Creating Barbarians IV

Our next author, Herodotus (circa 425 B.C.), was not present at the battle of Salamis, but he gives his own account of it in his Persian Wars.  As the third text in my analysis, The Persian Wars represents almost 50 years of development for the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy since Aeschylus’ Persians.  Indeed, Herodotus is separated by about a generation from the events he narrates.  Moving away from the “genres” of epic and drama, Herodotus presents an example of the “genre” of history.[1]  No longer is the author’s purpose to retell ancient legends or celebrate a crucial victory.  Herodotus is specifically concerned with a factual inquiry into the people, places, events, and most importantly, causes that fall within the scope of his work.[2]

Herodotus, unlike Aeschylus the Athenian, lived in Persian-dominated Anatolia and one might expect this to produce a very different picture of the Persians at Salamis from that of Aeschylus the Athenian patriot.  After all, the forces of Herodotus’ homeland fought on the side of the Persians.  What emerges in his depiction of the battle of Salamis, however, is the same picture of Persian disorder, effeminacy, despotism and cowardice.  Moreover, there is also a hardening of the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy in his works where Herodotus posits that the Persians are not simply inferior to the Greeks but possessed of an inherent “slave” nature.[3] Working in tandem with this hardening of the dichotomy is a continued reliance on Homeric scenes and motifs to contextualize and express it.  As Jeannie Carlier puts it in an examination of Herodotus’ similar reliance on the motif of the Amazon invasion in constructing the structure and articulating the messages of the Persian Wars: “In order to make the other (the Scythian, Egyption, Persian, or what have you) intelligible to the Greek audience, writers had to employ an interpretive framework familiar to their readers.”[4]

Herodotus’ depiction of the battle of Salamis presents an interesting opportunity for comparison in that it narrates the same event that Aeschylus chose for his Persians.  I can therefore compare the depictions of the Greeks and Persians in the battle between the two texts and attempt to show a pattern of interaction with the Homeric text while at the same time examining the how the continuing solidification of the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy affects Herodotus’ work. 

Keeping in lockstep with Aeschylus’ depiction of the battle of Salamis, the first identifier appears as the lines of boats clash.  We are presented with the same contrast between Greek competence and unity and Persian incompetence and disorder in martial maters: “For as the Greeks fought in order and kept their line, while the barbarians were in confusion and had no plan in anything they did, the issue of the battle could scarce be other than it was.”[5] It is the same image as that of Homer and Aeschylus but there is an added edge to it in the claim that “the barbarians were in confusion and had no plan in anything they did.”  Homer may portray the Trojans as giving disordered cries like wildfowl fleeing the harsh winter or sheep waiting to be milked, and Aeschylus may sermonize about the pitfalls of oriental hubris, but neither of them go so far as to claim that the “others” they portray “had no plan in anything they did.”

In this case the Homeric image is transformed into something harsher and more “essentialized” as the opposition of “Greek” to “Barbarian” grows sharper and more distinct in the Classical mind.  Remember that for Herodotus freedom was connected with military prowess.[6]  If the Persians are barbarians, and barbarians have slave natures, and the slave nature renders one “unmanly” and therefore unable to fight, then for Herodotus the Persians must have “had no plan in anything they did.” [7] 

Following Herodotus’ theme of the slave nature I find a permutation of the next identifier in the stereotype of “Barbarian” effeminacy.  Here again Herodotus’ appropriation of the theme of “Barbarian” effeminacy is affected by the hardening of the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy.  No longer are the “others” marked by effeminacy due to lives of oriental luxury, but they possess it as a natural quality of being “other,” barbarian/slave/woman.[8]  Thus we see where the Persians do fight well, Herodotus is quick to attribute it to fear of the Great King, rather than bravery in battle: “... each did his utmost through fear of Xerxes, for each thought that the king’s eye was upon himself.”[9]

When the Persians are fighting well, it must be because of some servile quality.  After all, the Greeks fight well because they are “free”, while the Persians must fight poorly because they are “slaves.” Indeed, Herodotus puts it more bluntly than Aeschylus, the Persians fight like women in the words of Xerxes: “My men have behaved like women, and my women like men!”[10] The woman Xerxes is referring to is Herodotus’ own queen, Artemisia, and she, a woman, not only outfights the other servants of Xerxes, but out-councils them![11]  One need only remember in what low status the Greeks held women to see implications of this: even a hellenized woman is a more worthy opponent than a Persian man.[12]

The third identifier, the “great leader,” also betrays a hardening of the Greek/Barbarian dichotomy beyond the works of Homer and Aeschylus that nevertheless still employs the same imagery and motifs. The hardening of the stereotypes is evident from the first.  Xerxes the leader of the “slave” Persians is portrayed as a coward in contrast to Themistocles the leader of the “free” Greeks.  Xerxes leads from the rear, meting out tyrannical punishments on those who displease him while Themistocles fights in the thick of it and receives the taunts of his allies as an equal:

Xerxes, when he saw the exploit ... ordered their heads to be cut off ...

