THE GREAT KINGS OF THE FOURTH
CENTURY AND THE GREEK MEMORY
OF THE PERSIAN PAST
The Persians and their vast empire exerted a remarkable hold over the Greek imagination. Greek art from the late archaic period and throughout the classical age contains an abundance of images of the Otherness of the Persians, showing them as pampered despots and effeminised defeated soldiery. Greek literature too overflows with references to all kinds of diverse Persian exotica: Persian-sounding (but fake) names, references to tribute, to proskynesis, law, impalement, the King’s Eye, good roads, eunuchs, gardens, harems, drinking and gold. Christopher Tuplin presents a useful composite picture of the Persians as seen in Greek literature:
They . . . possess a large empire . . . whose only (other) physical, floral or faunal characteristics are extremes of heat and cold, mountains, citrus fruit, camels, horses, peacocks, cocks, (perhaps) lions for hunting, paradeisoi, road systems measured in parasangs and travelled by escorted ambassadors and official messengers . . . There is great wealth . . . Persians are liable to pride, hauteur, and inaccessibility . . . They enjoy a luxurious life-style (exemplified by clothing, textiles, food and drink, tableware, means of transport, fans and fly-whisks, furniture) in a positively organized, regimented fashion: but the queens are sexually virtuous and sometimes energetically warlike . . . Their policy is defined by a tyrannical ideology and systems of deferential behaviour and hierarchical control which deny equality . . . [They] value mere power and are inimical to the principal of Law – except that there have been ‘good’ Persian kings to whom some of this does not apply. Eunuchs will be encountered; and impalement or crucifixion is employed as a punishment.1
Such representations helped to mould classical Greek self-identity.2 It is interesting to note that, from the late archaic period to the age of Alexander the Great, each successive generation of Greeks had its own particular way of reconfirming, as needed, national identity against the ever-changing yet ever-present external Persian threat. The infamous cultural construction of the Persian barbarian has been best explored in its fifth-century context, but in this chapter I will concentrate on less familiar images of the Great Kings and their Persian subjects in fourth-century Greek sources, chiefly through the material evidence contained in vase-painting and relief sculpture. This chapter will question how the Greeks of the fourth century related to their historical interaction with the Persians during the Great Wars of the previous century and will attempt to explore how the Graeco-Persian past was filtered into a contemporary understanding too. In particular, this chapter will explore a series of representations of the Great King and his court created in the period c. 380–330 BCE, images which harked back to an earlier historical age while simultaneously making an adroit comment about the contemporary political scene.
Over recent decades, the work of Achaemenid scholarship has proved that the Persia of Darius III on the eve of its conquest by the Macedonians was far from the moribund state depicted by Plato, Isocrates and the troublesome Epilogue of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.3 Nevertheless, it must be conceded that things were not always going well for the Persian Empire throughout the fourth century: it was often beset with revolts. The reign of Darius II in particular was conspicuous for frequent revolts, led partly by satraps who had acquired a power base in regions where their families had ruled for generations. Ctesias mentioned a revolt by Darius’ full brother Arsites, assisted by Artyphios, son of the satrap Megabyzus, who had mounted a revolt during Artaxerxes I’s reign (Ctesias F15 § 52). The revolt of the satrap Pissouthnes at Sardis was crushed by Tissaphernes, probably in 422 BCE (Ctesias F15 § 53), who bribed Pissouthnes’ Greek mercenary troops to abandon their commander. The Paphlagonian eunuch Artoxares, who had once helped Darius to become king, also attempted a coup at an uncertain date (Ctesias F15 § 54). In addition, the novella-like tale of the insubordination of Teritouchmes, married to a daughter of Darius II, may well mask a more serious threat to the throne (Ctesias F15 § 55–6). There is evidence of trouble in Egypt in 410 BCE, prelude to a successful revolt in 404 BCE while, in the heart of the empire, the crushing of a Median revolt (Xenophon, Hellenica 1.11.19) was followed by a campaign against the Cadusii. The end of Darius’ reign witnessed a major attempted coup d’état (that of Prince Cyrus the Younger) in 401 BCE, which heralded decades of trouble into the new century: a revolt by Evagoras of Cypriot Salamis between 391 and 380 BCE, by the Phoenicians c. 380 BCE and, most alarmingly, in the western satrapies in the 360s and 350s BCE (led by prominent rebels such as Datames of Cappadocia, Ariobarzanes of Phrygia and Autophradates of Lycia). Moreover, Egypt’s secession from the empire between 405 and 343 BCE was a major blow to the finances and morale of the Persian Great Kings. And throughout all of this time (certainly from the period of Tissaphernes’ sojourn in Asia Minor, which signalled the start of intensified Persian interference in Greek affairs during the Peloponnesian War), major players were the Greek city-states and, subsequently, the growing strength of Macedon.4
The Greeks remained a familiar part of the Persian world-view as much as the Persians remained central to the Greeks’, but how much of the historical process of the Persian Empire did the Greeks understand? Outside of the authors of Persica, did the Greeks reflect upon the issue of Persian history? Clearly the Epilogue of the Cyropaedia (8.1–27) suggests so, with it overarching desire to depict Persian history as a gradual, if inevitable, slide into moral depravity, achieved through the narrative technique of looking back to Persia’s brief golden age, the reign of Cyrus the Great, and comparing it with the moral and political bankruptcy of a contemporary Persia. ‘I maintain,’ says the author (possibly Xenophon, but probably not),5 ‘that the Persians of the present day . . . are less reverent towards the gods, less dutiful to their kin, less upright in their treatment of men, and less brave in warfare than they were of old’ (8.27). This, though, is far removed from pure history.
What do our non-historical sources have to say about the process of Persian history? This chapter aims to explore that question by examining some texts outside of the Greek historiographic corpus – namely philosophy, legal speeches and poetry – but, more intriguingly, I will attempt to answer the question by analysing some key iconographic evidence and read the evidence for a Greek understanding of the Persian past through the prism of material culture.
I begin with a lively, colourful relief scene on a squat lekythos of c. 380 BCE, signed by the Athenian artist Xenophantos, but found at Dubrux near Kirch in the Crimea (Fig. 17.1); it is the earliest of three works to be explored in this chapter.6 Its shoulder shows conventionalised mythological Gigantomachy and Centauromachy scenes, but the body of the vase depicts Persians hunting in a royal paradeisos.7 The body of the vase is loosely divided into two registers, both linked by a tall date palm, gilt tripods and acanthus columns.8 At the base of the vase a charioteer named Abrokomas delivers a death blow to a wild boar while above him, mounted on a white horse, a youthful-looking Darius spears a wounded deer. To the left of Darius is a group of Persians: the bearded Cyrus, holding an axe, moves towards his hunting dog, which jumps up eagerly to greet him but is prevented from doing so by an unnamed page. To the left of Darius three Persians finish off another boar: the bearded Eurylaos aims his spear at it, Klytios (almost erased from the vase) thrusts his spear into its neck, and an unnamed youth awkwardly delivers a back-thrust with his javelin. In the lower register, two hunters of two mythical beasts, a griffin and a horned lion-griffin, are named as Artamis and Seisames.
Figure 17.1 Line drawing of the Xenophantos lekythos. St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum P 1837.2.
