Because of the multiple and multifaceted connections between the Roman and Sasanid Empires, each side knew a great deal about the other. Unfortunately, through lack of sources and the tendency to look at Roman-Persian relations from a western perspective, hardly anything is (yet) known about how the Sasanians perceived the Romans and their society. Through diplomacy and other contacts, however, they must at least have had knowledge of the way in which the Roman Empire was administratively, military, and socially organized; and through warfare, they must have been well acquainted with geographic and topographic conditions in the eastern Roman territories. Moreover, the shaping of an Iranian identity in Sasanian times - through, for instance, the composition of the Book of Lords - demanded the construction of a hostile ‘‘other’’ world. Rome was that other world and Persia’s arch-enemy (Wiesehofer 2005). The Sasanians felt superior to the Romans - obvious in the Res Gestae Divi Saporis. In this trilingual inscription, the Roman emperor is called the subordinate of the Sasanian king, and the Roman Empire considered a vassal state of the Sasanid state (Rubin 1998). The Sasanian rock reliefs express the same ideology in visual form: they show Roman emperors who kneel as suppliants before Persian kings. Even though the Sasanian rulers never abandoned their triumphal ideological presentation and image of the Roman Empire, reality demanded a more realistic approach, namely the treatment of the Roman emperors as their equals and the acknowledgment of the Roman Empire as a super power.
On the Roman side, the sources are more abundant. They give the impression that the Romans must have known something of, for example, Sasanian political and social institutions, the Persian army, Zoroastrianism, and the geographical situation of the western regions of the Sasanid Empire. Due to the Greco-Roman literary tradition, however, much factual and practical information was either not included in the sources or not presented as such. Geographical learning, for example, was predominantly literary in character, and geographical treatises contain relatively little concrete information. Ethnographical descriptions were still written in the Herodotean tradition, and according to these sources the customs of Sasanian Persians hardly differ from those of their Achaemenid predecessors.
Because they viewed other peoples through the inherited categories of classical ethnography, Roman sources portray their Persian neighbors (and, indeed, the northern ‘‘barbarians’’) in a negative light. Roman cultural prejudices and traditions went deep, and, judging from the available information, greater knowledge (or at least less ignorance) does not seem to have diminished estrangement. As a result, the Persians were characterized as the negative embodiment of Greco-Roman values. The Antiochene orator Libanius, an intellectual heavyweight, called the Persians barbarian and inhumane and compared them to wild beasts (Or. 15. 25-6). His contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew the Sasanians from his own experience and who was not averse to using the beast metaphor in characterizing all peoples outside the Roman Empire (Wiedemann 1986), never calls them barbarian (Chauvot 1998: 386 ff.); but nor does he present them in a favorable light. Ammianus, in his long digression on Persian geography and ethnography (23. 6), was not able to break loose from the portrayal of the Persians that Herodotus had given some eight centuries before. In his ethnographical account, Ammianus emphasizes the ‘‘otherness’’ of the Persians (Teitler 1999; Drijvers 2006). Persian national vices (as seen by Greeks and Romans) receive particularly close attention: sexual intemperance, cruelty, arrogance, effeminacy, violence, garrulity, constant domestic strife, and foreign wars. But Ammianus aspires at least to some sort of balanced picture since, apart from their vices, he also mentions the Persians’ virtues: their avoidance of excessive eating and drinking, their moderation, and, above all, their military training and discipline, as well as their expertise in warfare. Ammianus, being a soldier himself, admired the Sasanian military qualities, although he criticizes the Persians for not always fighting in an organized way, for lacking endurance in battle, and for not being good in man-to-man combat. In general, he portrays the Persian king (Shapur II) in an unfavorable way. He is harsh and cruel, unrestrained in his greed, short-tempered and rude, treacherous and dishonest, and he suffers from uncontrolled rage. The Sasanian king is clearly portrayed as the opposite of Ammianus’s ideal Roman emperor - philanthropic, just, moderate, mild, and gentle. Almost two centuries later, Procopius gave a similar picture of the Persian king (Khusro I); he shows hostility to Khusro and represents him as the denial of humanity (Averil Cameron 1985: 162-3; Brodka 1998; Borm 2007: 251-2). Some time later, Agathias holds similarly contemptuous views on the Persians and their (sexual) habits; he accuses the Sasanid kings of flaying people alive and of being wicked and abominable men (Cameron 1969: 121; Isaac 2004: 378-9). But Agathias as well as other Greco-Roman writers also showed some genuine interest in Sasanian religion and the - from the Roman point of view - peculiar burial customs of the Persians (e. g., Cameron 1969: 79-89).
In spite of frequent contacts, and the knowledge that east and west had about each other, there does not seem to have been a greater resulting empathy and understanding - not, at least, on the Roman side. Greco-Roman sources present on the whole a stereotypical and not very favorable image of the Sasanians. Sasanian society seems to have remained another world for the Romans, a world they did not always find easy to understand, about which they were prejudiced, and to which they felt superior.
Classical scholars have long studied the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, including the Late Roman Empire, as self-contained entities. The Persian Empire, outside their central area of inquiry, had been in general considered marginal, and had been left to study by Orientalists. New approaches in classical scholarship have led to an understanding of what novel insights can be gained by studying the interrelationships of civilizations. In studying the relationship between east and west, the artificiality of ‘‘Orientalism,’’ first criticized in such terms by Edward Said (Said 1978), has put scholars fruitfully on their guard (although Said’s argument is not without its problems and critics). The east, in our case the Sasanid Empire, was a Greco-Roman construct, as is clear from the Roman conception of Sasanian society. That society was seen as very much another and unfamiliar world, to which the Romans condescended; but Sasanian society was in reality more like late Roman society than the Romans themselves were probably inclined to admit. The Sasanians, who had almost certainly developed a corresponding ideology of superiority, had a similar attitude toward Roman society. In spite of the mental gulf that separated them, the east was very much a reality for the Romans, as was the west for the Sasanians. Wars were fought and diplomacy employed to preserve a balance of power between the two empires; but the authorities in both states also realized that they profited from peaceful economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange and that these friendly interactions were beneficial in upholding an acceptable equilibrium between them. Coexistence, just as much as confrontation, characterized the multifaceted and complicated relationship between the Roman and Sasanid Empires.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For basic introductions to Sasanian history, see the various chapters in Yarshater 1983a, vol. ii, and relevant chapters in Schippmann 1990, Cameron and Garnsey 1998, Cameron et al. 2000, Wiesehcjfer 2001, and Bowman et al. 2005. Sources in translation are provided in Dodgeon and Lieu 1991, in Winter and Dignas 2001 (and see Dignas and Winter 2007), and in Greatrex and Lieu 2002, all of which give references to relevant modern publications. For the relations and interchange between the two empires see, for example, Blockley 1992 and Lee 1993. On religious, in particular Christian, interchange between the two empires and Christianity in Iran see Chaumont 1988 and Jullien and Jullien 2002. On the Roman image of the Sasanians and their society, several contributions in Wiesehcjfer and Huyse 2006 are very useful.
World History
