scope for the use of light-armed troops, cavalry, and above all its navy (Osborne 2000: 21–42; Strauss 1996: 313–14; van Wees 2004: 45–60). The Greeks associated Persians and other barbarians, by contrast, with weaponry and tactics that avoided intense sustained fighting at close quarters, notably cavalry and above all the bow. In this passage the Persian Queen wonders if the Athenians, the Other from her perspective, are armed as the Persians are, “with bow plucked shaft.” Similarly, when the herald reports the vast extent of the Persian disaster he notes that, “in vain the crowd of arrows, massed, came on the hostile land” (268–271) and that “the bow protected none” (278).
Aeschylus further develops the contrast between Athenians and Persians in his description of the fighting at Salamis. This comes in the form of a dialogue between the herald and the Persian Queen. With typical Persian emphasis on quantity she asks first about the size of the Greek fleet. The Persians, we are told, held a seemingly overwhelming advantage, 1207 to 310 ships, but, as the herald notes, fortune sided with the Greeks; the Persians’ great numbers proved a disadvantage in the close confines of the Salamis straits. Greek guile played a role, too, as Xerxes believed a specious report that the Greeks would try to escape and therefore kept his fleet at their stations rowing all night (353–368). When battle begins the Greek ships advance in good order, their crews chanting the paean in unison; by contrast, “babel Persian tongues rose to meet it.” (406–7). A Greek ship struck first, ramming a Phoenician vessel, and for a while the two navies clashed in formation. But the Persian fleet, hampered by its size, soon became entangled in the narrow waters. The Greek ships circled and struck with a lethal precision until the Persian fleet fell apart.
Greek skill, discipline, love of freedom, and a dash of guile overcome the much larger but poorly led and less disciplined Persian fleet. The patriotic paean the Greeks sing at the outset (401–406), emphasizing freedom, contrasts strongly with Xerxes’s threat to behead any Persian who lets the Greeks escape (361–371). The Persians fare equally badly on land. Xerxes stationed Persian infantry on the little island of Psyttaleia near the entrance to the straits of Salamis in order to kill shipwrecked Greeks but “he conned the future ill.” Athenian hoplites annihilate them.
Seeing these twin defeats from his vantage point on a nearby hill Xerxes orders his troops to retreat and they flee in disorder (469–471). By giving equal weight and prominence to the action on Psyttaleia, a small if brutal and bloody sideshow to the main naval engagement, Aeschylus has the more aristocratic hoplite class at Athens share credit for the overall victory with the demos-dominated navy.9 Aeschylus assigns the lion’s share of the blame for both Persian defeats to Xerxes (361–363): he succumbed to Greek guile before the sea battle and he miscalculated badly in placing troops on Psyttaleia. This both underscores the failings of tyrannical rule and, along with the vivid descriptions of the violence of the battles, creates, perhaps, a little sympathy for the rank and file of Xerxes’s force who suffer so horrifically because of his flawed leadership. Aeschylus highlights the excellence of the Persian infantry who died on Psyttaleia in a way that may, perhaps, betray a preference or at least a greater respect for infantry than for navy men (441–444): they were good men betrayed by a bad leader. A similar sentiment appears later in Herodotus’s account of Persian courage at Plataea where it is inferior equipment that lets them down (9.62). There is nothing here to suggest that the Persian rank and file lost because their luxurious lifestyle had made them soft and vulnerable. Instead Aeschylus seems to assign the blame overall to Xerxes’s arrogance and failure to stay within reasonable boundaries (e.g., 129–130; 739–750; 803–807). Still, the Persians themselves bear some blame for the disaster, as the ghost of Darius notes, they plundered and burned many Greek temples and altars (809–815).