In this lively if somewhat chaotic scene, the worlds of fantasy and reality converge. To achieve this Xenophantos employs some bona fide Achaemenid imagery within the picture,9 but toys with its use. Many of the details of the hunting scene are derived from real Persian practices, which were well known to the Greeks of the fourth century, who seem to have developed something of a passion for stories of royal hunts in the great paradeisoi of the empire.10 The mythologisation of the Persian hunt occurs in the fifth century too, but Margaret Miller reads the Xenophantos lekythos as a definitive turning point in the mythologicalisation and marginalisation process of the Persian image, in which they ultimately morph into the eastern combatants of griffins in the Arimasps myth.11
What can be done, though, with the names of the hunting Persians? They are, of course, credible Achaemenid names in their (Latinised) Greek forms: Darius and Cyrus are the names par excellence of the kings and princes of the Achaemenid royal house,12 while we find that an Abrokomas was a satrap of Syria at the end of the fifth century under Artaxerxes I, who thereafter sent him to Phoenicia, perhaps in preparation for an Egyptian campaign (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.3.20; Isocrates 4.140; Diodorus 14.20.5); Artamis might be cognate with the city of Adramyttion (in the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia), while Seisames ‘the Mysian’ is listed as one of the Persian dead in Aeschylus’ Persai (322).13 Herodotus, however, tells the story of Seisames who was killed by Cambysses (5.25), and of another Seisames who commanded troops in Xerxes’ expedition (7.66), while Sekunda has suggested that Seisames might have been the name of an early fifth-century satrap of Mysia.14 Whatever the reality, there is little doubt that Seisames is a well-attested Persian name.15 Of course the decidedly Hellenic names Eurylaos, a name shared with one of the Epigoni, who was also an Argonaut and who led the Argives at Troy (Pausanias 2.20.5; Apollodorus 1.9.13, 3.7.2; Homer, Iliad 2.565), and Klytios, the name of one of the brothers of King Priam of Troy (Homer, Iliad 3.146), are out of place here, although Michalis Tiverios suggests that they are Greeks in Persian service and therefore depicted wearing Persian court livery.16 In fact, Tiverios argues that the lekythos depicts a specific royal hunt in the western part of the empire late in the fifth century BCE: the location is the paradeisos at Kelainai, where Apollo defeated Marysas and where Cyrus the Younger had both a palace and a paradeisos (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.7)17 – this would explain Artamis and Seisames hunting mythical beasts18 – and the participants in this real, historical hunt, says Tiverios, are Abrokomas, the satrap of Syria, Cyrus, the brother of Atraxerxes II (before his rebellion), and Darius, Artaxerxes’ crown prince. This hunt would therefore have taken place a few years before Cyrus’s death (at Cunaxa) in 401 BCE.
Historically, this cannot work: crown prince Darius must have been a babe in arms at the time of his uncle Cyrus’ rebellion and death, so it is impossible to read this scene as an exact event in time (besides which, given that the scene is painted on a lekythos, there is probably a funerary resonance to this scene too, which removes it from the real). Instead we have in this lively scene a blurring of history whereby several bona fide historical personages become conflated into standardised ‘royal Persians’, a theme which we will explore in greater depth below. While it is impossible to dismiss the idea that the viewer of this fourth-century image may well have read into the vase the events of Cyrus the Younger’s revolt (for the rebellion was, after all, a keenly felt and talked-about event in the Greek-speaking world), it is more likely that the names ‘Cyrus’ and ‘Darius’ would have either reminded the viewer of the earliest kings of the Persian past, those who first pulled Greece into the powerful Persian orbit, or else would simply have called to mind a generic image of ‘royal Persia’.
Certainly an actual moment in Achaemenid history cannot be looked for in the Xenophantos lekythos, but does that mean that the Greeks had no interest in recalling the Persian past, or, for that matter, their own important intervention in the flow of Persian history? Were the Greeks content to settle for a nebulous ‘once upon a time’ quality in their involvement with the Persian past?
On one level, that question can be answered with an affirmative, reflected in a tendency in fourth-century literary sources, as in the Xenophantos lekythos, to create a standardised ‘Great King’ – a depersonalised description allowing for an open identification of any (or all) Persian kings as a single entity.19 Isocrates, for instance, routinely equates Xerxes with Artaxerxes II (5.42; 12.157–8), while Lysias (2.27) attributes the battle of Marathon to the campaigns of Xerxes. Aeschines (3.132) too creates a confluence of Xerxes with an unnamed king of the fourth century:
Is not the king of the Persians, he who channelled Athos, he who bridged the Hellespont, he who demanded earth and water of the Greeks, he who dared to write in his letters that he was lord of all mankind from the rising sun to its setting – is he not now struggling, not just for the lordship over others, but for his very life?
Here Aeschines’ composite Great King straddles the historical narrative: he has shown his hubristic desire to conquer free Greece (à la Xerxes) and now must face up to the reality of Macedonian invasion (à la Darius III).
Fourth-century oratory and philosophy frequently utilise materials which at first glance might be thought of as an attempt at Persian history, but upon inspection are seen to be ‘pretty unspecific and cast little special light upon Athenian knowledge of Persia and the Persians’.20 It is a fact that, by and large, with the exception of the (often anonymous) Great King, hardly any Persians are named in the Greek philosophical and legal sources at all.21 Interestingly, if rarely, however, when the need is paramount, authors can be startlingly specific in referring to monarchs and their historical deeds and contexts. For instance, Isocrates (5.99–100) takes pains to compare and contrast carefully the characters and policies of Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III so as to demonstrate the latter’s military weakness and the ease by which he might be overpowered by a unified Greek taskforce:
In order for you to know the temper and power of each, it is proper for me to also speak to you about the two kings, the one against whom I am advising you to take up arms, and the other one against whom Clearchus made war. In the first place, the father [Artaxerxes II] of the present king once defeated our city22 and later the city of the Lacedaemonians, while this king [Artaxerxes III] has never crushed any of the armies which have been ravaging his territories. Secondly [Artaxerxes II] took the whole of Asia from the Greeks by the terms of the Treaty [of Antalcidas], while [Artaxerxes III] is so far from exercising his power over others that he is not even in control of the cities which have surrendered to him.
In a similar vein, but taking a much broader historical narrative sweep, in Book 3 of the Laws, written around 360 BCE, Plato reserves a relatively long exposition for Persian society (II, 639c–698a), dedicated by and large to a description of, and explanation for, its decadence and degeneracy. To couch his argument, Plato calls upon a potted version of Persian history and, with a somewhat cavalier attitude, retells the story of the political development of Persia from the days of Cyrus the Great to those of Xerxes:
ATHENIAN: So how are we to explain the disaster under Cambyses, and the almost total recovery under Darius? To help our reconstruction of events, shall we have a go at guessing?
CLEINIAS: Yes, certainly this topic we’ve embarked on will help our investigation.
ATHENIAN: My guess about Cyrus, then, is that although, doubtless, he was a great commander and a loyal patriot, he never, even superficially, considered the problem of decent education. As for running his household, I’d say he never paid any attention to that at all!
CLEINIAS: And how should we interpret that kind of statement?
ATHENIAN: I mean, he probably spent his life after adolescence on campaign and handed over his children to the women to bring up. These women reared them from their formative years as though they were already ‘Heaven’s Chosen-Ones’, and fawned over them accordingly. They wouldn’t allow anyone to scold their god-sent darlings in anything, and they forced everyone to rhapsodise about whatever the child said or did. You can imagine the type of person they produced.
CLEINIAS: A great education it must have been, to judge from what you say!
ATHENIAN: It was a womanish education, conducted by the royal harem. The teachers of the children had recently come into considerable wealth, but they were left all alone, without men, because the army was preoccupied in the field.
CLEINIAS: That makes sense.
ATHENIAN: The children’s father . . . just didn’t notice that women and eunuchs had given his sons the education of a Mede [i.e. of great luxury] and that it had been debased by their so-called ‘heaven-sent’ status. That is why Cyrus’ children turned out as children naturally do when their teachers have never corrected them. So when, on the death of Cyrus, they succeeded to their inheritance they were living in a riot of unrestrained luxury . . . [But] Darius was no royal prince, and his upbringing had not encouraged him to self-indulgence . . . But Darius was succeeded by Xerxes, whose education reverted to the old royal practice of pampering . . . So Xerxes, being a product of this kind of tutoring, naturally had a career that resembled that of the misfortunate Cambyses, and ever since hardly any king of the Persians had been truly ‘great’ except in title and magnificence. I hold that the reason for this is not just bad luck, but the shocking life that children of despots and fantastically wealthy parents almost always lead.
Here, then, Plato argues that under Cyrus, Persia had witnessed an age when freedom of speech, liberty, community and co-operation reigned, only to be quashed by the oppressive regime of his successor Cambyses. Under the lawgiver-king Darius, Persia experienced a renaissance of thought (and deed), which once again gave way to the megalomaniac autocracy of Xerxes; from thereon in, says Plato, in a passage informed more by Greek prejudice than historical fact, ‘the Persians have failed to halt on the downward slope of decadence (truphē)’ (697c).23
It would appear from Plato’s Laws that the dynastic squabbling of the sons of Cyrus II and the eventual seizure of the throne by Darius was a pivotal moment in Achaemenid history well known to the Greeks – versions of the story are delivered by Aeschylus (Persai 773–80),24 Herodotus (3.1–87)25 and Ctesias (F13 § 11–18)26 (and there were no doubt others too)27 – and it is also known that the history of Cyrus the Great (and the legends that sprang up around his life) always enjoyed great renown in the Greek-speaking world.28 Plato’s explanation of the political development of Achaemenid history fits in neatly with the general Greek discourse; he regards the entire thrust of Persian history as being determined by the relationships of the royal family and the duty of the kings to educate their successors in the ideals of freedom. Persian degeneracy was inevitable, he propounds, since even at the beginning of the process of creating an empire, Cyrus’ campaigns away from the political heartland meant that his sons were reared by the women and eunuchs of the court and, with the exception of Darius, who was not a king’s son and therefore not exposed to dangerous harem tutorage, all subsequent Persian monarchs have been degenerate by definition of their womanly education.
Plato uses the chronological development of Persian history to support his stance; he lists, in the correct order, the main players in Persia’s slide into degeneracy: Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes – the ‘gang of four’ who for the Greeks fundamentally defined the Persian experience. Interestingly, while Plato clearly knows about Artaxerxes I, the Great King of his own day (see, for instance, Alcibiades 121b, 123c–123d), he writes him out of the Laws. The ostracism of Artaxerxes from the text is deliberate and serves Plato’s purpose: to show that the enfeebled kings of the present day are nameless entities of little political or military clout compared with the Great Kings of an earlier, more noble age.
Indeed, a similar tack is taken in many of the great orations of the early fourth century. Isocrates’ Panathenaikos of 380 BCE, for example, has been seen as the defining moment in the negative stereotyping of the barbarised Persian;29 his agenda is to belittle and deride the Persia of his day and he does so by once again marginalising all mention of its current rulers. The spirit of Xerxes looms comparatively large in the Panathenaikos (12.49ff, 161, 189) but the name of Artaxerxes II is conspicuous by its absence.30 Even in his Evagoras of around 370 BCE there is no mention of this king, or of his predecessor Darius II, who was so frequently at loggerheads with the Cypriot ruler (see Ctesias F30).31 In praising Evagoras’ exploits, Isocrates is content to say, with one breath, that he was so superior a person that ‘when the kings of that time beheld him they were terrified for their power’ (9.23), while with another that Evagoras equalled the elder Cyrus in greatness. He expands (9.37):
Of those who lived later, perhaps indeed of all, the one hero who was most admired by the greatest number was Cyrus, who deprived the Medes of their kingdom and gained it for the Persians. But while Cyrus with a Persian army conquered the Medes, a deed which many a Greek or a barbarian could easily do, Evagoras manifestly accomplished the greater part of the deeds which have been done through strength of his own mind and body. Again, while it is not at all certain from the expedition of Cyrus that he would have endured the dangers of Evagoras, yet it is obvious to all from the deeds of Evagoras that the latter would have readily attempted the exploits of Cyrus. In addition, while piety and justice characterised every act of Evagoras, some of the successes of Cyrus were gained impiously: for the former destroyed his enemies, but Cyrus slew his mother’s father. Consequently if any should wish to judge, not of the greatness of their successes, but of the essential merit of each, they would justly award greater praise to Evagoras than even to Cyrus.
Judging from the works of the orators and philosophers, it can be argued that the Greeks of the fourth century were capable of pinpointing a precise moment in Persian history, at least as far as they understood the Persian historical process, if only to reflect upon their own Hellenic past and present. Frustratingly, it is at this point in the fourth century that our literary sources all but disappear, and to investigate further the Greek perception of Persian history we must inevitably turn to the iconographic evidence, like Xenophantos’ hunting lekythos, for support. The lekythos seems to be consistent with the way in which we can generally read fourth-century attitudes to both the Persia of the contemporary world and that of the past, but the idea might be more clearly delineated with an image painted onto a vase of a slightly later date: the famous name-vase of the Darius Painter, an Apulian volute-krater, dating to around 330 BCE (Fig. 17.2), was almost certainly created during the reign of Alexander the Great, sometime between his accession to the Macedonian throne and his destruction of Persepolis.32
While the vase is the product of a Greek workshop in southern Italy, that need not devalue its usefulness as a reflection on Greek rhetoric about the Persian Empire and its past: for here is a multifaceted allegory of the Persian Wars of the early fifth century from a late fourth-century perspective, although scholars read the meaning of vase in multivalent ways. Some see it as a theatrical scene and read the vase as a representation of the theatre space itself: the chorus in the orchestra, the protagonists on the skene, and the gods on the roofspace, waiting to descend ex machina.33 Many of the Persians on the vase wear Greek theatre costume – sleeved and elaborately patterned robes and headdresses; but it is hard to verify if these are theatre costumes per se: throughout the fifth century the Greek representation of Persians and other orientals blurred the reality of dress with the costume of the stage, so that it is impossible to tweak out accurately the pure imaginary from the deliberately theatrical.
Figure 17.2 Line drawing of the ‘Darius Vase’; Apulian volute-krater by the Darius Painter. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 81947 (H 3253).
It has been suggested that the figures on the vase may have been inspired by a now-lost drama, or restaging of a drama, perhaps Phrynichos’ Persai.34 It is certainly true that the memory of the Persian Wars did not die out from the Greek tragic tradition and we know of several fourth-century and third-century tragedies with subjects set in the Graeco-Persian past,35 although regrettably little of them has survived: Theodectas’ Mausolus (72 TgrF T 6–7) and Moschion’s Themistocles (97 TgrF F 1) are cases in point, and Moschion’s play certainly included a vivid description of a battle, echoing Aeschylus’ surviving Persai. Another Themistocles can be attributed to the Hellenistic playwright Philicus, and there was even a satyr play called Persai dating to the second century BCE. It would seem, then, that the Persian War narrative (and the role of Themistocles in particular) underwent what might be seen as a canonisation process in tragic theatre, as well as in oratory and historiography during the fourth century.
Contemporary lyric poetry also took the Persian Wars as a theme. Apart from Simonides’ lyric poem on Salamis (fr. 536), by the late fifth century BCE Choerilus of Samos’ epic Persica was dealing in hexameter with Xerxes’ invasion, although its complete scope remains unclear.36 Dated to around 410/9 BCE is the remarkable Persai of Timotheus of Miletus, a flamboyant Mozartian-like concert aria for a solo voice in which the performer imitated a host of Persian barbarians, from the pidgin-Greek-speaking soldiery (slowly drowning) to the lofty lamentations of Xerxes himself.37 As Horden notes, ‘the fourth century was . . . clearly a fruitful time . . . for Athenian interest in the [Persian] Wars’, and he suggests that the upsurge in poetic activity centred on the Wars can be explained by ‘the political difficulties experienced by Athens in their resistance to Macedon’.38 Certainly, Timotheus’ Persai, the ultimate jingoistic, triumphalist, popular classic (and thus much beloved of the philhellene Plutarch),39 abounds with terminology and imagery drawn from the longstanding Greek creation of the barbarian ‘other’; the same resonances are found too in Euripides’ comi-tragedy Orestes of 408 BCE.40
That the Darius Vase continues the Saidian orientalising trend in its depiction of the luxury-loving barbarian is perhaps not surprising, and Hall has suggested that it is in fact evidence for a splendid (but unknown) fourth-century play about the Persian invasion. She argues that a fragment of a tragedy (tr. fr. adesp. 685) which includes the disjointed words and bitty sentences, ‘O race of Persians . . . of a wretched father . . . King . . . I will lament’ is a dirge for Darius (or some other Great King), and can be related directly to the Apulian vase.41 Certainly, a theatre setting for the vase scene is plausible, but it would be short-sighted to limit it to only that context, and, of course, we must in no way think of it as a photographic record of a particular staging of some lost fourth-century tragic Persai.
The Apulian volute-krater is richly decorated: three separate registers provide some kind of narrative, but how can they be contextualised? In the centre of the middle band, dominating the scene, is the enthroned, named and imperious figure of the Great King Darius; a messenger stands on a podium to his side (i.e. in front of the king; the artist is rendering three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium). The messenger is Greek, judging from his pilos and travelling cloak – the traditional get-up of the tragic messenger (although there is a possibility, of course, that he is a Persian messenger newly returned from Greece; his Greek clothing is not a cause for concern if he is a Persian, because several of Darius’ councillors wear Greek robes – himatia – too). Whatever his origin, the messenger holds up the fingers of his right hand as he makes a pronouncement. The round podium on which he stands bears the inscription PERSAI, which might refer to the title of the play or, more generically (and more probably), to the location of the scene – the royal court in the city of the Persians.
