As was noted above, patterns of awareness, according to which the Levantine neighbours were sorted and categorized, have been extensively analysed and adapted by modern scholarship (Lund 1990; E. Hall 1989; 1994; Georges 1994; Schmal 1995; Tuplin 1999a; Konstan 2001; Thomas 2001; Bichler & Rollinger 2002). The perceptual images of the barbarian, its genesis, and its position in life particularly for the fifth century have been thoroughly treated (Hutzfeldt 1999). This holds true in general terms also for the fourth century, for which a grand synthesis, aiming at exploiting all available written sources - as Hutzfeldt was able to accomplish - still constitutes a desideratum (cf., e. g., Rosselini & Said 1978; Said 1985; 2001).
Even the archaeological sources have been discussed intensively in that they contrast with the surviving written sources and that, as an independent source, they have appreciable value (Holscher 2000a; Boardman 2000). Finally conceptions and images, which derive both from written and archaeological sources, of the eastern barbarians as foils to everyday life and experience are severely blinkered, and the broad influence of Persian-eastern custom and usage on even these conditions of life are stressed. Indeed, a distinct Persia-oriented trend (Perserie) in fashion, eating habits, luxury goods of every kind, and even in architecture, was evident in the distinguished circles of high society in the Greek polis (M. C. Miller 1997: 135258; 2002; Wiesehofer 2003b; 2004a).
The political and military contacts have already been picked out as major themes of historical consideration by older scholarship and therefore diplomatic interrelations were always broadly stressed (M. C. Miller 1997: 3-28, 109-33; for a general introduction, Hofstetter 1978). In addition to exchange as a medium of intercultural contact (Rollinger & Ulf 2004b) the role of theft and booty goods has now entered firmly into the view of scholarship (M. C. Miller 1997: 63-88). Because ceramics in particular have gained strong scholarly interest as archaeological evidence and as markers for transcultural connections of exchange (Haider 1996; Waldbaum 1997; Raptou 1999), a broad network of contacts that quite tightly meshed the Aegean world and that of the Levant together became visible behind the surface of warfare, hostility, and military confrontation. In this context particular attention has been directed to Cyprus, where modern scholarship - in contrast to earlier opinions - again reached a substantially different conclusion. There the conception of a national conflict between Greeks and Persians, which dominated older scholarship, could be exposed as a construct. Attention could then be directed behind the stereotypes and the propagandistically loaded conceptions of the world - both that of ancient sources and that of modern observers - to a broadly integrated and intermeshed everyday world, in which ‘national ideals’ play no role at all (Seibert 1976; Wiesehofer 1990; Maier 1985; 1994).
If we consider how the actual sphere of contact is presented to us especially through the Greek sources, there results a broad range of connections, which far exceed the politico-diplomatic plane. In fact, we encounter both Greeks in the Persian empire and Persians in Aegean and Greek areas to such degree that a broad spectrum of mutual points of contact becomes clear. Certainly we are less adequately informed about the presence of Persians in the Greek poleis. Rather individual examples emerge from the sources, which already in antiquity were regarded as particularly terse. The most famous case is that of Zopyros, who entered into Athenian service shortly after the middle of the fifth century and died on campaign in Karia shortly after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Artaphernes, who was sent by Artaxerxes I in 425 as an envoy to Athens, can also be named in this context (Thuc. 4.50). Aristophanes among other things set a Persian legation on the stage in Acharnians 91-122 (Chiasson 1984). Moreover it is possible to isolate a set of offerings in the surviving inventory lists of the great Greek sanctuaries, which can be regarded as ‘oriental’. The personal and national identity of the dedicants, however, remains largely obscure (Kosmetatou 2004).