In the Persae Aeschylus presents the victorious Greeks as free men, fighting collectively in disciplined well-organized fashion, their numbers and resources comparatively modest. Xerxes capriciously wields his immense army and navy, reckless of their safety, and accountable to nobody. His wealth, resources, and ambitions are limitless. The Greeks rely primarily on the spear and prefer hand-to-hand fighting; the Persians prefer the bow. Aeschylus’s battle of Salamis likewise highlights Greek skill, discipline, and intelligence. These differences become key components of the Greeks’ sense of themselves and of their stereotype of barbarians.
And yet Aeschylus occasionally undercuts the dichotomy, or even highlights similarities between Greeks and Persians. The Persian Queen dreams that Xerxes tries to yoke two sisters to a chariot, one, who lived in Greece, dressed in Doric robes, the other wearing Persian clothes and living in Asia. The Persian woman accepts the bridle with proud obedience; the Greek breaks the harness and overturns the chariot and Xerxes. While the Greek sister differs in her preference for freedom, the two women are nonetheless sisters, thus related, and both are beautiful, spotless, and splendidly dressed (180–200).
Finally, the Persae presents the victory at Salamis overwhelmingly as an Athenian triumph, one that reflects well on both the hoplites and the rowers of the navy, rather than simply a Greek victory. This foreshadows the often undercutting role polis patriotism will frequently play in later fifth-century and fourth-century manifestations of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy.
HERODOTUS
In the introduction to his account of the Persian Wars, Herodotus distinguishes Greeks from barbarians. But he also notes that both peoples performed deeds worthy of glory and commemoration, which his work will include. Herodotus recognized that many values and mores are culturally determined and therefore relative, not absolute, a view that by implication advocated some degree of tolerance of different cultures’ norms (though Herodotus did not think all norms were equally good or desirable: cf. his disapproval of temple prostitution at Babylon [1.199]). His account includes lengthy and broad ethnographic surveys of the peoples and nations the Persians conquered as they expanded westward ultimately to clash with the Greeks. Though Herodotus writes for a Greek audience and therefore primarily from a Greek viewpoint, that does not mean that the dichotomy in his world is simply Greeks and barbarians. In fact, everybody, seemingly, plays the Other to somebody sooner or later as the narrative proceeds. The overarching contrast compares Greeks to Persians. But as Persians encounter peoples such as the Scythians, the viewpoint shifts: Persians become the norm and Scythians the Other. When Scythians meet the Amazons the dichotomy shifts again and the latter take over as the Other while the reader’s viewpoint shifts to that of the Scythians. These shifts work to underscore the relativity of cultural values, as well as to weaken or blur the distinctions between contrasted peoples.
For Herodotus patterns in human behavior and history apply to all peoples regardless of race or ethnicity. A consistent contrast throughout his Histories is that between hard and soft cultures. In the concluding paragraphs of the work he harkens back to an anecdote about Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire. In it Cyrus rejects a suggestion that the Persians, having acquired an empire, abandon their small, barren homeland and appropriate a richer, more productive one. He warns that if the Persians do make such a move they must be ready to give up their rule and instead be ruled by others: “Soft countries breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too” (9.122). Cultures that were originally hard, such as the Medes, Lydians, and Babylonians, enervated by their wealth and success, succumbed to the Persians who, in turn, led by a grasping king made too ambitious by the Persians’ success, suffer defeat at the hands of the Greeks, whose land is much smaller and poorer. The Ghost of Darius in Aeschylus’s Persae makes the same point when he warns the Persians never again to invade Greece because the poor Greek soil itself is the Greeks’ greatest ally: it starves large armies (789–794).
A central tenet of later fourth-century Panhellenist rhetoric stems from the hard/soft contrast. The Persian Empire, soft because of its immense wealth and vast resources, the argument went, was ripe for the plucking if only the Greek states might stop squabbling among themselves long enough to form a coalition and invade. Herodotus has the Ionian leader Aristagoras deploy this theme when trying to persuade first the Spartan king Cleomenes (unsuccessfully) and then the Athenians (successfully) to aid the Ionian rebellion from Persian rule in 499. Addressing Cleomenes, Aristagoras tells him that defeating these foreigners (barbaroi) will be easy as they have little taste for war, fighting in trousers and turbans with bows and short spears, while the Spartans are the best in the world. Richer than all the rest of the world, Persia’s wealth will be ripe for plucking (5.49).