The Great King is flanked by an armed bodyguard, holding a spear and a scimitar, and is attended by a group of bearded councillors, three of whom wear oriental costume; two of the courtiers are of an advanced age, and appear to be perturbed and in the thick of a debate, judging from the animated gesticulation, and the body language they adopt: several councillors lean into the scene, intent on listening. For his part, the Great King looks majestically aloof and calm.
Set in between two incense burners, the lowest register shows a royal treasurer seated at a low table (this cannot be another representation of Darius; the figure, in a Greek himation and short beard, is far too prosaic for that of a Great King). He is a royal treasurer (a representative of the Great King), counting pebbles and arranging them into correct columns as he tallies up on his wax tablet the value of the goods pouring in from the empire in the form of tribute, brought to court by well-dressed satraps who appear before him: there is a sack of money (?) about to be placed on the table and some gold or silver dishes being proffered too. This will all help provide funding for the war effort against Greece. The three empty-handed satraps perform an elaborate obeisance; their gift-giving has already taken place.
Taken together, these two scenes suggest a specific (if highly imaginative) moment in the year 490 BCE, just predating Marathon, when the Persians set themselves on the course for war.42 But the outcome of the war is preordained: the top register leads the viewer into the divine plane, and in an almost Homeric assemblage of gods, paralleling the Persian war council below, the viewer meets with sceptre-bearing Zeus (directly placed above the sceptre-bearing Darius) accompanied by a winged Nike – the Greek victory to come – and the divine twins Apollo and Artemis (on whose festival the battle of Marathon was fought). Standing next to Zeus is the elegantly dressed, but somewhat timorous, figure of Hellas, for, as Alan Shapiro notes, the scene is ‘an accurate reflection of the mood of Greece on the eve of Marathon’.43 But Hellas has nothing to fear: she is protected by the armed Athene, who places a supporting hand on her shoulder. Seated at an altar with a herm is the figure of imperial (sceptre-bearing) Asia, plucking at her veil; Asia is certainly queenly, accustomed to command, while, in comparison, Hellas looks younger, lacking in confidence. Of the two, Asia has more to dread, for standing in front of her, in a hunting costume and with snakes in her hair, is the Fury-like figure of Apatē (Deception or Deceit).44 She holds two flaming torches, and it has been argued that she is about to declare war by throwing them between the combatants,45 but there is little to support this; instead perhaps we see here the flames of deceitful ambition. Jon Hesk has noted that this ‘depiction of the divine and daimonic machinery behind the Persian Wars’46 revolves around the juxtaposition of Athene and Apatē and implies a divinely inspired cunning which enabled the Athenians to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But there can be other interpretations: Apatē is attempting to lure Asia away from the safety of the altar; or the Persians are self-deceived or are attempting to deceive the Greeks about their greatness, expressed through the grandeur and grovelling of Darius’ theatrical court: all smoke and mirrors, but little substance.
Shapiro sensibly suggests that the Darius Vase presents a depiction of the clash of civilisations, played out through the female personifications of Asia and Hellas, first encountered, during Atossa’s dream, in Aeschylus’ Persai of 472 BCE: ‘Two beautifully dressed women appeared . . ., one decked out in Persian robes, the other in Doric dress . . . and they were faultlessly lovely . . . a conflict between the two arose’ (181ff). A similar image was still being employed in the Hellenistic period, for, according to a poem by Moschus (2.8.15), Europa herself once dreamed that two women, one an Asiatic barbarian and the other a civilised Greek, struggled over possession of Europe, while a third-century engraved marble slab known as the Arbela Relief (in the Palazzo Chigi, Rome) depicts a shield embossed with a scene of the battle of Gaugamela. On it, a crowned Europa and an identically crowned Asia appear as twins holding between them the shield depicting the mêlée; the only identifiable differences between the twin figures are Europa’s few extra inches of height and Asia’s sandaled feet – a memory, perhaps, of proverbial eastern softness.47
The scene on the Darius vase, with its ‘delusional air of unreality’, is a radical departure from the traditions of vase-painting: ‘no other artist has attempted . . . to envisage a specific moment in the history of the confrontation between Persia and Greece’,48 Shapiro suggests, although, as he concedes, in the lost arts of wall-painting there were specific moments in history recorded in vivid coloured frescos: the Athenian Stoa Poikile, a kind of victory monument to the Persian Wars, famously housed a vast fresco by Polygnotos of Thasos depicting the battle of Marathon, which can be dated to around 460 BCE. To all intents and purposes this seems to have been a documentarylike depiction of the events of the battle, albeit interwoven with mythological narratives and figures of the gods and heroes who steered the outcome of the event – as is suggested on the Darius Vase too.49
The scene on the vase is conceived of in an entirely Greek style and depicts the Persians in a way that conforms wholly to their views of Achaemenid hierarchy. The Great King sits above his subjects’ heads, although a meaningful interaction between sovereign and councillors is suggested – an image drawn from Herodotus’ constitutional debate of Book 3 of the Histories, and other such Greek conceptions of the Great King in council. Yet the vase-painter steers us towards believing that we are observing life at a historically verifiable Persian court, at an exact moment in time. The middle register is, of course, a formal audience scene, while the lower register allows us to look at the workings of the imperial bureaucracy inside the palaces’ treasuries.
The Greeks were fascinated by the affairs of the royal and satrapal courts of the Persian Empire, and they correctly envisage the Great King’s palace as an impenetrable fortress, not just of stone and wood, but of ceremony and etiquette: as Aristotle puts it, ‘[The king] himself, so it is said, established himself at Susa or Ecbatana, invisible to all, dwelling in a wonderful palace; many gateways one after another, and porches many stades apart from one another, were secured by bronze doors’ (Aristotle, Mund. 398a).
From the offset, the Greek imagination attempted to peer into the halls and chambers of the palaces of the Great King: Aeschylus’ Persai takes us into the heart of the court at Susa, and even presents Xerxes’ much-honoured Mother and her opulent trappings to the hungry gaze of the Athenian audience. Herodotus takes us into the council chambers, banqueting halls and even harem quarters of the royal palaces, and by the early fourth century the Great King’s court became the locus classicus of the popular Persica of Ctesias, Dinon and Heracleides, so much so that I think we can classify them properly as court histories.50 I have little doubt that these populist histories, and Ctesias’ novelistic work in particular, had a profound effect upon the representations of Persian life we see in fourth-century Greek iconography, where we are truly encouraged to enter into the world of ‘le roi imaginaire’.
Tales of defiant Greeks, like Herodotus’ Bulis and Sperchis (Histories 7.136), appearing in audience before the Great King must have been popular, since the theme has a long history,51 and probably drew on a folk-tale motif whereby Greek sophrosyne was seen to triumph over Persian servility. The theme is still active as late as Philostratus’ third-century CE Imagines, which is imbedded in generic Greek stories of the Great King’s court.52 His ekphrasis of Themistocles’ famous audience with Artaxerxes I in Babylon (Imag. 2.31) draws upon a single historical event briefly outlined by Thucydides (1.138) and elaborated on by Plutarch (Them. 29.5–6) and Nepos (Them. 9.5).53 Philostratus creates the picture of the sophisticated Greek, noble in his confinement within the gilded cage that is the Persian court, lecturing the Great King and his eunuchs, who are posed before him in a kind of theatrical tableau ‘iridescent in gaudy costumes against an opulent palace setting’.54 Undeniably, Philostratus’ description has some remarkable parallels with the theatre-like scene painted on the Darius Vase; it begins with a description of the physical features of the court itself and then examines the scene which unfolds therein:
A Greek among foreigners, a real man among the unmanly, louche, and luxury-loving; he is an Athenian to judge from his short rough cloak (tribōn). I think he pronounces some wise saying to them, trying to correct them. [Here are] Medes and the centre of Babylon . . . and the king on a throne decorated with ornamented peacocks. The painter does not ask to be praised for his fine depiction of the [royal] headdress (tiara) and the tasselled robe (kalasiris) and the sleeved tunic (kandis), nor the monstrous shapes of colourfully woven animals which are [typically] foreign . . . but he should be praised for . . . the faces of the eunuchs. The court is also gold . . .we breathe in incense and myrrh, with which the foreigners pollute the freedom of the air; one spear-bearer is conferring with another about the Greek, in awe of him as his great achievements begin to be realised.
Next, Philostratus speculates on the events of that famous audience:
For I believe that Themistocles the son of Neocles has come from Athens to Babylon after the immortal victory at Salamis because he has no idea where in Greece he might be safe, and that he is discussing with the king how indebted Xerxes was to him while he was commander of the Greek forces. His Median surroundings do not intimidate him, he is as confident as if standing on the rostrum; and his language is not his native one, but Themistocles speaks like a Mede, which he took the trouble to learn there. If you doubt this, look at his audience, how their eyes indicate that they understand him, and look at Themistocles, whose head tilts like one speaking, but his eyes show his hesitance, because what he is speaking is newly learned.
While Philostratus purports to be describing a real wall-painting,55 it does not mean to say that he faithfully draws on an actual scene of Themistocles standing before the king, but when comparing his vivid description to the elaborately painted Darius Vase, it can be ascertained how certain Greek conventions in thinking about the Great King’s court had become truisms.
The painted image of Darius might be made in a style recognisable to a Greek audience, and was no doubt pandering to their sense of superiority over the effeminate barbarians, but nevertheless, I would suggest that alongside the gorgeous robes and elaborate thrones depicted on the vase, there is a trace of the historically verifiable in the scene which affords it a certain credibility in trying to depict a ‘real-life’ moment in historical time.
Undoubtedly there are bona fide Achaemenid motifs located on the vase: the salaaming postures of the satraps in the lower register of the vase correspond neatly with figures found in a similar position on the base of a monumental Egyptian-style statue of Darius I from Susa;56 likewise the representation of the spear-bearer behind Darius’ throne (looking very much at ease with his ankles crossed and a scimitar casually slung over his shoulder)57 is, to all intents and purposes, fashioned on bodyguards regularly depicted (but depicted upright and standing to attention) on Achaemenid brick-reliefs from Susa, or relief sculpture from Persepolis.58 The famous Bisitun inscription of Darius I, with its accompanying relief, shows the king accompanied by two weapon-bearers (perhaps Gobryas and Intaphernes) and a spear-bearer bringing up the rear.59 The Darius Vase’s Achaemenid-style motifs appear to have been lifted directly from authentic Persian iconographic sources, suggesting that Greeks artists could be surprisingly au fait with centralised royal Persian imagery.60 Indeed, the overall feel of the audience scene on the Darius Vase is fashioned after a Persian image specifically authorised by the Persian monarchy, but one which must have been a familiar motif to Greek viewers too (in Asia Minor at least): I refer, of course, to the royal audience scene.
Originating in monumental relief panels at the Achaemenid palaces (certainly at Persepolis – see Fig. 17.3 – but probably at Susa and Babylon too, as well as in the satrapal palaces dotted throughout the empire), the intricate iconographical composition was deliberately disseminated throughout the empire in the form of seals, gemstones and other types of inlaid jewellery, or in painted leather panels, or woven textiles, such as those reported to have decorated Alexander’s funeral catafalque (Diodorus 18.26.6).61 It must have remained a well-known device throughout the lifespan of the Achaemenid dynasty because an unexpected detail taken from the glorious ‘Alexander Sarcophagus’ from Sidon, designed and executed sometime between 325 and 311 BCE, depicts – inside a Persian soldier’s shield – an exact reproduction of the standard imperial audience scene.62
Figure 17.3 Reconstruction of the audience scene, originally from the northern Apadana staircase at Persepolis and later moved to the Treasury.
Of course, the motif was open to interpretation according to locale. The west face of the tomb of the Lycian governor Payava (c. 360 BCE), for instance, shows him as part of a local delegation in audience before the seated satrap Autophradates. The scene’s composition and its component details, such as the style of the satrap’s throne, are comfortably adapted from Achaemenid court scenes.63 Predating the Payavan relief by some twenty years is a well-known slab from the frieze on the base of the Nereid Monument, also from Lycia. It shows an embassy of Greek-looking elders approaching the seated figure of Erbinna, the last of the powerful independent rulers of Xanthos, who, enthroned like a satrap, is depicted in Persian court style, his head shaded by a parasol, and his feet raised off the ground on a footstool; a youthful bodyguard in Greek dress stands behind the throne holding a Greek shield. The subject perhaps records a real-life episode in which Erbinna received an embassy from a captured city (indeed, the siege of a city is shown elsewhere in the same frieze), but certainly draws on the conventions of the official Achaemenid audience scene.64
The Darius Vase therefore has parallels in a long-established and well-disseminated Achaemenid iconographic motif for depicting individuals in audience before the Great King. This all contributes to the verisimilitude of envisioning an exact time and place for the vase’s scene, centring as it does on Darius’ interview with the messenger. Or does it? While I concur with Shapiro’s assessment that the Darius Painter makes a bold step towards depicting an exact moment in historical time, I want to take the argument a step further to suggest that the artist is actually, and skilfully, giving us a multi-layered approach to history. Past and present are merged in this scene; we can view the vase’s temporal location, like its triple registers, on (at least) three levels. The vase does indeed show the moment when the threat of east–west conflict borders on reality; this is also the moment when Darius’ ambitions for the conquest of Greece get the better of him. But a question remains: which Darius is this meant to be? The vase’s annotations, especially the names ‘Darius’, ‘Hellas’ and ‘Deceit’, support a story involving Darius the Great, but the situation, like the theatrical, orientalised costumes of the king and his courtiers, allows for a more generic and transferable reading of the scene. By the time the Darius Vase was created, there had been three Great Kings named Darius, each of them notorious among the Greeks in his own right: Darius I (522–486 BCE), the monarch who initiated the Great Wars of the past; Darius II (423–405 BCE), who contributed with such vigour to the prolonging of the Peloponnesian War; and Darius III (336–330 BCE), who according to some accounts (Diodorus 17.1–3, 8–10; Justin 10.3.2–5) was a valiant warrior and had tirelessly met Alexander in the field, until his death – at around the time this vase was crafted.65 With three Great Kings bearing the name Darius, I suggest that three simultaneous readings are possible, as, in effect, one reads the complete history of Persian involvement with the Greeks through this one vase. Ultimately, of course, each Darius was ruined by a form of deceit, be it bad council or ambitious, and deceitful, courtiers or blood-kin.
Of these three kings, it is the Greek memory of Darius II, perhaps the least familiar in our present trio of monarchs, that I wish to examine further here. Known to us best, perhaps, from the mentions he warrants in the works of Thucydides (8.5.4–6, 80.1–2), Xenophon (Hel. 1.4.1–7; 5.8–9; Anab. 1.1–1) and Ctesias (F 15 § 48–52), Darius II, the sixth Achaemenid King of Kings, came to the throne late in 423 BCE, having already been satrap of Hyrcania. His father was Artaxerxes I; his mother, according to Ctesias, was a Babylonian concubine, Cosmartidene (F 15 § 47); Greek authors therefore wrongly considered him a bastard (and nicknamed him nothos), perhaps not fully understanding the institution of royal concubinage.66 The Athenians were familiar with Darius II from the outset of his reign, and they appear to have begun negotiations with the king almost immediately upon his accession to the throne. Margaret Miller has explored the comparatively rich evidence for Athenian embassies to the Persian court early in the reign of Darius, and she stresses the fact that in this period many Athenians of upper rank had visited his court.67 This might well help explain the new red-figure vogue for scenes of the Great King enjoying the pleasures of the court: his female fan-bearers, his gorgeously attired courtiers, and his dancers and musicians (a topos scene of oriental hedonism similarly expounded on the stage by Euripides in his Orestes of 408 BCE).68
Athenian–Persian relations soured quickly when in 413 BCE the Athenians interfered in Persian affairs by supporting the rebel Amorges against the throne. From thereon in, Darius’ reign, as we have had occasion to note, became conspicuous for frequent revolts, led partly by satraps but more threateningly by his own blood-kin. His two eldest sons, Artaxerxes and Cyrus (the Younger), both aimed for the throne. Deciding to keep Artaxerxes close to him at court, Darius sent the younger son, Cyrus, to Ionia to coordinate Persian efforts as Darius began to create a more cohesive Greek policy. Angered by the Athenian championship of Amorges, he decisively sided with the Spartans. Consequently, Cyrus began to pump Persian gold into the Spartan war effort as new warships were constructed and troops were levied. On the back of this, the Persians restated their old claim on the sovereignty of the cities of western Asia Minor, and Cyrus bought the services of Greek mercenaries, many of whom were garrisoned in the Persian-controlled cities of Ionia. In the autumn of 405 BCE, just as the Spartan grip on Athens was tightening, Darius II became ill and summoned Cyrus to rejoin the court at Babylon.69
Interestingly, coinage issued at this troublesome time demonstrates how the image of the Great King penetrated the Greek psyche. An Attic tetradrachm, for example, was used by the Persian authorities to pay Greek mercenaries; the reverse shows the bearded and crowned head of a Great King, in all probability Darius II, at the foot of Athene’s owl.70 Another Attic tetradrachm, however, shows a cleanshaven crowned head stamped on Athene’s cheek – this, it is argued, is an image Cyrus the Younger himself, stamped on a coin issued by the prince for recruiting his Greek forces in Asia Minor.71
It is against this background that Aristophanes produced his comedy Frogs in 405 BCE. Alan Sommerstein persuasively suggests that we can read into the play something of the Athenian reaction to Darius II’s Greek policy and his Spartan partisanship.72 In 405, only two things might possibly have saved a battered, bruised and hungry Athens: a negotiated peace with the Spartan enemy and their Persian allies, or the death of the Great King, which would, at the very least, plunge the empire into chaos and, best of all, probably halt (if only temporarily) the Persian funding of the Peloponnesian fleet. It is little wonder then that in Frogs Dionysus gleefully recalls enjoying best in Aeschylus’ old tragedy, Persai, the scene where the chorus listened to the dead Darius and lamented and mourned the loss of their king (1026–9):
AESCHYLUS: I produced The Persians, and taught [the audience] always to be keen to defeat their enemies, thereby gilding an already splendid achievement.
