It has been said, with some justification, that the Persian invasion of 480-479 offered the Greeks the means for recognizing their identity. Within possibly only a year of the victory at Plataea, the poet Simonides had written an elegy that specifically associated the Persian and the Trojan wars (POxy. 3965). The term barbaros is now attested with increasing frequency in Greek literature and, beginning with Aeschylus’ Persians of 472, the figure of the barbarian in Athenian tragedy comes to be invested with all the characteristics - excess, effeminacy, cowardice, injustice, and cruelty - that were considered to be the polar opposites of cardinal Greek virtues. The comedies of Aristophanes lampoon the stupidity and savageness of barbarians such as Persians and Scythians, and the fifth century also saw a heightened, if not entirely new, fascination for depictions of Persians, Phrygians, and Thracians on Athenian Red Figure vases. It is, however, important to ask whether the creation of a barbarian antitype was primarily a feature of Athenian thought and culture or a more widespread phenomenon among the Greeks. The matter is complicated considerably by the fact that nearly all of our literary and iconographic evidence comes from Athens. Simonides hailed from the island of Ceos but he worked for Athenian patrons. Herodotus - whose History is as much concerned with what it is that defines Greekness as with recounting the narrative of the Persian wars - was a native of Halicarnassus but spent considerable time in Athens, where he undoubtedly gave oral recitals of his research. The question cannot, then, be answered with absolute certainty but there are hints that the rampant hostility we find expressed towards the east was not as fervent in other cities of the Greek world.
Firstly, we need to remember that only thirty-one out of several hundred poleis were credited with the salvation of Greece on the victory monuments at Delphi, Olympia, and Isthmia (Document IV.1). A city such as Thebes, which readily came to terms with Xerxes and fought with the Persians at Plataea, or Argos, whose professed neutrality might just as well have amounted to collusion, would have been hard placed to promote themselves as perennial enemies of barbarians. But even the Spartans, whose leadership had eventually repulsed the Persians, seem to have entertained ambiguous relations with the east. The Athenians, like many other Greeks, drew a distinction between xenoi (Greek-speakers from other cities and regions) and barbaroi (non-Greek-speakers) but, according to Herodotus (9.11.2), the Spartans called all outsiders xenoi, Hel-lenophone or not. Pausanias, the victor of Plataea, was criticized for “going native” in Byzantium - clothing himself in Median attire, surrounding himself with a bodyguard of Medians and Egyptians, dining on Persian cuisine, and making himself as inaccessible as oriental despots (Thucydides 1.130.1-2). The Spartans did take seriously evidence that Pausanias had been intriguing with the Persians and yet one gets the sense that their real fear was the charge that he had been fomenting unrest among the helot population (1.132). Certainly, the Spartans did not baulk at accepting Persian gold in order to gain the advantage over the Athenians in the final stage of the Peloponnesian War of 431-404. Secondly, it was very much in Athens’ interest to promote an unbridgeable gap between Greeks and barbarians since the Delian League - which would eventually offer Athens both prosperity and hegemony over the Aegean - was founded in 478 with the explicit purpose of “avenging what they had suffered by ravaging the land of the Great King” (1.96.1). In other words, the continued “demoni-zation” of the barbarian served as the rationale for the perpetuation of the League while legitimating Athens’ continued demand for tribute from her erstwhile allies.
The history of how a barbarian stereotype functioned within Greek - and especially Athenian - self-identification leads us into the fifth and fourth centuries and so is beyond the chronological scope of this book. Considerations of ethnic self-ascription are not, however the whole story. There is also a sociopolitical dimension to the phenomenon that does relate directly to some of the developments we have been tracing in Late Archaic Athens. Although Cleisthenes is credited with having instituted ostracism (p. 243), the procedure was only used for the first time in 487, three years after the battle of Marathon. The first to be expelled was Hipparkhos, son of Kharmos - a relative, perhaps by marriage, of the Pisistratid family. In 486, it was the turn of Megacles, son of Hippokrates - an Alcmaeonid and nephew of Cleisthenes himself. The name of the Athenian ostracized in 485 is unknown, but Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 22.6) says that the first three victims of ostracism were “friends of the tyrants” and much modern scholarship has accepted this explanation. Interestingly enough, there does not seem to have been an immediate backlash against the Pisistratids after Hippias’ expulsion in 510, which is another reason why recent attempts to interpret late sixth-century monuments as “democratic reactions” to the tyranny are unpersuasive (pp. 253-5). Hipparkhos, for example, was archon in 496/5 and an attempt in 493 to prosecute Miltiades - the victor of Marathon and a political ally of the Pisistratids - was unsuccessful (Herodotus 6.104). What changed public opinion was the reappearance of the exiled Hippias at Marathon. Miltia-des was tried again and convicted in 489 (6.136), a decree was apparently passed in the 480s ordering the removal and melting-down of a statue of Hip-parkhos, son of Kharmos, to be made into a stele on which the names of traitors would be inscribed (Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 117), and kinsmen and associates of the Pisistratids were ostracized. There was evidently a popular belief that the Alcmaeonidae had been implicated in the tyranny: they were accused of having communicated a signal to the Persians to sail to Athens before the troops at Marathon could make it back to the city (6.123-24) and Xanthippus, brother-in-law of Megakles and father of Pericles, was ostracized in 484. It is against this background of accusations that we must consider their professions that it had been they who contributed to the liberation of Athens in 510 (pp. 236-7).
Something more, however, than punishment for acts of treason with the enemy was in play. Among the more than 10,000 ostraka discovered on the acropolis and in the agora and Kerameikos cemetery (Figure 9.1), some 700 are inscribed with the name of Kallias, son of Kratios. Of these, sixteen explicitly accuse him of “Medizing” and one even depicts him in Persian costume. This could certainly be interpreted as a charge of collusion with the enemy but, if it is right that ostracism in some senses commemorated the demos’ usurpation of the formerly aristocratic power of imposing exile (pp. 242-3), the accusations of Medism resonate with a rather different tone. As we have seen, the consumption and display of eastern products was one way through which Archaic aristocrats communicated their social distinctiveness; another was by intermarrying and conducting guest friendships with wealthy, non-Greek families. In other words, the charge of “Medism” was part of a critique of aristocratic comportment leveled by a demos that had already intervened in aristocratic politics in 508 and was soon to gain even greater confidence from the role that it played in crewing the triremes that routed the Persian fleet at Salamis - a battle in which the contribution of the poorer citizens outweighed that of the wealthier hoplites. The proscription of “barbarian” customs and products was as much an attempt to “tame” the behavior of the elite as it was the outcome of ethnic chauvinism.
There can be no doubt that the progressive development in the fifth century of a barbarian stereotype allowed the Greeks - and especially the Athenians - to conceptualize more easily their own identity by means of differential comparison. In an age where more abstract ideas about language and culture were evolving, linguistic and behavioral factors also assisted in the process of differentiation. But Hellenic identity was no more a product of the fifth century than it was of the first encounters between Greek settlers and indigenous westerners in the eighth. Its origins lie rather in the sixth century as Greek elites sought to balance their affiliation to an international aristocracy with their obligations to their own communities.
World History
