Imagining Xerxes

Ancient Perspectives on a Persian King

Emma Bridges

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472511324
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Greek Ancient History

Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with this eastern king – which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army – has inspired a series of literary responses to Xerxes in which he is variously portrayed as the archetypal destructive and enslaving aggressor, as the epitome of arrogance and impiety, or as a figure synonymous with the exoticism and luxury of the Persian court. Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition. It examines the earliest representations of the king, in Aeschylus' tragic play Persians and Herodotus' historiographical account of the Persian Wars, before tracing the ways in which the image of Xerxes was revisited and adapted in later Greek and Latin texts. The author also looks beyond the Hellenocentric viewpoint to consider the construction of Xerxes' image in the Persian epigraphic record and the alternative perspectives on the king found in the Jewish written tradition. Analysing these diverse representations of Xerxes, this title explores the reception of a key figure in the ancient world and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.

1

Staging Xerxes: Aeschylus and Beyond

The viewer of an artistic depiction of the dream-vision seen by Aeschylus’ Persian queen (Plate 2, based on George Romney’s 1778 sketch, ‘Atossa’s Dream’)1 could be forgiven for failing at first to identify the figure who lies prostrate in the foreground. Raising his hand to his head in a gesture of despair, and stripped bare of the rich royal garments which might provide clues about his status or identity, he lies humiliated and pathetic, cast out from his chariot and watched over by an anxious bearded spectator – the ghost of his father – who is powerless to intervene. The women who stand over him, personifications of Asia and Greece, are no longer restrained beneath the harness attached to his chariot; his attempt to join them together in subjection to his command has been catastrophically thwarted. The wretched character seen here – unrecognizable as the fearsome warring king who marched on Greece with a military force of millions at his disposal – is the imagined Xerxes whom Aeschylus chose to present to the audience of his Persians. He is a Xerxes created within the theatrical context of a tragic drama; pictured by the Chorus at the start of the play as the formidable invader who struck terror into the hearts of the Greeks, the king is transformed in the course of the tragedy into a grief-stricken spectacle who eventually appears before us in rags and bereft of his vast army.

By envisaging the reaction at the Persian court to news of the Athenian victory at Salamis the Persians – the only surviving text of an Aeschylean trilogy produced in 472 BC, with Pericles as choregus2 – presents to us a Xerxes who at first displays many of the characteristics which would come to be adopted in later literary depictions of the barbarian invader.3 Here was an enemy capable of inspiring terror and awe, who had threatened the homeland and the lives of the Greeks; in articulating the absolute fear felt at his advance, the ultimate victors were also able to express their pride in their own success at overcoming the Persians against all odds. At the same time, however, Xerxes’ defeat – precisely because it had seemed at first that all was weighted in his favour – reduced the king, in the eyes of the triumphant Greeks at least, to a pathetic figure, one who might be viewed with derision or perhaps even pity.4 For the Athenian spectators in the Theatre of Dionysus in 472 BC, many of whom would actually have fought at Salamis, Aeschylus’ tragedy – the first Greek cultural response to the figure of Xerxes which survives in its entirety and the only extant example of a tragic play based on a historical theme5 – evoked memories of events which had taken place less than eight years previously. As a piece of tragic theatre, this first configuration of Xerxes is shaped by the requirements of the drama; this has an impact upon the presentation of his character in terms both of the play’s moral dimension and the visual and aural elements of the way in which he is envisaged. An analysis of the play’s presentation of the Persian king will demonstrate the ways in which Aeschylus’ audience encountered his version of Xerxes – a theatrical impersonation of the then still-living barbarian ruler6 – and the dramatic process by which the play uses the tools at the tragedian’s disposal to erode gradually the magnificent image of a fearsome enemy which is envisaged in the parodos.

Despite the focus on the defeat of Xerxes’ force at Salamis the king himself actually appears only after over 900 lines of the text.7 Although he is literally absent from the stage for much of the play, however, his presence is felt throughout in the words spoken by the Chorus and by other characters: the Queen, the messenger and Darius. This chapter will explore the ways in which their perspectives on Xerxes both anticipate his eventual arrival at the Persian court and create a series of images highlighting significant elements of his personality and behaviour as conceived in the early stages of the evolution of the Xerxes-traditions. By using striking visual imagery in the words of the Chorus, the Queen’s report of her dream foreshadowing Xerxes’ failure, and the messenger’s description of the actual defeat at Salamis, when the prophecy seen in the dream becomes a reality, Aeschylus stages the decline of his offstage protagonist. Before Xerxes himself appears we are also offered an image of what might have been, in the form of the ghost of his father Darius, whose dramatically contrived presence in the play as a representative of past royal splendour and success serves to highlight the inadequacy of his son; Xerxes’ predecessor also pronounces an ethical judgement on his actions. Xerxes’ eventual appearance on stage is the final spectacular chapter in the tragic drama, which culminates with an outpouring of emotional anguish from the Greeks’ vanquished foe; he embodies the Persians’ humiliation and, by association, the triumph of the Greeks. This tragic Xerxes would inspire a range of literary responses throughout antiquity and beyond; the present chapter will also examine closely one performative re-interpretation of his character, a dithyramb composed by Timotheus of Miletus sixty or more years after Aeschylus’ Persians, which illustrates the way in which Aeschylus’ theatrical character could be adapted in a new artistic and historical context.