This speech so neatly summarizes the post–Persian Wars Greek stereotype of Asia that some scholars, probably rightly, have suggested that Herodotus may have transferred the sentiments of his own era to that of Aristagoras (e.g., Flower 2000: 76).
THERMOPYLAE
Perhaps the most vivid and one of the best-known sections of Herodotus’s work is his account of the battle at Thermopylae (480). By the time Herodotus was writing, some half-century or so after the battle, Leonidas and the Three Hundred Spartans had long since achieved legendary status. Herodotus’s almost reverential narrative only serves to enhance their reputation; the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae enshrines the dichotomy between Greeks and barbarians. The conversations between Xerxes and Demaratus, the exiled Spartan king, who warns the Persian that the Spartans will fight to the death no matter the odds, raise the reader’s expectations and heighten the drama (7.101–105; 209, and below). Xerxes expected the Greeks to give way without fighting, cowed into submission simply by the size of his force. But after four days of Persian attacks the Greeks were still in place: “they made it plain enough to anyone, not least the king himself, that he had in his army many men, indeed, but few soldiers” (7.210). The confined space in the pass negated the Persian advantage in numbers; moreover, just as Aristagoras’s speech had predicted, the Persians suffered because they wielded shorter spears. Overall, the Spartans enjoyed great success in the early fighting because “they were men who understood war pitted against an inexperienced enemy” (7.211). Ultimately, of course, the treachery of Ephialtes, who shows the Persians a way around the pass at Thermopylae, allows the Persians to defeat the Spartans. Even so, the Persian troops still fighting in the pass have to be whipped into battle (7.223). The Spartans fight to the very end, using their hands and teeth when their weapons break, and succumb only under a hail of arrows, rocks, and other missiles sent from a safe distance (7.225). Spartan conduct at Thermopylae seems to confirm the words of both Aristagoras and Demaratus. A small number of highly skilled, well-disciplined, properly armed, free Spartans could accomplish exceptional deeds against numerically superior, though less well-armed Asiatic troops commanded by a tyrannical king.
PLATAEA
A year later (479) the Spartans led the Greek coalition in a decisive victory over the Persians at Plataea. Though a much more important battle in nearly all ways, Plataea lacks the dramatic impact of Leonidas and the Three Hundred’s last stand at Thermopylae. At Plataea the opposing forces are much more evenly matched. The Greeks often find themselves in difficulty, at times cut off from their supply lines or a good source of water. Relations among the various Greek contingents are periodically fractious and tainted by mistrust. Even the Spartans, though ultimately brilliant, occasionally seem reluctant to fight and most unlike their counterparts at Thermopylae (e.g., 9.47–49). Throughout the campaign the Persians present a formidable challenge even though they no longer have an overwhelming numerical advantage. Their bravery matches that of the Greeks, especially their cavalry who were not easy to close with: when they moved forward, they harmed the Greek line with their arrows and javelins (9.49; see also, e.g., 9.17–18; 20–21).
When the climactic battle does come the Persians fight well; they make a barricade out of their wicker shields and from behind it pin down the Spartans with arrows. When the Spartans move forward against them the Persians meet them in fierce and protracted hand-to-hand fighting. Herodotus tells how the Persians, attacking the Spartans individually or in small groups, grabbed on to Spartan spears and broke them. In courage and strength the Persians were as good as their adversaries, but they lacked defensive armor and adequate training. The chief reason for the Spartan success, and Persian failure, is equipment and training, not that the Spartans are better men. As Herodotus makes clear, the chief cause for the Persian defeat was their lack of armor, as they fought against better-armed hoplites (9.62–63).
Still, Herodotus hints at another reason the Persians lost. He says that they fought hardest where their commander Mardonius and his personal bodyguard of one thousand elite soldiers were. When Mardonius was killed and his guard destroyed, the rest of the Persians took to flight (9.63). This is the same crucial distinction between Greek and barbarian troops that Aeschylus invoked earlier in the Persae when the Persian Queen is surprised to learn that the Athenians have no leader under whose compulsion they fight but instead are “slaves to none, nor are they subject” (242–244). Unlike barbarian soldiers Greeks do not fight because a tyrannical ruler compels them but rather as members of a community who share a stake in its survival.
Perhaps Herodotus’s most vivid illustration of the difference between free Greek and enslaved barbarian soldiers occurs in Xerxes’s interview of the exiled Spartan king Demaratus. Xerxes expresses surprise, or rather disbelief, similar to that of the Persae’s Persian Queen. Having just crossed to Europe and conducted a review of his army and fleet, Xerxes summoned Demaratus to ask him if he thought the Greeks would dare to resist his immense force. Skeptical when Demaratus tells him that the Spartans will resist no matter the odds, Xerxes questions the actions of free men (7.103). In a telling response, Demaratus answers that the Spartans are not entirely free, as they fear the Law more than Xerxes’s subjects fear him. Whatever the Law commands, they do. And this command never varies: never to retreat in battle, whatever the odds, but stand fast and conquer or die (7.104).
A commander’s oversight is central to a barbarian army’s success. Thus the Persians fought well at Plataea until their commander Mardonius was killed. Wherever possible Xerxes watched his troops from a highly visible position. Indeed, he explains the relatively poor performance of the Persian fleet at Artemisium as due to his being away with the army at Thermopylae (8.69). At Salamis he watched the battle from a seat on Mount Aegaleus and with a cadre of secretaries kept careful account of how all of his officers and contingents performed (8.90). Xerxes often exercised his close oversight with a sudden and vicious cruelty, ranging from whipping troops into battle—a standard part of the Greek stereotype of Persian armies—to on the spot beheading for failure to perform according to expectations.10 The atmosphere around the Great King was not conducive to free expression and exchange of ideas. Herodotus regularly presents subordinates as afraid to speak plainly or truthfully in front of Xerxes, or other superiors (e.g., 7.10, 9.42).
HERODOTUS IN REVIEW
Though the Greek/barbarian model has proved an often useful shorthand way of looking at the ancient world, in Herodotus the dichotomy quickly splinters into a much more complex ethnographic picture: the Greek world is not monolithic; there are many Others. More meaningful is the contrast between rich, advanced soft cultures, for example, Persia in 480, and those that are poor, simple, and hard, for example, the Greek cities. Another key contrast is between free and slave, with the Greeks free, that is, self-ruling, and the Persians at the mercy of, or in Greek terms, slaves to, an absolute monarch. These dichotomies are not static; the Persians originally were a hard culture but became softer as they grew more powerful and wealthy. Nor, therefore, does race play a significant role in determining whether a culture is hard or soft. Barbarian troops often are a match for Greeks in courage and strength; in certain circumstances non-Greek weapons such as the bow and cavalry can inflict near-mortal damage on the elite Greek soldier, the hoplite. In hand-to-hand fighting, though, Greek equipment and training usually provide an advantage. Greek soldiers excel and ultimately prevail during the Persian Wars because they fight as free men and not out of fear of, or compulsion by, a tyrant. Finally, it should be noted that the Greek/barbarian dichotomy breaks down quickly on the Greek side of the equation as well. Greek unity is always fragile, tenuous, and ephemeral. Moreover, pronouncements or examples of what are often considered paradigmatic greatness are almost always limited to a particular subset of Greeks. For example, Demaratus admires Dorian Greeks but just up to a point; he vouches only for the Spartans’ conduct in battle. He omits entirely Ionians, Aeolians, and the rest of the Greeks. Similarly, Aeschylus’s Persaecelebrates Athenian achievements. Herodotus notes that, in the face of Xerxes’s invasion, “most of the Greeks were unwilling to fight and all too ready to accept Persian dominion” (7.138).
THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE AND THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR: NO ROLE FOR THE OTHER?
Figure 26.1 Detail(s) of battle of Marathon, south side of the Temple of Athena Nike, Athens, circa 425–400. Elgin Collection, British Museum, London (GR 1816.6–10.158–161; Sculptures 423–424). Photo: L. Tritle.
The Greek/barbarian stereotypes first seen in Aeschylus’s Persae continue to develop throughout the fifth century and barbarians appear often in tragedy, mostly set in mythical or heroic times (figures 26.1, 26.2). As many scholars have pointed out, these barbarians usually display characteristics that are the opposite of Greek ideals: they are often cruel, cowardly, servile, corrupt, faithless, luxury-loving, and so on (cf. J. Hall 2007: 267–8, E. Hall 1989: 17, 121–2, and Momigliano 1979: 146; all list and discuss these Greek ideals and their barbarian opposites). It is unclear how widespread a negative view of barbarians was among the Greek states—many had sided with Xerxes—but the Athenians certainly had much to gain from promoting these stereotypes. Their heroics at Salamis had greatly enhanced their status and power. Invoking those glorious days, along with the threat of another Persian attack, helped justify their continued tight control of the Delian League. Note that the propaganda is not directed against barbarians but rather other Greeks, a tactic that becomes common, indeed, the norm, in the fifth and fourth centuries. A Greek could attack a Greek rival by characterizing him as the Other, that is, by accusing him of having stereotypical barbarian traits. To take one example from tragedy, scholars have argued that in his Andromache, which dates to the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides portrays the Spartans in the play as barbarians, as Greeks who behave barbarously (see, e.g., lines 168–75; 445–53; 595–600; Green 1996: 15–16; E. Hall 1989: 214).
Figure 26.2 Detail(s) of battle of Marathon, south side of the Temple of Athena Nike, Athens, circa 425–400. Elgin Collection, British Museum, London (GR 1816.6–10.158–161; Sculptures 423–424). Photo Credit: L. Tritle.
Indeed, after the repulse of Xerxes the major conflict of the fifth century was not Greek against barbarian but the war between Athens and Sparta, a struggle that would seem to leave little scope to exploit Greek/barbarian stereotypes for propaganda. In fact, though, Sparta cast herself from the outset in the role of liberator of Greece, the champion of Greek freedom, thereby evoking unmistakable echoes of the victory over Xerxes. This time, though, the repressive tyrant was not the Persian Great King but Athens, Sparta’s former partner in panhellenic glory. Thucydides describes the mood in Greece when the war broke out, revealing how in the beginning goodwill favored the Spartans, as they proclaimed they were freeing Greece. Cities and individuals were enthusiastic to support them in every possible way as the general feeling against Athens was so bitter (2.8.4).
The Spartans’ stance as liberator, with its emotional appeal to the panhellenic spirit of 480/479, mirrors the Athenians’ exploitation of Greek/barbarian stereotypes to justify their empire. In both instances the much more narrow ambitions of the polis lie not far below the surface of the broad panhellenic rhetoric.
LONGING FOR THE OTHER
After the first few decades of the Delian League, barbarians, in particular Persians, do not play a major role in Greek warfare or politics. However, that changed after the Athenian disaster at Syracuse in 415–413. The subsequent weakening of Athenian control in Ionia allowed the Persians to emerge as power brokers in the Greek world, a role they would maintain until the rise of Macedon.