Leaving aside these brief glimpses into the presence of Persians in Greece, we come to the role of Greeks in the Achaimenid empire, about which we are substantially better informed. Our sources concentrate on two regions above all: Asia Minor west of the Halys river and the residences of the Persian king. Yet even here the sources provide only a conditionally representative insight into the manifold network of connections, to which Greeks of very different origin and social class were likely to have been bound. In the first place there are prominent individuals to whom the surviving tradition turned its attention. The fate of Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, for example, shows the manifold levels of interaction. He, as the owner of large estates in the Thracian Chersonese, was obliged to pay tribute to the Great King and later fled to Athens after his participation in the Ionian Revolt. These levels of interaction become still clearer in the case of Themistokles, who in the late 470s fled from Athens and placed himself under the protection of the Great King, where in the vicinity of Magnesia on the Maiandros River he was offered a sinecure as a tribute paying lord over several cities and there was allowed even to strike his own coinage. Recent scholarship has shown that his eventual suicide and the alleged return of his family to Athens were, in fact, historical constructs. Rather Themistokles’ son followed in his father’s footsteps and exercised his rule as a Persian vassal (Nolle & Wenninger 1998-9).
That Greek-Persian mixed marriages occurred in such contexts need not be surprising, even if the sources for it provide little concrete evidence (Whitby 1998). Besides Alkibiades several other exiled Greeks can be named who found a convenient reception in the empire of the Great King, and can, therefore, expose the national contrast between Greeks and Persians as a surface for projecting specific political and ideological interests (Seibert 1979). This notion becomes quite evident when the contingents which the Greek poleis of Asia Minor contributed to the grand army of Xerxes are taken into account. As a result, the Persian Wars in no way offer themselves as purely ‘national’ confrontations (cf. Ritter 2001). In fact, we are woefully ill-informed about the actual motives of the Persian kings that motivated their massive offensives of 490 and 480/79 (Young 1980; Wiesehofer 2004b).
In addition the Greek soldiers who constituted a fixed component of the armies led either by the satraps or by the Great King himself played a major role in the conflicts of the fifth and fourth centuries (Parke 1933; Seibt 1977; H. F. Miller 1984; Krasilnikoff 1992; 1993; McKechnie 1994; Ducrey 2000; Kaplan 2002). The comparatively well-documented difficulties Xenophon experienced in western Asia Minor likewise belong in this context. It involves the great civil war between Artaxerxes II and his brother Kyros the Younger, who led a force of Greek troops as far as the vicinity of Babylon. After the battle of Kounaxa, where Kyros died, the Greeks, led by Xenophon, were forced to make it on their own to the coast of the Black Sea. Xenophon has left for us an impressive testament to these events in his Anabasis (Lendle 1995; Tuplin 1999b; 2004a).
We are similarly well informed about the presence of Greek specialists at the court of the Great King (Walser 1967). To begin with, it is possible to identify a set of doctors, from among whom two examples are particularly conspicuous. Herodotos (3.129-37) relates in detail the fate of Demokedes of Kroton, who stayed at the court of Dareios for an extended period of time and supposedly embarked on a reconnaissance expedition commissioned by the Great King to Kroton in southern Italy (Griffiths 1987). Here, a remarkable affinity with the ladies of the Persian royal court becomes apparent in these Greek physicians - in this case Demokedes reportedly cured Atossa of a breast ailment. This affinity emerges still more clearly in the works of Ktesias of Knidos. Ktesias relates to us something of the medical skill of Apollonides of Kos, who allegedly devised a cure for a ‘gynaecological disorder’ of Amytis, the daughter of Amestris and Xerxes (FGrHist 688 F 14 = Lenfant 2004, 133-4). This distinguished Persian lady only too happily took up the remedy of penetration, in which even the doctor himself participated, until Amytis finally succumbed to her illness and Apollonides met a gruesome fate because of Amestris’ vengefulness (Tuplin 2004b: 319, 332-5). Even Ktesias, however, preferred to practise as a doctor at the Persian royal court. His work unfortunately survives only in various fragments (Lenfant 2004), which treats the happenings of Asia from the rule of the Assyrians to his own time and in which his own presence at the royal court plays a special role. Ktesias paints a bewildering picture of the customs at the court: intrigues, harems, decadent and sumptuous lifestyles, excesses of cruelty and underhandedness - all the stereotypical elements that characterized and defined the mental edifice of oriental despotism, well into the present (Briant 1989). The reports of Ktesias confront modern scholars with notorious difficulties, so that not only the historicity of his accounts (Dorati 1995), but also the very characterization of Ktesias’ work as historiography (Bichler 2004c), must remain of dubious value. No matter how these questions are evaluated, Ktesias has in each case profoundly helped in shaping a conception of oriental despotism that is recognizable even in our own day (Bichler 2005), a notion corroborated by the allegedly elaborate methods of torture and execution (Jacobs 2005; also Rollinger 2004b).
