Creating Barbarians I

My examination of how the Ancient Greeks formed their notion of the “barbarian,” and Persians as the archetypical “barbarians,” has its inspiration in the study of the part played by slaves in Classical Greek warfare in Peter Hunt’s Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. Hunt argues that there is a pattern of suppression in these works, both conscious and subconscious, of the role slaves played in Classical warfare, rooted in the challenge fighting slaves posed to notions of “free Greeks.”[1] According to Hunt: “In contrast [to free Greeks], slaves are anti-warriors: they are soft, feminine, non-Greek, and cowardly.”[2] Slaves assuming the role of warrior, a part reserved for male citizens, threatened the ideological categories that separated slave from free in the minds of the citizenry:

Slavery played an important ideological role in the relations between

sections of the free population . . . On the ideological level, slaves were a

group against which all Athenians could define themselves as a unity.[3]

Hunt argues that this led to a certain “reticence of the ancient sources” in which slaves tend to “disappear” or stand out as exceptions when they are mentioned.[4] The main players of the historians’ narratives are free Greek citizens.

I believe that Hunt’s thesis can be extended to understand the mental world of the Classical Greeks in regard to a Greek/Persian dichotomy. This dichotomy has its origins at the very outset of Greek literature, Homer’s Iliad. It latches on to the Persians in the theatrical works of Persian War veteran, Aeschylus. The historian Herodotus brings the dichotomy into the realm of formal history in his Persian Wars and Xenophon’s Anabasis and Cyropedia firmly cement the dichotomy as a common place.

In order to begin my examination, I will first mark out what I believe are the three key identifiers of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy. The first identifier is the stereotype of the numberless and disordered barbarian hordes versus the disciplined Greeks. Aeschylus, an eyewitness at the battles of Marathon and Salamis, demonstrates this in his Persians:

A mighty shout greeted our ears: “On, ye sons of Hellas! Free your

native land, free your children, your wives, the fanes of your fathers’ gods,

and the tombs of your ancestors. Now you battle for all.” And now from

our side arose responsive the mingled clamor of Persian speech. [5]

The image is that of a vast and countless swarm of exotic Asiatics descending upon Greece. The Greek popular imagination liked nothing so much as a few well-disciplined Greeks overcoming all the odds to win out against a tide of disordered and clamorous  barbarians, as Xenophon’s Anabasis bears witness.[6] This identifier creates a bridge between the mental stereotype of barbarians as “weak and slavish” and the need for a compelling story. If Greeks defeating an equal number of barbarians is always going to be a pushover, how about if they’re outnumbered ten to one![7] 

The second identifier is the stereotype of barbarian luxury and effeminacy. Again, Aeschylus provides an example in speaking of the Persian-dominated Anatolians:

In their train follows a throng of luxurious Lydians, and those who hold in

subjection all the people of the mainland, whom Metrogathes and brave

Arcteus, their kingly commanders, and Sardis rich in gold sped forth, riding

in many a chariot, in ranks with three and four steeds abreast, a spectacle

terrible to behold.[8]

Barbarians are lovers of gold, numerous, and “luxurious.” In the Greek mind, Greeks may have been much poorer than the Persians, but their poverty made them rugged and “manly”; while a life of “oriental luxury” blunted the puissance of the Persians and their allies.[9] In this way, an accident of geography and economics becomes a moral virtue.

The final identifier is that of the “great leader,” or the barbarian who by virtue of possessing certain “Greek” traits is able to rule over the other barbarians and, when the narrative demands it, to provide a fitting challenge to Greek manhood on the field of battle. An example is Xenophon’s heroic Persian employer in his Anabasis, Cyrus the Younger, or his idealized Cyrus the Great:

As to his nature, even now Cyrus is still described in word and song by the

barbarians as having been most beautiful in form and most benevolent in

soul, most eager to learn, and most ambitious, with the result that he endured

every labor and faced every risk for the sake of being praised.[10]

The logic runs along the same lines as that of the “Asiatic hordes”: the creation of a “super” barbarian who can be focused on as a fitting, and (in a narrative prepared to entertain an audience) exciting, challenge to the Greeks.

            With these three identifiers marked out, I can proceed to examine their source. In the next post in this series, I will demonstrate that these markers find their origin at the beginning of Greek literature in Homer’s Iliad.

Nota Bene: This post in modified from my master’s thesis “Peacocks out of Asia: An examination of the Greco-Persian dichotomy as articulated in four ancient Greek texts”

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[1] Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.

[2] Ibid., 5.

[3] Ibid., 3.

[4] Ibid., 5.

[5] Ibid., lines 401-406.

[6] Nor is that taste foreign in our own times, as the continued popularity of the film adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 based on the battle of Thermopylai shows; cf. http://300themovie.warnerbros.com (16 February 2006).

[7] For a brief outline of Barbarians as “servile,” cf. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 54-56.

[8] Aeschylus, Persians, ed. Loeb, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth., op. cit., lines 40-48.

[9] Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 12. In addition, cf. Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 8.8.8-26. Also of interest, cf. Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians, op. cit., 46-48.

[10] Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler, op. cit., 1.2.1.