Iran and the West

Cultural Perceptions from the Sasanian Empire to the Islamic Republic

Margaux Whiskin, David Bagot

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838608750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the age of the Sasanian Empire (224-651 AD), Iran and the West have time and again appeared to be at odds. Iran and the West charts this contentious and complex relationship by examining the myriad ways the two have perceived each other, from antiquity to today. Across disciplines, perspectives and periods contributors consider literary, imagined, mythical, visual, filmic, political and historical representations of the 'other' and the ways in which these have been constructed in, and often in spite of, their specific historical contexts. Many of these narratives, for example, have their origin in the ancient world but have since been altered, recycled and manipulated to fit a particular agenda. Ranging from Tacitus, Leonidas and Xerxes via Shahriar Mandanipour and Azar Nafisi to Rosewater, Argo and 300, this inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging volume is essential reading for anyone working on the complex history, present and future of Iranian-Western relations.

SECTION 1

CLASSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

CHAPTER 1

TACITUS AND THE GREAT KINGS

Leonardo Gregoratti

The Arsacid Parthian Empire was Rome's only serious political and military rival from the first century BC until the collapse of the Parthian dynasty in the third century AD. However, despite more than three centuries of coexistence, the representation of the Parthians in Roman literary sources remained one coloured heavily by stereotype or other cultural, literary or political concerns. Focussing on the work of Tacitus, this chapter will demonstrate his work shows us rather more of the author's own concerns than the reality of how the Romans perceived the Parthians, and hence even less of the reality of the situation. This chapter will argue that Tacitus systematically used his portrayal of Parthian monarchs to highlight the failings or strengths of the Roman emperors who populated his narrative. However, this political use of the portrayal of Parthian kings was built upon a seemingly deeply held perception of the Parthians by Tacitus' readership, a perception of ‘eastern decadence’ and barbarism which had been established by the works of the earlier seminal works of Herodotus and Xenophon.

The Parthian Empire entered the political horizon of Rome violently in the mid-first century BC, when Crassus' legions suffered a disastrous defeat on the steppes of northern Mesopotamia. From that time until the early decades of the third century AD, Rome's expansionist goals in the East had to deal with the Parthians. A few decades after Alexander the Great's death, Arsacid Parthian monarchs established their control over a considerable portion of territory on the remotest borders of the Seleucid Empire. The members of the Arsacid dynasty were able to gain the greatest advantage from the weakening and consequent disintegration of that huge Hellenistic state by spreading their control over large territories of southern Asia. When the struggle with Rome began, the Arsacid Empire stretched from the Euphrates to north-western India, including Mesopotamia, the whole Iranian plateau and all the territories lying between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to the south and the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to the north.¹

The Parthian Empire was thus a geographically imposing political entity, far longer lasting than many of the empires that preceded it, ruling over the same peoples and regions. Unfortunately, its role in the history of western Asia, as any scholar dealing with Parthian antiquities sadly knows, has for a long time been underestimated due to the scarcity of extant sources.² Modern researchers complain of the lack of work able to provide a more complete portrait of the Arsacid rule, such as Herodotus and Xenophon provide for the Achaemenids. The result is that what for a long time was known about history and state structure of the Parthian kingdom was mainly based on the incomplete and largely stereotyped accounts drawn up by Roman and Greek imperial writers. Since they wrote in a period during which the Parthians were often at odds with Rome, their interest in the Arsacids was restricted to the provinces of this vast domain lying closer to the Roman borders and to the historical episodes more closely connected with Roman policies.

In her fundamental book L'Image des Parthes dans le Monde Gréco–Romain Charlotte Lerouge showed that the Romans' conception of the Arsacid kingdom and its inhabitants, its organisation and culture was the result of a combination of the elements of Greek historiographic tradition, beginning with Herodotus, which had previously been attributed to the ancient people of Asia: the ancient Persians on one side and the Scythians on the other.³

Having to provide the Western public with a representation of the only state challenging Rome's supremacy in the east, Roman historians found that the best solution was to use the old stereotypes the Greeks had conceived, suggesting the potency of these representations and perceptions in the Roman imagination. Ethnographic topoi were amalgamated in order to create a mainly artificial representation of the Parthian people in order to describe to the Romans this new people Rome was not immediately able to subjugate. Thus, the Romans' perception of the Parthians was the result of a deliberate assemblage of stereotypes about Eastern people belonging to previous literary and historical traditions. Roman propaganda played a major role in moulding the way the Parthians were perceived in the West combined with a lack of genuine interest in most of the sources at the disposal to modern scholars, into understanding what the Parthian state really was like. That said, it is important to emphasise that only a few fragments survive from the works by the western authors explicitly dealing with the Parthians, such as like Arrian's Parthika and from those written by Greek authors living in the Arsacid empire, such as Apollodoros of Artemita or Isidoros of Charax, perhaps distorting our appreciation of Roman perceptions of the Arsacids.