DIONYSUS: I for one enjoyed the bit when <they listened to> the dead Darius, and right away the chorus clapped their hands together, like this, going ‘iaow-oy!’
Here, clearly, Darius I deliberately becomes conflated with Darius II, and the mention of a ‘dead Darius’ gives the audience of Frogs something to be hopeful about. At the end of 405 or early in 404 BCE Athenian hopes were indeed met with the death of Darius II at Babylon.
It is clear then that the Greeks had a good idea about the character and policies of Darius II; he was very much part of their political reality. That the Greek memory of Darius was kept alive after his death can be confirmed too by a badly weathered stone base from Olympia, dating to 330 BCE (contemporaneous, therefore, with the Darius Vase), which once held a statue of the celebrated Thessalian pankratiast Poulydamas, possibly by none other than the master sculptor Lysippos, although this is much debated.73 Poulydamas had triumphed at Olympia in 408 BCE and an accompanying inscription, Pausanias tells us, listed some of his feats of strength: he could hold a bull by its hind legs, so that it could not tear itself loose; when the bull finally managed to get free, it leftits hooves in Poulydamas’ hands. According to another story, Poulydamas could stop a chariot with galloping horses by holding the wagon from behind with just one hand. More than all these feats, though, he was famous for wrestling, Herakles-like, a lion to its death: ‘On Mount Olympus Poulydamas conquered a lion, a huge and dangerous beast, without the help of any weapon. To this venture he was brought by the ambition to equal the works of Herakles, because Herakles also, as the legend goes, conquered the lion in Nemea.’74 The base represents his victory over the lion, and shows both Poulydamas wrestling the beast and the immediate aftermath. Most interesting, though, is a long horizontal relief (Fig. 17.4) scene depicting a moment in Poulydamas’ life which won him most renown, since the relief was commissioned and carved some eighty years after the event. Poulydamas is shown performing a remarkable feat of strength – he is lifting a man (a royal bodyguard in fact) over his head in the presence of none other than the Great King Darius II himself. Pausanias (6.5.7) provides the details of the story and sets it within its Persian historical context:
Figure 17.4 Poulydamas statue base by Lysippos, c. 330 BCE; front relief. Olympia Museum 45.
Artaxerxes’ bastard son, Darius, who led the Persian people and took the throne from his legitimate son, Sogdius, when he became king sent a messenger to Poulydamas, because he knew of his wonderful deeds, and persuaded him, with promises of gifts, to come to Susa for Darius to see him. At Susa, Poulydamas challenged three of those Persians who were called Immortals, and fought alone against three of them together and killed them. Some of the deeds I have mentioned are on the pedestal at Olympia, and others are explained in the inscription.
The scene on the relief depicts the Great King sitting on his throne wearing the long-sleeved oriental robe, but with a Greek-style himation slung over it, where it falls in folds on his lap; the long flaps of his tiara headdress fall forward down to his chest.75 The king’s left hand holds a sceptre (originally crafted as a metal fixture and now lost), which was once picked out in paint.76
Poulydamas stands in front of the monarch, lifting the flailing and kicking body of the Immortal well above his head, as the soldier struggles to break free. To the right of the group stand four female figures – a queen and concubines, possibly. These court ladies are certainly conjured from the Greek imagination and are dressed in Greek chitōnes and himatia, much in the style of the depictions of Hellas and Asia on the Darius Vase. The female at the front of the group is shown in a standard Greek way as she raises a section of her robe in a veiling gesture.77 The presence of the royal women dovetails neatly with standard Athenian images of the Great King created from the latter part of the fifth century onwards;78 superficially these are imagined scenes of court life or the royal harem where the focus, says Shapiro, is on the male as a ‘truly Persian peacock’.79 It is worth noting, however, that a series of seals and gemstones from Persianoccupied Asia Minor, no doubt commissioned by and for satrapal and local princely courts, also show the image of nobles with their women, although in these Anatolian scenes both parties are always depicted in Achaemenid dress.80
While we have in the Poulydamas relief a stop-frame moment in real time, an event that historically took place at Darius II’s court at Susa at some point between 410 and 405 BCE, I think that it is possible to read the scene in another context entirely, reflecting the date in which the base was commissioned and crafted, that is to say, around the time of Alexander’s conclusive triumph over Darius III at Gaugamela. It is possible to read the relief scene as a moment in the past (some eighty years earlier) projected into the present. The relief is not only a flagrant inversion of the normal regularity of the imperial Achaemenid audience scene, but a metaphor for the overthrow of the Persian Empire itself. This is endorsed by the depiction of Poulydamas’ wrestling a lion. Undeniably Heraklean in its inspiration, the scene has simultaneous Achaemenid undertones which cannot be ignored. In Achaemenid royal ideology the lion symbolises strength, while the image of the slaughtering of a lion by a hero-king, regularly seen in Persian monumental and glyptic art, is used to underline the Great King’s power over his empire and the forces of chaos that threaten it.81 It is possible to see the same ideology incorporated into the Poulydamas scene, but here combined with the victory over the Persian military represented by the defeated Immortal. Darius II, in effect, becomes conflated with his namesake, Darius III, who witnesses, first-hand, the shock and awe of the overthrow of his realm by a Greek force that turned out to be even greater than its reputation had heralded. For his part, Poulydamas is simultaneously his historical self, the mythical Heracles, the personified Greece and, perhaps, an Alexander too.
It would appear that the Greeks of the late classical period understood the workings of Persian history; the Greek historians, in particular those working within the genre of Persica, ensured that they had access to a chronological outline of Persian history, at least as far as they saw it. The Greeks, we have seen, could use the Persian past with great precision (or an attempt at precision at least): Aeschylus had already demonstrated that in his bid to chronicle Median and Persian royal genealogy in his Persai (lines 765–81) of 472 BCE.82 Nevertheless, the Greeks were equally capable of overwriting Persian history and willing to do so, skewing the historical process for their rhetorical, cultural or theoretical needs, omitting and ostracising persons and events from the picture. But the Greeks could also reflect on the workings of the historical process, allowing past events to be paralleled by the present. Literary sources were clearly revelling in this practice: the Cyrus the Great of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia is, of course, the Cyrus the Younger of the Anabasis; we are familiar with that. We are less familiar perhaps with the way in which fourth-century iconography utilises the cultural indica of Persian civilisation to create a picture of a ‘real’ historical Persia whilst simultaneously adjusting the focus of the scene so that we shift backwards and forwards in a moment of time. When we accept that the process of history can be filtered through non-historical texts and images, we must acknowledge that the Greeks were capable of, and enjoyed, creating a sophisticated interplay with the Persian past.
