Among all the civilizations which the ancient Greeks encountered, the Iranians have a special place in the European imagination as the Greeks’ enemies and opposites. Nineteenth - and early twentieth-century Europeans, whatever their nationality, took it for granted that ancient Greek civilization was indigenous and exemplary, while its Iranian counterpart was strange and alien, Greek culture creative and active, Eastern culture passive and derivative (Hauser 2001a: 93-4). European historical thought,
A Companion to Archaic Greece Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-631-23045-8
Following ancient Greek models, perceived Iran (like the other cultures of the Ancient Near East) as hardly more than a “culture on the fringes of the Mediterranean,” as a kind of outer or even counter-world. This antinomy did not change fundamentally even when the kinship between the Iranian (Aryan) and European languages was recognized, and when theories about “national consciousness” gave rise to a belief in a close affinity between all Indo-European peoples and their shared cultural superiority. True, this resulted in a more positive assessment of the ancient Persians, but it did not change the distinct preference for the art, culture, and government which evolved in Greece (mainly Athens) and was often seen as continuing in a direct line to the present day (Hauser 2001a: 85-90). In Germany, this ideology was replaced, but in part also reinforced, by the National Socialists’ view that the “Aryan” Persians had been adversely affected by the racial and biological influences of the “Semitic” Orient. A negative assessment of “Semites” and “Semitic” cultures was not, of course, an exclusively German phenomenon. After the war - again not only in Germany - the idea of an unbridgeable gap between Persian despotism and Greek love of freedom became predominant (Wiesehofer 1988; 1990; 2002). Only since the 1980s have interdisciplinary scholarship1 and the more inclusive discourse of such research topics as cultural diversity, ethnicity, Orientalism, the “strangeness” of Greek culture (Holscher 1989) promised a paradigmatic change which would treat non-Greek cultures more fairly. At the moment, however, we are again seeing a rejection of such a broader perspective and a revival of Eurocentric constructs of cultural continuity, a trend set off by controversies over the relevance of Classics in Higher Education and by the search for pan-European and/or occidental identities (Hauser 1999). In the process, the real and most lasting legacy of Greek culture, political theory and practice (Flaig 2001), is often pushed into the background.
This chapter reviews the political and cultural relationship between Greeks and Persians in pre-classical times in two ways. First, it is concerned with the history of scholarly and popular perceptions of those relations in both Europe and Iran. It seeks to expose the weaknesses inherent in many of those views in light of new ideas about, for example, the invention of tradition, ethnicity, collective identities, and cultural complexity. Secondly, drawing on recent research on the sources (especially Herodotus) and the history of events, it stresses the variety of political and cultural relations between Hellas and Iran and of the Greeks’ perceptions of their mighty neighbor in the East.
In this chapter, the term “culture” will be used to mean not only “high” culture, but the whole range of acquired perception, knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. This is important since the transfer of practical knowledge and techniques, as well as of utilitarian and luxury goods, was a distinguishing mark of Graeco-Persian cultural contacts. Ancient civilizations were shaped by cultural differences, and hardly at all by ethnic characteristics (despite our sources’ occasional claims to that effect). This chapter adopts the concept of “transculturality,” which sees the relationship between cultures as a process of exchange and appropriation, within which what is one’s own and what is foreign is constantly being negotiated. Through loss, selection, innovation, and borrowing something completely new may emerge on both sides (Welsch 1999: 194-213). Finally, cultures must be understood in their historical context.
As far as material culture is concerned, where Classical and Near Eastern archaeology overlap the tendency is still to emphasize the Greek side of cultural contact: “good taste” in art is sometimes attributed only to Greeks, and Iranian interest in or understanding of Greek culture is denied. The Orient may be presented as a “debtor of Greece, and relevant only insofar as it participated in ‘our Hellenic-European evolution’” (Hauser 1999: 334). On the other hand, in our effort to escape the traps of “Orientalism” and “Eurocentrism” (Kurz 2000; cf. Hauser 2001b) and to give the Iranian contribution to cultural contacts and creative processes its due, we may run the risk of underestimating Greek involvement and the appeal to Iranian and indigenous elites of what the Greeks had to offer. Only a careful analysis of the nature, social and cultural contexts, and audiences of literary and artistic genres will enable us to balance imperial Achaemenid influence against regional traditions and fusions of the two. The fact that Near Eastern specialists are now being asked to review the validity of their own, post-colonial, world view (0stergard 1991) is a welcome development.
Historical myths, aimed at securing the identity of groups and peoples, are found in Asian as well as European and Western societies (Conermann 1999). In Iran, for example, a - futile - authoritarian attempt was made to impose the myth of the 2,500th anniversary of Iranian imperial kingship (Wiesehofer 1999). “National” Iranian interpretations of Graeco-Persian or Irano-Arabic relations, which - like their western (Greek) counterparts - equate ethnic, cultural and “national” identities, and other ideas propagating an allegedly immutable kind of “Iranianism,” are still quite popular in Iran and the Iranian diaspora.
The preceding remarks point to further weaknesses of earlier (and the most recent?) historical research. First, terms like “Iran/Persia” or “Greece,” and “Iranian/Persian” or “Greek culture,” tend to obscure the variety of political and cultural “styles” found within the Ancient Near East and Greece. Thus, in Greece, a stock of common cultural and political ideals and institutions2 coexisted with a wide range of traditions peculiar to particular regions and periods, many of them adopted from abroad and adapted as appropriate. The history of Greece was determined to a large extent by the tension between particularism and the pursuit of hegemony or even empire. Nor was ancient Iran, with a territory far larger than the modern state, ever a culturally homogeneous entity. An example of cultural variety and exchange in the east is the Persian ethnogenesis in an Elamite environment before the foundation of a “Persian” empire by Cyrus (Rollinger 1999). Furthermore, in the military encounters of the Persian wars Greeks faced not only Iranians, but also other Greeks, Macedonians and all the main peoples subject to the Great Kings (Wiesehofer 2002).
Secondly, for generations before the Persian wars a variety of ethnic, cultural, and religious communities had been living side by side in Iran and Mesopotamia, and processes of transculturation, of a different kind and intensity, had long been on-going. We know the peoples of antiquity by names which define them primarily as linguistic or cultural communities; ethnic affiliations and origins are harder to determine. But the modern insistence on assigning a particular “nationality” would surely have baffled people in the Ancient Near East, and besides: what do collective names and origins really tell us about cultures and attitudes? Only a closer look at the direction, significance and paths of cultural exchange in antiquity will allow us to understand different social milieus and aspects of culture, and to account for “syncretistic” or “hybrid” phenomena such as Achaemenid imperial art where in the course of time something completely new developed.
Thirdly, many modern observers - depending on their views on such matters in their own society - consider ethnic variety and social and cultural heterogeneity in imperial societies either an abnormality and handicap or a positive advantage and virtue. In the National Socialist era, for example, German “scholars” regarded the abandonment of the so-called “volkisches Prinzip” (“national principle”), alongside “Rassenmischung” (“racial mixing”), as the root of all evil, a sign of decadence and decline. More generally, European scholarship long after the Second World War continues to compare ancient empires with modern national states (Wiesehofer 2004a: passim). Instead of passing such judgements, historians ought to describe and analyze the complex processes of creating identities in ancient multi-cultural societies, both at the level of ethnic and religious groups and at the level of the individual.
Fourthly, many of the problems raised and deplored so far have their origin not only in the biases of Classicism, Eurocentrism, and “Orientalism,” but also in inadequate use of sources. This applies in particular to material culture and archaeological remains, but to a lesser degree also to the written sources, which contain a great deal more information on relations and interaction between Greeks and Persians than we might expect. It is vital to read the literary and epigraphic texts closely with due consideration of their genre, date of origin, and the world view of their authors - and indeed to read them “against the grain.”
World History
