Sophist Kings

Persians as Other in Herodotus

Vernon L. Provencal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780938165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Sophist Kings: Persians as Other sets forth a reading of Herodotus' Histories that highlights the consistency with which the Persians are depicted as sophists and Persian culture is infused with a sophistic ideology. The Persians as the Greek 'other' have a crucial role throughout Herodotus' Histories, but their characterisation is far divorced from historical reality. Instead, from their first appearance at the beginning of the Histories, Herodotus presents the Persians as adept in the argumentation of Greek sophists active in mid-5th century Athens. Moreover, Herodotus' construct of the Sophist King, in whom political reason serves human ambition, is used to explain the Achaemenid model of kingship whose rule is grounded in a theological knowledge of cosmic order and of divine justice as the political good. This original and in-depth study explores how the ideology which Herodotus ascribes to the Persians comes directly from fifth-century sophists whose arguments served to justify Athenian imperialism. The volume connects the ideological conflict between panhellenism and imperialism in Herodotus' contemporary Greece to his representation of the past conflict between Greek freedom and Persian imperialism. Detecting a universal paradigm, Sophist Kings argues that Herodotus was suggesting the Athenians should regard their own empire as a betrayal of the common cause by which they led the Greeks to victory in the Persian wars.

1

Herodotus and the Histories

The life of Herodotus and the historical narrative of The Histories1 are both centred upon the crisis that gave birth in Greece to the Panhellenic cultural identity of to Hellenikon.2 The historical narrative of The Histories begins and ends with the loss and recovery of Greek freedom in Ionia, where Herodotus was born and grew up, and its thematic climax is a speech in which Athens declares her allegiance to the Greek fraternity based on to Hellenikon, what it means to be ‘Greek’ (8.144). The Histories attributes the Greek victory to democratic Athens (5.78, 7.139), where Herodotus is said to have publically presented his work, for which he was awarded handsomely (SK 1.1). By the time he did so, however, Pericles had already removed the Delian treasury to Athens, effectively completing the conversion of the Athenian-led alliance of freedom-fighters into an Athenian Empire, and the earliest signs of impending internecine warfare throughout Greece were beginning to appear.3

The Histories was completed several years after war between Sparta and Athens and their allies had been declared, a war that Herodotus’ younger contemporary Thucydides blamed on the growth of Athenian imperialism (Th. 1.23). It is really from this perspective of having witnessed the destruction of the Greek fraternity at the hands of those who were most responsible for its realization that The Histories is composed.4 As such, like the plays of Athenian contemporaries, The Histories has the immediate rhetorical purpose of addressing the contemporary political situation by way of its representation of the past.5 It does so chiefly by representing the Persians as embracing, embodying and espousing the sophistic doctrines by which the Athenians justified imperialism (SK 4.4.5). This is not to say that Herodotus is intentionally misrepresenting the Persians as sophists to teach Athens a lesson, since he understands Asian tyranny on the basis of Greek tyranny, and Persian imperialism on the basis of Athenian imperialism.6 Just as it is the wont of Herodotus to understand Egyptian religion on the basis of Greek religion yet to explain Greek religion as originating in Egypt, so does he understand the Persian ideology of imperialism on the basis of the Athenian ideology of imperialism yet represents the sophistic ideology of the Athenians as originating in Persia. And just as the attribution of Homer’s and Hesiod’s knowledge of the gods to the Egyptians (2.50, 53) serves the rhetorical purpose of establishing an account of the past based on historia,7 so does the attribution of Athenian ideology to Persia serve the rhetorical purpose of criticising Athens as betraying the Greek cause of freedom in its pursuit of empire.