C. J. Tuplin, Achaemenid Studies (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996), p. 164. |
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The theme propounded by E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). |
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Arguments for the flourishing of the empire under the later Achaemenids and into the reign of Darius III are neatly synthesised by P. Briant, Darius dans l’ombre d’Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 2003). |
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Interestingly, Artaxerxes III’s chief objective was to consolidate royal authority and to terminate the revolts which threatened to break up the empire. Wars against the rebel Cadusii (Justin 10.3.2), a major campaign (c. 356–352 BCE) against rebellious western satraps, and the reconquest of Egypt were carried through with vigour and aggression. Details of the various campaigns are unclear, but, clearly, considerable success was achieved. For a narrative overview see P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), pp. 681–90, and M. A. Dandamaev, A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1989), pp. 306–13. See also C. J. Starr, ‘Greeks and Persians in the fourth century BC: Part I’, Iranica Antiqua 11 (1975), pp. 39–99, and Starr, ‘Greeks and Persians in the fourth century BC: Part II’, Iranica Antiqua 12 (1977), pp. 49–116. |
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See, for example, comments by S. W. Hirsch, The Friendship of Barbarians: Xenophon and the Persian Empire (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), p. 142. |
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St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum P 1837.2. For details see L. Stephani, ‘Erklärung einiger Vasengemälde der Kaiserlichen Ermitage, Tafel IV’, CRPétersb. (1866), pp. 139–47; M. Tiverios, ‘Die von Xenophantos Athenaios signierte große Lekythos aus Pantikapaion: Alte Funde neu betracht’, in J. H. Oakley, W. D. E. Coulston and O.Palagia (eds), Athenian Potters and Painters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 269–84; M. C. Miller, ‘Art, myth and reality: Xenophantos’ lekythos re-examined’, in E. Csapo and M. C. Miller (eds), Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth, Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 19–47; B. Cohen (ed.), The Colours of Clay: Special Techniques in Athenian Vases (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), pp. 141–2. See also J. Boardman Persia and the West. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 213–16 and H.A. Shapiro, ‘The invention of Persia in classical Athens’, in M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac and J. Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 57–87, esp. pp. 83–4. |
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The theme is taken up by Xenophantos on other occasions too. In fact, the vase belongs to a group of six similar lekythoi, each of which depicts a hunt (of boar, lion or deer), and all of which have been attributed to a single workshop. See Miller ‘Art, myth and reality’, p. 32 with fig. 2.9. |
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The decoration is sumptuous: eight of the thirteen hunters and all of the game are mould-made relief figures painted and partially gilded. |
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Miller, ‘Art, myth and reality’, pp. 23–39. I suggest that the griffin in the scene takes its inspiration from the Achaemenid-style Homa-bird found on column capitals at Persepolis and elsewhere. |
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Tuplin, Achaemenid Studies, pp. 80–131; J. Barringer, The Hunt in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 183–92. For Near Eastern hunting practices see W. Helck, Jagd und Wild im alten Vorderasien (Hamburg and Berlin: Parey, 1968), and T. T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). |
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Miller, ‘Art, myth and reality’, pp. 39–44. |
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Two Cyruses and two Dariuses were well known in Greece by the early fourth century: Cyrus the Great, the founder of the empire, and Cyrus the Younger, best known for his rebellion against his brother Artaxerxes II; Darius I, best known for his invasion of Greece in the 490s BCE; and Darius II, the father of Artaxerxes II (see below). However, there were several crown princes bearing the name Darius too. See Ctesias F13 § 24, 33, F14 § 34. |
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See E. Hall, Aeschylus: Persians (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1997), p. 112, and A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus: Persae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 169. |
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N. Sekunda, ‘Itabelis and the satrapy of Mysia’, AJAH 14 (1998), pp. 73–102, esp. p. 93. |
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R. Schmitt, ‘Die Iranier-Namen bei Aischylos’, SBWien 337 (1979), pp. 56–7, no. 4.1.12; see also J. M. Balcer, A Prospographical Study of the Ancient Persians Royal and Noble c. 550–450 BC (Lampeter: Edward Mellen, 1993). |
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Tiverios, ‘Die von Xenophantos’, p. 278. Certainly the hunters are easily recognisable as Persians and wear long-sleeved tunics over trousers; some also wear the kandys, a coat with hanging sleeves. They wear the kidaris on their heads. The appearance of the hunters on the Xenophantos lekythos is carefully constructed, which, together with their Persian names, leaves little doubt that they are supposed to represent Persian courtiers. |
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See further Hdt. 7.26.3. |
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See Miller, ‘Art, myth and reality’, although see further arguments by H. M. Franks, ‘Hunting the eschata: An imagined Persian Empire on the lekythos of Xenophantos’, Hesperia 78 (2009), pp. 455–80, esp. p. 480, who suggests that the lekythos ‘illustrates Persian territorial aspirations, which extend to the very limits and most extreme places of the world, and which, as the product of hubristic ambition, must ultimately go unfulfilled’. |
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On the issue of the depersonalisation of individuals in modern synchronic historiography see comments by T. Petit, ‘Symchronie et diachronie chez les historiens de l’Empire achéménide’, Topoi 3 (1993), pp. 39–71, esp. pp. 60–4. |
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Tuplin, Achaemenid Studies, p. 154. |
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Exceptions are: Amestris (Plato, Alcibiades 123c); Datis (Demosthenes 59.94), Mardonius (Demosthenes 24.129); Tissaphernes (Isocrates 16.18) and Cyrus the Younger (who is, anyway, very much a special case; see Demosthenes 15.24; Isocrates 4.145, 5.90, 9.58). |
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A mistake: Isocrates is possibly thinking more generally about the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War in which Sparta received Persian assistance; Artaxerxes II acceded to the throne in 405 BCE, the year of the battle of Aegospotami, the last major battle of the war. |
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The contrast between the fate of the two pairs of kings (Cyrus–Darius/Cambyses– Xerxes) is equally unreal. The pairing occurs elsewhere in Plato: Epistle 332AB, 320D; Phaedrus 258C. Antisthenes apparently wrote two dialogues on the pairing of Cyrus and Darius. |
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See comments by H. D. Broadhead, The Persae of Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 278–82; Hall, Aeschylus: Persians, pp. 161–3; Garvie, Aeschylus: Persae, pp. 300–5. |
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See comments in D. Asheri, A. Lloyd and A. Corcella, ed. O. Murray and A. Moreno, A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397–478. |
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See D. Lenfant, Ctésias de Cinde: La Perse, L’Inde, autre fragments (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004), pp. 118–21; L. Llewellyn-Jones and J. Robson, Ctesias’ History of Persia: Tales of the Orient (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 179–80. |
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The first author of a Persica proper was Dionysus of Miletus, who seems to have attempted an outline of Persian history from the end of the reign of Cambyses II (522 BCE) to the end of the reign of Darius the Great (486 BCE); see R. Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 36; D. Lenfant, ‘Greek historians of Persia’, in J. Marincola (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), vol. I, pp. 201–9, esp. p. 201. The Persica of Charon of Lampsacus, who seems to have written a concise narrative (in only two books) of Persian history from its legendary origins to the time of Themistocles’ meeting with Artaxerxes I, must have covered Darius I’s appropriation of the throne. It is also clear that Hellanicus of Lesbos covered the events of early Achaemenid history, including the murder of Cambyses’ successor and the accession of Darius the Great. As a contemporary of Herodotus, it is possible that Hellanicus’ Persica worked as a parallel (if more concise) redaction of the better-known Histories. See Drews, Greek Accounts, pp. 23–4; Lenfant, ‘Greek historians of Persia’, p. 202; Llewellyn-Jones and Robson, Ctesias, pp. 48–9. |
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See especially Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, pp. 14–16. |
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B. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 285–6. See further L. Mitchell, Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007), pp. 171–2. On fourth-century oratory and its relationship to the Persian past see also J. Marincola, ‘The Persian Wars in fourth-century oratory and historiography’, in E. Bridges, E. Hall and P. J. Rhodes (eds), Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 105–25. |
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He is present in abstracted form, often merged together with Xerxes, at 12.104, 106. He is simply ‘the King’ at 12.162, without a name. |
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On Evagoras see further G. S. Shrimpton, Theopompus the Historian (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), pp. 7–10, 91–2, 93, 103; M. A. Flower, Theopompus of Chios History and Rhetoric in the Fourth Century BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 163–96. |
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Apulian volute-krater by the Darius Painter; Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale 81947 (H 3253). On the dating of the vase and general interpretations of its iconography see M. Schmidt, Der Dareiosmaler und sein Umkreis: Untersuchen zur Spätapulischen Vasenmalerei (Munich: Aschendorff, 1960); M. Daumas, ‘Aristophane et les Perses’, REA 89 (1985), pp. 289–305; A. H. Sommerstein, Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari: Levante, 1996), p. 69; O. Taplin, Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase Painting of the Fourth Century BC (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), pp. 235–7, with a fine colour plate 92; Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, p. 84; Hall, Aeschylus: Persians, p. 8; Garvie, Aeschylus: Persae, p. xvi; Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, pp. 84–5. |
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A. D. Trendall and T. B. L. Webster, Illustrations of Greek Drama (London: Phaidon, 1971), no. III.5.6. |