During the whole time of the battle Xerxes sat at the base of the hill ...  It

chanced that there was a meeting between the ship of Themistocles ... and

that of Polycritus ...  Polycritus no sooner saw the Athenian trireme, than

knowing whose vessel it was ... he shouted to Themistocles jeeringly ...[13]

From his seat, Xerxes is not depicted as deftly maneuvering his great host, but raving and meeting out unjust punishments as the archetypal oriental despot.  He is the master of slaves, and fulfills his role not as a general or a great leader, but by meeting out to his slaves the beatings their conduct deserves.[14]  Themistocles, in contrast, serves as a sort of, in modern idiom, “working class hero” leading from the front, jostling in the thick of it, and taking the flack from his peers without comment.

While the depiction of Themistocles and Xerxes is more strongly dichotomized than anything found in either Homer of Aeschylus, this dichotomy is still discoursed through a Homeric motif.  It is the contrast between Agamemnon, the Achaean leader, and Priam, the Trojan king, in books III and IV of the Iliad.[15]  In books III and IV Homer speaks of the first great clash between the Achaean and Trojan armies and the contrast between their two leaders.  Themistocles’ pattern of conduct follows that of Agamemnon as “first among equals”, leading from the front, trading taunts, and fighting in the thick of the battle.[16]  Compare the scene mentioned above in Herodotus with a similar scene taken from book IV of the Iliad where Agamemnon ranges up and down the front lines rallying his troops and trading boasts and insults:

And hard by stood Odysseus of many wiles, and with him the ranks of

Cephallenians, no weakling folk ... At the sight of these Agamemnon,

king of men, chid them, and spoke, and addressed them with winged words:

“O son of Peteos, the king nurtured of Zeus, and thou that excellest in evil

wiles, thou of the crafty mind, why stand ye apart cowering, and wait for

others? ... Then with an angry glance from beneath his brows Odysseus of

many wiles addressed him: “Son of Atreus, what a word hath escaped the

barrier of thy teeth! ... This that thou sayest is as empty wind.”  Then lord

Agamemnon spake to him with a smile, when he knew that he was wroth,

and took back his words ...[17]

Xerxes’ pattern of conduct follows that of Priam in book III where the king sits far removed from the battle watching from the walls of Troy and inquiring about the identities of the heroes:

So they said, but Priam spake, and called Helen to him: “Come hither, dear

child, and sit before me, that thou mayest see thy former lord and thy kinsfolk

and thy people--thou art nowise to blame, who roused against me the tearful

war of the Achaeans--and that thou mayest tell me who is this huge warrior,

this man of Achaea so valiant and so tall.  Verily there be others that are even

taller by a head, but so comely a man have mine eyes never yet beheld, neither

one so royal: he is like unto one that is a king.[18]

The difference, of course, is that while Homer depicts Priam as a kindly, if impotent, old man, Herodotus depicts Xerxes as a raving lunatic.  Once again Herodotus appropriates the Homeric imagery but adds to it the flourishes that his belief in a Persian “slave nature” demands.

Familiarity may breed contempt, but it can also bring understanding. In the next post, I will consider the work of Xenophon and how his personal experience with Persians in the heart of the Persian Empire further refines the Graeco-Barbarian Dichotomy.

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[1] What exactly defines a “history” as a “history” is a long and thorny debate that is tangential to my inquiry.  It suffices to say that this examination will bow to convention in classing The Persian Wars as a history and Homer and Aeschylus in the realms of epic and drama, respectively.  The distinction is well precedented in the field.

[2] Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, op. cit., 1.1.

[3] Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology, op. cit. 49.  See in particular his list of citations under footnote 19 where he gives: H. 3.83, 7.19, 7.39, 7.103-104, 7.135, 7.223, 8.68, 8.102, 8.116, 8.118.  See also H. 7.223 for the infamous claim that the Persians were driven into battle with whips.

[4] Jeannie Carlier, “Voyage in Greek Amazonia,” Postwar French Thought Volume III: Antiquities, eds. Nicole Loraux et al., op. cit., 137.

[5] Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, op. cit., 8.86.

[6] Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology, op. cit., 46-47.

[7] Ibid., 50-51.

[8] Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 11-12.

[9] Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, op. cit., 8.86.

[10] Ibid., 8.88.

[11] Ibid., 8.102.

[12] For more on Herodotus’ view of Artemisia, cf. Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 97-99.

[13] Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. George Rawlinson, op. cit., 8.90, 92.

[14] Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, op. cit., 75-77.

[15] Francois Hartog notes that Herodotus pictures Xerxes as a “descendant of Priam,” cf. Francois Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, trans. Janet Lloyd, op. cit., 83.

[16] Jean-Pierre Vernant, Origins of Greek Thought, op. cit., 41.  For a handling of the problems of inequality in society between leaders and masses after the ascendance of the hoplite/citizen soldier, cf. Ibid., 26-27, 64-65., note his mention of Herodotus 9.17.

[17] Iliad, Homer, ed. Loeb, trans. A. T. Murray, op. cit., IV.329-363.  Indeed, for a fuller comparison, cf. IV.223-421.

[18] Ibid., III.161-170.  Indeed, cf. III.161-242.