That the cultural polarity of Greece and Persia in Herodotus is that of conflicting ideologies rooted in contrary views of the relationship of nomos and phusis has important implications for how we regard the Greek view of the ‘Other’ more generally (SK 0.1). In Herodotus, at least, there is not an essentialist notion of a Greek ‘nature’ as opposed to a Persian ‘nature’; there is an ideological notion of otherness of such an order that, while Persians and Greeks have adopted diametrically opposed ideologies and evolved diametrically opposed cultures, Herodotus can insist that the Persians entertained the possibility of instituting democracy in Persia as it did in Ionia (3.80, 6.43), and that the Greek tyrants and medized generals had adopted the Persian ideology of despotism (SK 5.6).

1.1 Herodotus

Herodotus: son of Lyxes and Dryo, of Halicarnassus, from a prominent family, brother of Theodorus.8 He moved to Samos on account of Lygdamis, the third tyrant of Halicarnassus, grandson of Artemisia … In Samos he became fluent in the Ionic dialect and wrote a history in nine books, starting from Cyrus the Persian and Candaules the Lydian.9 After returning to Halicarnassus and driving out the tyranny, he later saw that he was unpopular with his fellow citizens, and went voluntarily to Thurii, which was being settled by the Athenians. He died there and was buried in the market place; but some say that he died at Pella.

‘Herodotus’, Suda10

Aside from the Histories, our principal source for the life of Herodotus is whatever is preserved of ancient tradition in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia, under entries for ‘Herodotus’ (above), ‘Lydagmis’ and ‘Panyassis’. Additional evidence is found in Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, Eusebius, lesser-known authors and anonymous works.11 The Histories begin by declaring that it is the work of ‘Herodotus of Halicarnassus’, but Aristotle and others cite a variant reading, ‘Herodotus of Thurii’. The Suda resolves the discrepancy by placing Herodotus’ birth in Halicarnassus and his death in Thurii. Herodotus’ birth is generally dated to 484, accepting the ancient convention of dating the acme of a person’s life at the age of 40, which would have been the age of Herodotus at the time he is reported to have been publically honoured by the Athenians in 444, which agrees also with the ancient dating of his age as 53 at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431. Although the Histories only assure us that Herodotus could not have died before 431, his death is generally dated to 424, with some scholars extending it to 421 or even 414.12 By the time of his birth, Halicarnassus had been under Persian rule for more than a half-century. By the time Halicarnassus joined the league in 454, the Athenians had gained an empire, ruling over the cities of Ionian Greece they had initially helped liberate from Persian rule. About this time, Herodotus left Halicarnassus ‘for good … when he was about 30’13 and he spent the remainder of his life travelling, composing and lecturing from the Histories. His travels included central Greece, as far north as Thrace, Macedonia, the Black Sea and Scythia; to the west, Magna Graecia and Sicily; as far south as Elephantine in Egypt; in the Near East, Asia Minor as far as Babylon, but not Persia proper.14 Despite his travels, it is ‘probable that Herodotus could not speak any language other than Greek’.15

Neither the Suda nor the Histories claim Herodotus visited Athens16 but his use of local information about Athenian history and topography assures us that he did.17 Scholars accept anecdotal evidence that places him there sometime between emigrating from Halicarnassus in 454/3 and settling in 444/3 in Thurii, a Panhellenic colony founded by Athens in southern Italy, whose constitution was drafted by Protagoras as commissioned by Pericles.18 It is said that he gave public readings in Athens in 445/4, for which it was proposed that the Council award him the astonishing fee of ten talents.19 About 442, he is said to have been honoured with an ode composed by Sophocles,20 whose extant tragedies evince familiarity with the Histories.21 The ‘tragic’ aspect of Herodotus’ Histories also evinces familiarity with the Greek tragedians, certainly Aeschylus, most likely Sophocles, and perhaps Euripides as well.22 Anecdotal evidence and apparent familiarity with passages in the Histories in Antigone (late 440s) and Acharnians (425/4) date the Histories as familiar to Athenians as a work in progress as early as 445/4 and as a published work as early as 425/4.23 Thus,

it is not to be denied that Herodotus’ public readings were renowned in intellectual circles at Athens and that Sophocles in particular was impressed by his views on the barbarians as well as by his ethical and religious ideas. Ancient sources do not mention any contact with Pericles … It remains true, however, that Herodotus’ Athens was also Pericles’ Athens, as well as the Athens of Sophocles, Euripides and Protagoras.