In addition to the physicians and diplomats another class of specialists appears in the sources, who are likely to have remained at the court of the Great King. It is again Herodotos who reports that the architect Mandrokles of Samos was in the service of Dareios (Hdt. 4.87). He was denounced as the one responsible for the rescue of the bridge that made it possible for Dareios’ troops to cross the Bosporos. Pliny the Elder ( Naturalis Historia 34.68) makes mention of the sculptor Telephanes, who was in the service of Dareios and Xerxes. Whether we enter into realm of the fabulous with the person of Poulydamas, the Thessalian pancratist and the Olympic victor of408, is debatable. According to Pausanias, he went to Susa at the invitation of the Persian king, Dareios II, where he not only defeated two of the legendary ‘immortals’, but is also supposed to have killed them (Pausanias 6.5.1-8). At any rate, two large fragments of the base of a statue of the athlete with the wrestling scene before the Persian king are preserved (M. C. Miller 1997: 89).
The ‘Ionian explorers’, among whom Herodotos of Halikarnassos is by far the most famous, pose an even larger problem (Bichler 2000; Bichler & Rollinger 2000; Rollinger 2003b). During the course of the last third of the nineteenth century scholarship had clearly come to a general consensus, which found powerful expression in Felix Jacoby’s monumental 1913 article in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopcidie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Bichler & Rollinger 2000, 145-7). References in Herodotos to specific sources were now thought to be largely authentic and on that basis an itinerary was constructed which tied together his alleged sources with their respective localization. In this way a travel route originated, which allowed Herodotos to visit Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Babylon, and Egypt. Only in regard to the Persian homelands and their metropoleis - Media and Ekbatana, Susiana and Susa, Persia and Persepolis - did scepticism prevail against the possible presence of Herodotos. Arguments in favour of Herodotos’ travels were first driven back by the provocative theses of Detlev Fehling, who preferred to understand all of Herodotos’ sources as literary constructs (Fehling 1989). Even though this thesis was certainly overdone, it nevertheless suggested the need for a critical reconsideration of the question, by which the literary dimension of Herodotos’ work could be thoroughly evaluated (Erbse 1992; Bichler 2000). With regard to the sources, attention was strongly focused on a literary technique directed at a Greek public. It is unlikely that this technique employed source quotations as guarantees of historical authenticity, but it was rather aimed at prevailing opinion and the cognitive association of information (Rollinger 2004c: 936-43). As a result, the historical anchoring of Herodotos’ travels obviously disappears. Yet it is important in consideration of the present inquiry to recall the rightly emphasized argument of Margaret Miller: ‘If we deny the travels of one Herodotos, we must posit the travels of other Herodotoi’ (M. C. Miller 1997: 107). Therefore the likelihood of touring the Persian empire, collecting information, and assembling corresponding inquiries is in theory beyond question. Indeed, the ancient eastern evidence attests to this quite amply.
In addition to these particularly prominent individuals in the Greek sources it follows that the presence of Greeks in the Persian empire was relatively extensive. Besides the above-mentioned soldiers and craftsmen it is of course necessary to take into account those persons falling into captivity, a group to which the victims of mass deportation also belong. Such cases are attested at least twice. Herodotos mentions the deportation of the Greeks from Eretria and Miletos (Hdt. 6.20; 6.119) to Susa. Yet no further trace of them appears in the sources (cf. Diodoros 1.64.4).
Previous scholarship had depended particularly on the Greek sources in its description of the points of contact between the Greek world and that of the Persians as well as the manifold connections bound up with them. Because of this, a picture was offered that was inextricably tied to Greek perspectives. In the next section an attempt at a change in perspective will be undertaken and the reciprocal contact will be treated from the ‘eastern’ point of view. This is attractive not only because it breaks from the usual and trusted patterns of examination, but also because the sources, which are here treated extensively, remain otherwise largely ignored or are, at best, consulted only by specialists.
World History