Among the many examples, the words of Tacitus, who wrote a chronicle of first-century Roman history, appear significant concerning the Parthian attitude towards their kings.⁴ After the death of the Great King Phraates (first half of the first century AD) Tacitus records that some Parthian nobles sent envoys to Rome in order to ask Augustus to send as new king Vonones, one of the Arsacid princes for many years living in Rome. Tacitus states: ‘The barbarians welcomed him with rejoicing, as is usual with new rulers. Soon they felt shame at Parthians having become degenerate, at having sought a king from another world.’⁵ Some time later Caius Cassius, governor of Syria, was commissioned to escort the young prince Meherdates to the bank of the Euphrates. Having encamped at Zeugma where the river was most easily fordable, they awaited the arrival of the chief men of Parthia, the Roman governor ‘reminded Meherdates that the impulsive enthusiasm of barbarians soon flags from delay or even changes into treachery, and that therefore he should urge on his enterprise.’⁶ In fact in the course of the campaign in the east, many Parthian vassal kings deserted with their troops, ‘with their countrymen's characteristic fickleness,’ writes Tacitus, ‘confirming previous experience that barbarians prefer to seek a king from Rome than to keep him.’⁷

These passages taken from the work of an imperial author who more than others expressed some interest in the Parthians beyond the mere narration of the historical events, provide a vivid example of the stereotypical approach adopted by Roman writers. After the defeat Crassus suffered at Carrhae (53 BC), when the two states' political aspirations clashed, the Parthians began to be described by the Roman propaganda as a weak people, the barbarians of the east, characterised by a whimsical and inconstant nature. They were politically unstable because they were unfaithful, treacherous and unable to consolidate a kingdom always perceived as on the brink of collapse. Tacitus' narrations demonstrate that the Romans' explanation for the historical events, in the absence of a real historical investigation, was largely ascribed to the very nature of the ‘barbarians.’

The Romans' point of view was based on well-known stereotypes regarding the oriental barbarians. Thus Arsacid rulers, like their Persian predecessors described by Herodotus, were cruel and despotic, weakened by luxury and wealth, and their decisions and policy were strongly influenced by palace intrigues and dynastic strife.⁸

Great King Phraates (37–2 BC),⁹ according to Dio Cassius was the ‘most impious of men’ who committed many crimes, among which the most terrible was the murder of ‘brothers and sons because they were his superiors in virtue’.¹⁰ His son Phraataces (2 BC – AD 4) was by no means a better ruler according to Flavius Josephus:¹¹ a parricide, hated by his own people and expelled from the kingdoms due to a ‘criminal conversation’ he had with his mother Musa.¹² According to the Romans the reality could not be different: the Parthian kingdom was weak because the nature of its monarchs and subjects was weak.

Nonetheless Tacitus' Annales, the history of the Roman Empire from the later reign of Augustus to that of Nero (AD 6–68), composed at the beginning of the second century AD, in at least 16 books of which only a part are extant, constitute the richest and most important source of information about Parthian history in the first century AD.

Although Tacitus shares with other Roman historians the same stereotypical attitude towards the Parthians, the representations of the various Great Kings he provides differ from one another and, in some cases, tend to distance themselves from the stereotypical approach used for the anonymous masses. Each royal personality has some peculiar characteristics and these sometimes differ significantly from the traditional idea of the ‘Persian’ monarch. Tacitus elaborates his own particular and fictitious idea of the different Parthian monarchs, amalgamating each time in a different way traditional topoi and ‘classical’ virtues. This Tacitean representation of the Parthian kings was instrumental in conveying the political message that emerges in all his work.

Between AD 6 and 8, after the fall of Great King Phraataces, a diplomatic delegation sent ‘a primoribus Parthis’ to ask the Roman emperor to appoint a new Great King to the vacant throne of the Parthian Empire from the many Arsacid princes who had been living in the Urbs or in its immediate surroundings since 10 BC when the Great King Phraates IV sent all his sons but one to the court of his ally and friend, the Emperor Augustus.¹³

The Roman princeps chose the old Vonones. According to Tacitus' report Vonones was enthusiastically welcomed in Parthia, but the enthusiasm of his subjects for their new ‘master’ soon gave way to indignation. Soon, states Tacitus, the Parthians began to see Vonones as a puppet king, a servant of Caesar, corrupted by foreign customs, hostium artibus infecto.¹⁴ Vonones was perceived as a foreigner because he was diversus a maioribus institutis, reluctant to adopt the customs of his ancestors. Tacitus goes further making explicit reference to some of the habits most characteristic in the Roman mind of the Parthian people. Vonones was not in fact interested in hunting and horses, raro venatu, segni equorum cura, like his fellow countrymen, but he used a litter for his transport and rejected the lavish banquets of his predecessors, fastu erga patrias epulas. Furthermore, his Greek retinue and the abundant use he made of his seal provoked the derision of his subjects.

Vonones was a Romanised Parthian, chosen by Augustus, and therefore in some sense an emanation of the man who, in the Roman historiographical tradition, was the princeps par excellence, the first and most illustrious Roman ruler. He ideologically represented the attempt of putting at the head of a barbaric nation a ‘minor Augustus’, a man who would have ruled Parthia like a just and civilised Hellenised ruler. The Parthians in Tacitus' narration due to their nature and nationalistic pride, decided not to take that chance and rejected the ‘generous’ gift. They decided in other words to remain barbarians.

In opposition to Vonones the aristocratic factions immediately proposed Artabanus of Media Atropatenes, a member of a cadet branch of the royal family who, according to Tacitus, had strong links with the Dahae, the nomadic tribe living east of the Caspian...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword by Ali M. Ansari
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 CLASSICAL REPRESENTATIONS
• SECTION 2 LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS
• SECTION 3 IMAGINING THE OTHER: FACT AND FANTASY IN CULTURAL AND POLITICAL INFLUENCES
• SECTION 4 VISUAL AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS
• Afterword Isfahan 1976–8: A Personal Recollection
• Bibliography