First impressions: The formidable foe

It is within the parodos of the Persians – sung by a Chorus of elderly Persian advisors who express their anxiety about the condition of the Persian army and its commander8 – that we find the play’s first image of the as yet absent Xerxes, set in the context of his leadership of the expedition to Greece. It is an image of royal splendour and one which conveys a sense of the fearsome appearance of the mighty king and his vast army; the Chorus’ description also reflects the haughty self-assurance of the king as he set out on his mission to Greece. This is a king imagined at the height of his power and confidence, shaped by Aeschylus’ need at the start of his play to set up his Xerxes for the crushing fall which will be enacted in the course of the tragedy. Having set the scene by listing the contingents of the Persian force and its commanders in an epic-style catalogue9 which serves to emphasize the size of the military force under Xerxes’ command, the Chorus conjure a mental picture of the king as he undertakes his expedition:10

The King’s army, which annihilates cities,

has already passed over to our neighbours’ land opposite,

crossing the strait named after Helle,

Athamas’ daughter, on a floating bridge bound with flaxen ropes,

yoking the neck of the sea with a roadway bolted together.

The raging leader of populous Asia

drives his godlike flock against every land

in two movements: an equal of the gods, born of the golden race,

he trusts in his stalwart

and stubborn commanders both on land and on the sea.

He casts from his eyes the dark

glance of a lethal snake;

with numerous soldiers and numerous sailors

he speeds on in his Syrian chariot,

leading an Ares armed with the bow against famous spearsmen.

No one is so renowned for valour

that they can withstand such a huge flood of men,

and ward them off with sturdy defences.

(Persians 65–89)

The Chorus’ recollection of the sight of Xerxes, sacker of cities, at the head of his immense army, offers a visual snapshot of the king in his role as powerful invader and incorporates several of the key topoi relating to Xerxes – recurring literary motifs which would come to characterize him in discourse surrounding the Persian Wars. The impression created here is one which draws primarily on Xerxes’ capacity to induce terror; the image also highlights themes which were to become embedded in the Greek imagination as symbolizing his invasion of Greece. Of crucial significance is the reference to Xerxes’ bridging of the Hellespont, an episode which in later texts would come to function as shorthand for the arrogance and transgressive behaviour of the king. References to the crossing from Asia into Greece in the literary tradition, beginning with Aeschylus’ play, also turned the actual event into something with a deeper symbolic meaning; it would come to represent Xerxes’ exercise of his despotic power and imperial ambition as well as his mission to enslave the Greeks in order to incorporate them into his already vast empire. The image here of the sea as having a yoke (ζυγόν, 71)11 placed about its neck metaphorically implies that it is a living being, to be tamed, just as Xerxes attempted to subdue Greece and its inhabitants with the ‘yoke’ of slavery (at line 130, too, the sea is also described as ἀμφίζευκτον, ‘yoked from both sides’). The noun τὸ ζεῦγος had been used since Homeric times to refer to a pair of beasts joined together (e.g. Iliad 18.543), and the verb ζεύγνυμι also applied to the action of yoking, harnessing or fastening together; with this suggestion of binding action it could also, like the English term ‘wedlock’, be used to refer to marriage. Aeschylus’ play is, however, the earliest evidence of the application of vocabulary relating to yoking to the joining of opposite banks with bridges. While the metaphor is a logical one in the context, the fact that frequently in Greek literature from this point on the term is applied to Xerxes’ bridge might indicate that the Persian invasion itself suggested this particular usage of the terminology. Elsewhere in the play the Chorus assert that the inhabitants of Tmolus are ‘set on casting the yoke of slavery (ζυγὸν ἀμφιβαλεῖν δούλιον) onto Greece’, and later the Persians themselves are described as being ‘yoked’ under Xerxes’ regime (591–4, where they imagine themselves as being able to speak freely once this yoke has been removed).

While the Hellespont crossing acts here as shorthand for the invasion as a whole, aggression and hostility are Xerxes’ defining personal characteristics in the image conjured up by the Chorus. Their description of him as θούριος (‘raging’, 74) relates to the Iliadic epithet for Ares,12 the god who personified the brutality and bloodshed of war, and whose name is also used in this description as a metaphor for the army led by Xerxes; the king himself is imagined as a deadly snake, or dragon (the Greek here is δράκων, 82), whose very gaze is sinister.13 Meanwhile his army is one which fights not with the spear, like the hoplite soldiers of Athens, but with the bow (85), which came to symbolize Persian warfare in Greek discourse;14 here and throughout the play – notably at the end of the parodos, where the Chorus wonder ‘Has the drawn bow won, or has the migh...

Indice dei contenuti

• Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations and Photographs
• Note on Translations, Illustrations and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Encountering Xerxes
• 1 Staging Xerxes: Aeschylus and Beyond
• 2 Historiographical Enquiry: The Herodotean Xerxes-Narrative
• 3 Xerxes in his Own Write? The Persian Perspective
• 4 Pride, Panhellenism and Propaganda: Xerxes in the Fourth Century BC
• 5 The King at Court: Alternative (Hi)Stories of Xerxes
• 6 The Past as a Paradigm: Xerxes in a World Ruled by Rome
• Epilogue: Re-imagining Xerxes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright