Scott McDonough
In his long digression on the character and dubious philosophical achievements of the Sasanian king Kusro I Anoshirvan, the sixth-century Roman advocate, poet, and historian Agathias states, “The philosophers of our age had come to the conclusion, because the official religion of the Roman Empire was not to their liking, that the Persian state was much superior. So they gave a ready hearing to the stories in general circulation according to which Fersia was the land of ‘Flato’s philosopher king’ in which justice reigned supreme. Apparently, the subjects, too, were models of decency and good behavior and there was no such thing as theft, brigandage, or any other sort of crime.”1 With this notion, a group of Neoplatonist philosophers from Athens journeyed to the court of Kusro. But they quickly became disillusioned with the barbarism of Persian customs and the superficiality of the king’s philosophical knowledge, and eventually begged Kusro to facilitate their return to the Roman Empire.124 125
Because Agathias made use of Fersian sources and eyewitness informants in constructing his long excurses on the Sasanians, modern scholars justifiably have viewed his Histories as the most important Roman source on Sasanian Iran.126 Correspondingly, Agathias’ negative assessment of the society, customs, and rulers of Persians have been taken as representative of the attitudes of Roman authors in sixth-century Constantinople toward barbarous Persia and its barbarian Sasanian kings. These negative views would have been rooted in Roman writers’ confidence in their own society’s absolute organizational, military, cultural, and moral preeminence over its eastern neighbor.127
Nevertheless, the passage raises a point that needs further explanation, namely Agathias’ observation, repeated on several occasions, about the general circulation of tales citing the superiority of the justice and governance of the Persian kings.128 Before we dismiss this assertion of his own iconoclasm as a literary topos, we might note that several of Agathias’ contemporaries, writing in the reigns of Justinian and his successors, did express a wary respect or even outright admiration for the achievements of the Sasanians. Indeed, in his vehement distaste for the Persians, Agathias was the odd man out, complaining ineffectively about a conventional wisdom of ambivalence toward or even admiration of the Persians, an attitude he viewed as fundamentally flawed, even dangerous. Yet the survival of Agathias’ work in its entirety has perhaps lent it an authority it lacked in his own time.
In an effort to put Agathias into his proper historical and literary contexts vis-avis the Sasanians, this study will explore how authors in Constantinople in the mid-to late sixth century portrayed the Sasanian Empire. Its fundamental premise is that the historical writing of Agathias was essentially reactive, dismissive, or hostile toward intellectual currents common in Constantinopolitan literary circles that Agathias regarded as unjustifiably “pro-Persian.” Focusing on Agathias’ challenges to the works of other writers, this study also will examine the occupational and ideological distinctions between Agathias and his contemporaries, emphasizing the important role of bureaucrats, diplomats, and military men in the intellectual circles of sixth-century Byzantium. It will conclude with a brief attempt to account for why so many writers in the times of Justinian and his successors portrayed the Persians in an equivocal or openly positive light, and the implications of this literary tendency for the modern historian.
At a number of points in his digressions on the Persians, Agathias explicitly identifies where his own conclusions diverge from the opinions of “the crowd” or other writers, particularly those he claims to respect, such as Procopius. Agathias explicitly criticized three approaches to the Persians that he suggested were common in contemporary writing: (1) assertions of the superior moral and intellectual character of individual Persians and their kings,129 (2) beliefs in the antiquity and distinction of Persian civilization,130 and (3) claims of the superiority of the Sasanian political system, often predicated on Neoplatonic notions of ideal kingship, as seen in the introductory quotation.131
World History