Asheri (2007a: 4)24

1.2 Historical narrative of the Histories

Herodotus’ life spanned the rise and fall of Greek fraternity in the early fifth century and the historical narrative of The Histories recounts the origins of the fraternity from the perspective of its collapse. Centred upon the Greek crisis of Persian conquest, the narrative proper of the Histories begins with the Lydian subjection of Ionian Greece around 560, and makes reference to events that occurred shortly after the beginning of the Peloponnesian war in 431. By the mid-sixth century, Greek poleis populated the Mediterranean coasts of Europe, Africa and the Levant. The centre of the Greek world remained the Aegean Sea. Ionian Greece remained subject to Lydia until Croesus led an ill-fated campaign against the greatest and last of the Near Eastern empires, Persia. By 530, Ionian Greece and the whole of the Near East were under Persian rule. The rise of Achaemenid Persia occurred in the aftermath of the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire at the end of the seventh century. Under Cyrus the Great, the Persians arose in 550 to take control of the territory once under Assyrian rule, to which Cambyses added Egypt. Darius gained the throne in 521 amid rebellions throughout the empire that he successfully quelled before attempting to expand the north-western frontier of the empire. Failing to subject the Scythians in the far north, he crossed the Hellespont into Greece and ended his campaign after subduing parts of Thrace and obliging Macedonia by way of a treaty.

The fifth century began with the Ionian revolt against Persian rule in 499, which Darius quelled by 494, and followed up by sending a fleet across the Aegean to punish Athens for assisting the revolt. The Persians answered their unforeseeable defeat by Athens at Marathon in 490 by launching a major invasion of Greece ten years later. Xerxes, who had inherited the throne after his father’s death in 486, marched his army across the Hellespont and down along the Aegean coast of Greece only to be defeated in Attica by the Greek alliance led by Athens and Sparta, which ended the Persian offensive. In 478, Athens allied with the Aegean and Ionian poleis to form a naval league whose mandate was to carry on an offensive against Persia, in which Sparta had no interest. By the mid-fifth century, a formal peace was negotiated with Persia, by which time the treasury of the alliance was transferred from Delos to Athens, marking the completion of a process by which free allies were forcibly constrained by Athens to continue as tribute-paying members of the league. Athenian imperialism so alarmed Sparta and her allies that the inevitable war was formally declared in 431, providing the most immediate context within which Herodotus gave final form to his Histories. By 424, the traditional year of his death at the age of 60, the war would have raged for seven years; according to Thucydides, it was a period marked by the bloodshed not only of war between the city-states, but of factional civil strife – stasis – within them. The irony of the turn of events would not have been lost on Herodotus: once leaders of an alliance in the ‘Great War’ of the defence of Greece against non-Greeks, Athens and Sparta now divided the Greek world in a war of Greek against Greek, citizen against citizen, father against son. In Athens, the demagogue Cleon had replaced the autocrat Pericles, and persuaded the Athenians to wreak savage vengeance on Mytilene; if Herodotus lived another ten years, as some have argued, Alcibiades would have been advancing the cause of the fated Sicilian expedition by arguing that it was a law of nature that those states that did not continually increase their empire would perish (Th. 6.18.6).

1.3 Rhetorical purpose of the Histories

As historians, we can approach the Histories as a narrative that follows the career of Persian imperialism and r...

Table of contents

• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Herodotus and the Histories
• 2 Herodotus and the Sophists
• 3 Herodotus and the Persians
• 4 Persians as Other in Herodotus
• 5 Sophist Kings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Expanded Table of Contents
• Index of Passages – Herodotus’ Histories
• Index of Persons
• Copyright