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Trendall and Webster, Illustrations, p. 112. See further Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, pp. 63–4. |
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E. Hall, ‘Aeschylus’ Persians and images of Islam’, in Bridges et al., Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars, pp. 167–99, esp. pp. 170–3. |
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POxy. 1399. See J. G. Winter, Life and Letters in the Papyri (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1933), p. 199. |
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J. H. Horden, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 121–248; E. Hall, The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Greek Drama and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 270–87. |
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Horden, Fragments of Timotheus, p. 123. |
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Plutarch cites Timotheus on several occasions: see D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric V: The New School of Poetry and Anonymous Songs and Hymns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 91–3. |
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See M. Wright, Euripides: Orestes (London: Duckworth, 2008). |
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Hall, Aeschylus: Persians, p. 8. |
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See Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 84. |
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Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 86. |
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Apatē is closely associated with Atē (Blindness, Recklessness) – a word favoured by Homer and Aeschylus. The Darius Painter might therefore be depicting the Persian Wars as a perversion of divine order. On this idea see further Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 86. |
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Trendall and Webster, Illustrations, p. 112. |
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J. Hesk, Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 7–11, 107–8, 146–51. |
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In the autumn of 331 BCE, Darius III used Arbela as his base before he marched to Gaugamela, where he was defeated by Alexander and his forces. An inscription above the relief, referring to Alexander, reads: ‘I am a relative of Heracles and Zeus, son of Philip and Olympias’; another, beneath the relief, says: ‘Kings and their peoples, as many as the Ocean allots the lands of the earth, cowered before my spear.’ See IG XIV.126. See also M. Fuhrmann, Philoxenus von Eretria (Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, 1933), pl. 3. |
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See Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 86. For the Stoa Poikile see T. L. Shear, ‘The Athenian Agora: Excavations of 1980–1982’, Hesperia 53 (1984), pp. 5–19; for the Marathon paintings see M. D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, ‘The painting programme of the Stoa Poikile’, in J. M. Barringer and J. M. Hurwit (eds), Periklean Athens and its Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), pp. 73–87. |
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See Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 84. He notes that ‘the fate of nations is in the hands of the gods; the Justice of Zeus protects the Hellenes’. |
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Llewellyn-Jones and Robson, Ctesias, pp. 66–8. |
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Compare Aelian VH 1.29, who recounts Ismenias’ ruse of dropping a ring in front of the Great King so that he might be thought to be performing proskynesis as he stooped to pick it up. |
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On Philostratus see G. Anderson, Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century AD (London: Croom Helm, 1986), and E. Bowie and J. Elsner (eds), Philostratus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). |
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See J. L. Marr, Plutarch: Lives. Themistocles (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1998), pp. 152–3. |
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Hall, Theatrical Cast, p. 185. |
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Anderson, Philostratus, p. 264, suggests that Philostratus might have derived his description of Themistocles before the Great King from an original showing Herakles at the court of Omphale, or Achilles among the women; the theme, he suggests, is much the same: ‘the hero among women’. The Hellene in an oriental court is a standard sophic theme from the time Philostratus visits the audience with Artaxerxes in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana 29. See further Anderson, Philostratus, p. 268. |
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J. Perrot, Le palais de Darius à Suse: Une résidence royale sur la route de Persépolis à Babylone (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris Sorbonne, 2010), pp. 256–99. See also L. Llewellyn-Jones, ‘The first Persian Empire 550–330 BC’, in T. Harrison (ed), The Great Empires of the Ancient World (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), pp. 97–121, esp. p. 100; M. C. Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pl. XI, fig. 11. |
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For a clear close-up photograph of this detail see Llewellyn-Jones, ‘First Persian Empire’, p. 109. |
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For the brickwork representations see Perrot, Palais de Darius, pp. 323, 335. For the Persepolis reliefs see, for instance, H. Kokh, Persepolis and its Surroundings (Tehran: Yassavoli, 2006), pp. 60, 70–1. |
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Root, King and Kingship, p. 186, pl. VI fig. 6. |
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This theme is very well explored by M. Millar, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 56ff. On the cultural and artistic interaction between Greece and Persia, especially in Asia Minor, see E. R. M. Dusinberre, Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); L. Llewellyn-Jones, ‘The big and beautiful women of Asia: Ethnic conceptions of ideal beauty in Achaemenid-period seals and gemstones’, in S. Hales and T. Hodos (eds), Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 171–200; C. H. Roosevelt, The Archaeology of Lydia, from Gyges to Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For a fuller picture of the cultural interaction see S. M. R. Darbandi and A. Zournatzi (eds), Ancient Greece and Ancient Iran: Cross-Cultural Encounters (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2008). |
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On the dissemination of the imperial image see especially L. Allen, ‘Le roi imaginaire: An audience with the Achaemenid king’, in O. Hekster and R. Fowler (eds), Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome (Munich: Steiner, 2005), pp. 39–62. See also Root, King and Kingship. |
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L. Allen, ‘Roi imaginaire’, p. 61, fig. 9. |
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See I. Jenkins, Greek Architecture and its Sculpture (London: British Museum Press, 2006), pp. 179–84; C. Brunz-Özgan, Lykische Grabreliefs des 5. und 4. Jarhunderts v. Chr. (Istanbuler Mitteilungen Beiheft 3; Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1987). |
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Jenkins, Greek Architecture, pp. 186–202. The seated figure might be interpreted as the Lydian satrap himself, but the likeliest solution to the figure’s identity is to name him as Erbinna himself, the ruler who commissioned the monument and who was interred in its burial chamber. |
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On the conflict between the reality and later reputation of Darius III see Briant, Darius dans l’ombre d’Alexandre. |
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For the Greek idea of illegitimacy see D. Ogden, Greek Bastardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); for Persian concubinage see the discussion in L. Llewellyn-Jones, ‘“Help me Aphrodite!” Representing the royal women of Persia in Oliver Stone’s Alexander’, in F. Greenland and P. Cartledge (eds), Responses to Alexander (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2009), pp. 150–97, esp. 264–6. |
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M. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C.: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 27, 89, 111. |
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See in particular a red-figure bell-krater, c. 400, Vienna Kuntshistorisches Museum 158; ARV(2) 1409, 1; Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 79, fig. 3.18, with p. 81, fig. 3.20, for a Persian dancer performing the ‘oklasma’ (Athens, National Archaeological Museum 12683, c. 400 BCE). |
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See Llewellyn-Jones and Robson, Ctesias, pp. 9–11. |
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A. Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 355. |
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W. Weiser, ‘Die Eulen von Kyros dem Jüngeren: Zu den ersten Münzporträts lebender Menschen’, ZEP 76 (1989), pp. 267–96. |
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A. Sommerstein, Aristophanes: Frogs (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996), pp. 246–7. |
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For a discussion of the base and debates surrounding it see A. Kosmopoulou, The Iconography of Sculptured Statue Bases in the Archaic and Classical Periods (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), pp. 156–64. |
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Pausanias 6.5.7. Pausanias goes on to say that Poulydamas’ last story concerns the end of his life. One day the athlete was in a mountain cave with his friends when the roof started to fall in on them, and the friends ran out of the cave. Poulydamas stayed inside, thinking he was strong enough to support the roof. He was, however, crushed by the mountain. After his death, he was honoured at Olympia as a hero with healing powers. |
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On the tiara see C. Tuplin, ‘Treacherous hearts and upright tiaras: The Achaemenid king’s head-dress’, in C. Tuplin (ed.), Persian Responses: Political and Cultural Interaction with(in) the Achaemenid Empire (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007), pp. 67–97. |
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His upraised right hand somewhat breaks with artistic convention and perhaps is meant to show Darius surprised and overawed by the strength of the Greek athlete. |
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On the veiling gesture see L. Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), pp. 98–120. |
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See Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 76 n. 59, for a list of ‘Persian domestic or court scenes’ on red-figure lekythoi. |
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Shapiro, ‘Invention of Persia’, p. 76. |
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There is probably a rich interplay for this motif operating between Anatolia and the Greek mainland. See Llewellyn-Jones, ‘Big and beautiful women of Asia’. |
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Root, King and Kingship, pp. 81, 82, 88, 98, 110, 232, 236. |
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Garvie, Aeschylus: Persae, pp. 274–5, 300–5. |