The half-century following Sparta’s defeat of Athens in 404 saw first Sparta, then Thebes and a resurgent Athens all contend for dominance in the Greek world. None attained it for long, nor did any state reach the level of either Athens or Sparta before the Peloponnesian War. Each city sought Persian money and endorsement, with Sparta obtaining it most often. With the Great King’s support Sparta enforced a series of common peace treaties. None brought lasting stability to Greece. In his assessment of the battle of Mantinea in 362 (Thebes versus Athens and Sparta), Xenophon effectively sums up the whole era, noting that both sides claimed victory, but none of those fighting was any better off after the battle than before, and in fact there was more disorder in Greece after the battle (Hell. 7.5.27).
The Persians played a paradoxical role in this period. On the one hand they were the most sought after of allies, one whose backing was essential for any state hoping to dominate the rest of the Greeks. But to many Greeks Persia was the enemy against whom it was in the best interests of all Greeks to set aside internal differences and unite. Thus in many Greeks there arose almost a longing for the Other as an alternative focus for Greek military and political ambition, and a hazy nostalgia for the glory days of the Persian Wars. An early manifestation of this occurs in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, put on in 411 during the last third of the Peloponnesian War, at about the time when Sparta was making an alliance with Persia. Lysistrata, leader of the rebellious Greek women, addresses Spartan and Athenian men hoping to persuade them to make peace with each other and redirect their energies against Persia. This Aristophanes states clearly, emphasizing the irony of panhellenic unity mocked by internecine warfare and Persians sitting and waiting to capitalize on the madness of Greek destroying Greek (Lys. 1128–1134).
This vision of a panhellenic campaign against Persia, and an end to internecine Greek warfare, remained a powerful if unrealistic dream down to the time of Philip and Alexander. Drawing on panhellenic themes, even if vague or not entirely appropriate to the circumstance, was a highly effective rhetorical technique. It packed an emotional punch. Yet these ideas rarely had any impact in the real world of politics and warfare. Polis patriotism nearly always worked to undercut it. The fourth-century Athenian writer and teacher Isocrates published a number of treatises calling on the Greeks to unite against Persia. In these, however, he usually argued that his native Athens was best suited to lead this crusade (or at worst share the leadership jointly with Sparta). By the 340s, when Athens and Sparta were too weak to be considered for such leadership, Isocrates turned to Philip of Macedon. Likewise the affinity among elites that prevailed in Homer’s Iliad remained an occasionally countervailing force to unity among Greeks. Xenophon, for example, deployed panhellenic rhetoric in his encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus. In particular he contrasts the simple, frugal, and disciplined lifestyle of the Spartan with the lavishly luxurious, self-indulgent, and enervating life led by the Persian Great King. Yet Xenophon also knew and deeply admired Persians such as Cyrus the Younger and the satrap Pharnabazus. His crowning political, philosophical, and military treatise, the Cyropaedia, takes the form of a semifictional biography of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire.
A final illustration of both the force and the elasticity of the Greek/barbarian stereotypes comes in the speech Alexander the Great delivers to his army just before the battle of Issus in 333 and reported by the later historian Arrian. Most of the key elements are here: free men/slaves, battle hardened/soft from luxury, robust/indolent. These date back at least to Aeschylus’s Persae. Yet in this battle both armies are a mix. Alexander’s consisted of Macedonians (themselves barbarians in the eyes of many Greeks), Greeks, and a variety of barbarian contingents. For Darius, Greek mercenary hoplites formed the very heart of his army, along with troops from the western and central portions of the Persian Empire. Nonetheless, Alexander still utilizes the Greek/barbarian dichotomy as the underpinning of his rhetoric, telling his Macedonians as they are about to fight at Issus (333) they are free men fighting slaves, that their own “barbarian” allies—Thracians, Paeonians, among others—will be fighting the softest tribes of Asia (2.7.4–5).
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Figure 26.3 The Roman Empire and the Germans, circa A.D. 300. From P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: OUP, 2006: Map 1: “Germania in the early Roman period” (pp. 50–1) and Map 2: “Germanic and Germanic-dominated confederations of the Fourth Century” (p. 81).